Religious vocation or ‘tender and gentle administration’: African Methodist Episcopalian Church women and in-group appropriation

ABSTRACT The work of Black women scholars and the lives of Black women demand a revisit of Lynch’s notion of sacrality and Bailey’s axioms of Implicit Religion. In-group appropriation via the case study of Fanny Jackson Coppin and Black Methodist women in the USA renders visible religious labour or vocation, leadership, and expertise of women. An extension of Altglas, in group appropriation illustrates how they were received, characterised, regulated, and ‘remade’ through structures optimised for this end. To look at labour as a mode of religious agency among the underrepresented demands that we revisit agency and expertise within structures, and who is credited with the development of religious social aggregations. In-group appropriation shows how these routinised presumptions on the labour and expertise of these women with stylised gendered notions of credit occur; how organisations and movements change, and how women assert themselves and bring about change.