‘Though other black churches fought for black freedom, none had embedded in their history an exodus narrative reenacted as powerfully as Richard Allen's departure from a white-dominated church determined to segregate its black members’, writes Dennis C. Dickerson in his meticulously researched denominational study. Bearing in mind this history of abolitionist organising, rooted in what the Revd Dr James H. Cone called ‘Black theology’ in the late 1960s, Dickerson characterises AME members as having ‘a keen awareness of their insurgent identity’ (p. 16). This awareness shapes the book's construction as Dickerson carefully guides readers through seven chapters and nearly three centuries, from the era of slavery (‘Richard Allen and the rise of African Methodism in the Atlantic world, 1760–1831’) to the present day (‘Becoming a global Church, 1976–2018’).

In his broad survey of over five hundred pages, Dickerson examines competing forms of ‘African Methodism’ by broadening his discussion beyond Bishop Richard Allen, the denomination's founder – a noteworthy intervention in AME historiography preoccupied with Allen – to other significant male figures, including but not limited to Daniel A. Payne (1811–93), Richard H. Cain (1825–87) and Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915). These men and other AME members ‘constantly had to rethink and rearticulate Wesleyan theology and reassess their grounding in African and African American folk religion’ (p. 7). By assessing these debates, Dickerson challenges historians to reckon with what is ‘African’ about ‘African Methodism’ and contends that ‘AMEs, a people of shifting transnational loyalties, constructed themselves as a Creole church for the Atlantic World. The peoples of African descent who populated their pews and forged communities of slave escapees, emigrants, and expatriates attached themselves to African Methodists during their multifront exodus to safe havens in the Americas and Africa’ (p. 106). Although Dickerson rightly points to the denomination's longstanding global reach, he overlooks what Sylvester Johnson has described in African American religions, 1500–2000: colonialism, democracy, and freedom (Cambridge 2015) as ‘the Black Christian settler colony’. Johnson argues that AME and other Black Christian missionary efforts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to Africa and the Caribbean demonised indigenous religions and cultures. Dickerson does, however, elucidate how AME leaders in the United States, such as Bishop Payne, eschewed ‘African survivals’, as was the case with Gullah Jack, an AME sorcerer who practised witchcraft and led Payne to ‘discourage vernacular religious rituals and practices’ (pp. 73–6). In some instances, the book reads as an embrace of respectability politics, which all too often worked to suppress vulnerable populations both within and beyond the denomination's control.

Moving into the twentieth century, Dickerson excavates the role of AME churches in the Civil Rights Movement and the global Black freedom struggle. Through these social and political movements, Dickerson demonstrates how different strands of African Methodism continued to crystallise as a byproduct of internal conflicts among AME clergy. ‘The bishops and other clerical and lay leaders whose vocations focused on denominational affairs contrasted with militant ministers and members who defined African Methodism through a praxis that aimed at societal reconstruction in the United States and ending colonialism in Africa’ (p. 366). These mid-century efforts were certainly different from those of their AME forebears whose transnational trips centred on the Christianisation, evangelism and salvation of ‘heathen’ populations. This reformed African Methodism was in conversation with pan-Africanism, Garveyism, Black Power and decolonial movements in African countries. In this vein, Dickerson illuminates a robust world of activism among AME ministers and laity – from praying bishops on the steps of the Supreme Court in commemoration of Brown v. Board of Education; to Rosa Parks, ‘a Stewardess of the AME Church’ and an organiser in the Montgomery Bus Boycott; to Bishop Richard R. Wright Jr and the Secretary of Missions, A. Chester Clark, being selected to represent the denomination in Ghana on 6 March 1957; to the AME Church Review's inclusion of the philosophy of the Ghanaian revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah within its pages during the 1950s (pp. 366–464).

Yet, even with its significant interventions, Dickerson privileges the denomination's male leaders, often at the expense of Black women's religious leadership. Black women appear throughout the text, but they are simply referenced and not centred as pivotal to the development and multiple re-constructions of African Methodism over time. From Jarena Lee's prophetic ruminations about women's divine right to preach and Richard Allen's pushback to Lee's demands, to the wives of bishops carving out their own spaces to critique black male ecclesial patriarchy, Black women have been central to African Methodism. None the less, Dickerson draws heavily upon the masculinist discourse of Black theology as a theoretical framework and does so without comparable engagement with Womanist theology (see pp. 10, 223). In 1986, Delores Williams proclaimed, ‘The womanist theologian must search for the voices, actions, opinions, experience, and faith of women whose names sometimes slip into the male-centered rendering of black history, but whose actual stories remain remote.’ The historian Judith Weisenfeld (2013) similarly argues, ‘When we place black women at the center of our narratives, we surely reveal a great deal more about African American religious history than a sole focus on men provides.’ These observations ring loudly as one considers how Dickerson's denominational history does not converse with Jualynne E. Dodson's Engendering Church: women, power, and the A.M.E. Church (Lanham, Md 2002). Although Dickerson cites (pp. 219–22) Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's Righteous discontent: the women's movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Ma 1994), the book could have benefitted from more engagement with other field-shifting denominational histories such as Anthea Butler's Women in the Church of God in Christ: making a sanctified world (Chapel Hill, NC 2008) and, most recently, Judith Casselberry's The labor of faith: gender and power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism (Durham, NC 2017), as these texts demonstrate Black women's central roles in the reconstruction of church denominational polity. Notwithstanding these observations, Dickerson's book is a masterfully crafted contribution to the field of African American religious history, and it will serve as a resource to both scholars and non-scholars alike for many, many years to come.