by Steve | Jul 8, 2020 | July-August 2020, Magazine, Magazine Articles
By Steve Beard –
Charles Albert Tindley was one of Methodism’s premier pulpiteers and song writers. Image: Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.
Charles Albert Tindley arrived for his first pastoral appointment in Cape May, New Jersey, in the middle of a snow storm. With small children to feed, Charles and his wife had only a stale piece of bread. As parents, they dipped the bread in water to soften it for the kids.
Charles asked his wife to set the table as if there was food for breakfast. Swallowing her reluctance, she agreed to do as he asked. As the story has been relayed by his youngest son, the parents got on their knees to thank God for their lives, their health, for the snow storm, and the rising sun in the morning.
“Not once did he complain about the shortage of provisions, but thanked God for what they had,” E.T. Tindley writes. They got up from their knees and sat at the barren table. When they did, there was a loud commotion outside. They heard a man commanding a team of horses.
“Whoa! Whoa!” They then heard loud stomps on the front porch. “Hey! Is anybody alive here?”
Tindley opened the front door and was face to face with a man with a large sack on his shoulder. Dropping it to the floor with a thud, the stranger said: “Knowing you were the new parson here, and not knowing how you were making out in this storm, my wife and I thought you might need some food. I’ve a cartload of wood out here, too. I’ll dump it and be on my way.”
Tears streamed down Tindley’s face. “You are an answer to prayer, for we didn’t have anything to eat except a stale crust of bread … We are not going to worry though, for we know God will provide a way.”
Later that night, Tindley was seated in a rocker thinking over the blessings of the day. In the afterglow of the miracle, he wrote the song, “God Will Provide For Me.”
Here I may be weak and poor,
With afflictions to endure;
All about me not a ray of light to see,
Just as He has often done,
For His helpless trusting ones,
God has promised to provide for me.
Charles Albert Tindley went on to become one of Methodism’s greatest pulpiteers and a pillar of faith. His life was bookended by the Civil War and the Great Depression. Tindley’s father was a slave, but his mother was a free woman of color. Tragically, he lost both his parents at very young age and had to live with strangers who did not permit him to read or go to church.
Seemingly every step of the way, Tindley (1851-1933) faced adversity and challenges. Nevertheless, he showed steadfast determination, ingenuity, and faith. From his Methodist pulpit, he became known as the “Prince of Preachers,” composed dozens of popular gospel songs, launched one of the first soup kitchens in his city, and spurred economic development for African Americans in Philadelphia through a savings and loan that helped secure home ownership. The church he shepherded – now called Tindley Temple – is still a historic and vibrant fixture in its community.
Tindley was filled with intellectual curiosity and passion. As a child he began to learn to read by picking up scraps of newspapers along the roadside. He studied the shape of each letter and attempted to use bits of coal to teach himself to write.
After the Civil War, Tindley and his wife moved to Philadelphia and attended Bainbridge Street Methodist Episcopal Church. He eventually became the janitor at the church. Although he had never been to college, he began studying for the Methodist ministry in order to pass the denominational examination with a high enough score. He learned Greek through a correspondence course offered by Boston Theological School and studied Hebrew with a rabbi at a synagogue in Philadelphia.
At the time of the exam, an arrogant college graduate snidely asked Tindley, “How do you expect to pass this examination? I and the other candidates hold diplomas in our hands. What do you hold?”
“Nothing but a broom,” replied Tindley who had just been sweeping around the church. Tindley passed second among a large class of candidates, all of whom had academic degrees.
When the storms of life are raging, stand by me;
When the storms of life are raging, stand by me;
When the world is tossing me, like a ship upon the sea,
Thou who rulest wind and water, stand by me.
After several different pastoral assignments, Tindley was eventually appointed to the very church he had previously swept as a janitor. As a young boy, he once wallowed in shame because he had no shoes to wear to church and had to sneak up into the balcony and hide behind boxes to attend a worship service. Now, because of a lifetime of walking barefooted in faith, he became the pastor of one of the largest congregations in Methodism and was routinely preaching and breaking into song at “standing room only” Sunday services.
Tindley is rightfully considered the “Grandfather of Gospel Music,” serving as an inspiration to Thomas Dorsey, usually indentified as one of the pivotal founding fathers of gospel music. Tindley’s songs are still found in the United Methodist Hymnal, as well as those of other denominations. His songs were recorded by gospel legends such as Mahalia Jackson (“Beams of Heaven”), the Soul Stirrers (“By and By”), the Ward Singers (“Take Your Burden to the Lord”), Blind Joe Taggart (“The Storm is Passing Over”), Sister Rosetta Tharpe (“What Are They Doing in Heaven”), and Elvis Presley (“Stand By Me”).
So pervasive was his influence that one of his hymns was the inspiration behind the Civil Rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.”
Tindley had witnessed some of the worst chapters of the unfolding American experiment. He preached faith, protested against injustice, provided food and shelter, and sang from his soul. His artistry dealt honestly with suffering and hardships. At the same time, he lived and saw through the eye and heart of faith. He knew that one day – someday – things would be redeemed and transformed. In “Beams of Heaven,” his vision shines through:
I do not know how long ‘twill be,
Nor what the future holds for me.
But this I know; if Jesus leads me,
I shall get home someday.
Steve Beard is the editor of Good News.
by Steve | Jul 8, 2020 | July-August 2020, Magazine, Magazine Articles
By Jim Patterson
Art from the book By and By: Charles Albert Tindley, The Father of Gospel Music, written by Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Bryan Collier. Image: Simon & Shuster.
Disbelief is the most satisfying response Carole Boston Weatherford gets from children about her books featuring notable African Americans.
“Kids just can’t believe that our nation allowed those kinds of injustices to visit upon so many people,” said Weatherford, a poet who has written children’s books on Fannie Lou Hamer, Harriet Tubman, Lena Horne, and others.
“I want them to be appalled,” she said. “I want them to be shocked that (slavery and racial discrimination) happened, but I also want them to be inspired that my subjects overcame those injustices … and persisted in reaching their potential and in making contributions to their communities and to larger society.”
Weatherford, who grew up as a United Methodist and was married for 20-some years to a United Methodist minister, considers it a mission to help correct the dearth of books about African Americans she experienced growing up.
“There were hardly any,” she said. “But when I became a mother, I noticed that there were more books that featured children of color for them.”
Her latest subject is Charles A. Tindley, a Methodist Episcopal clergyman sometimes called “The Prince of Preachers” and one of the founding fathers of gospel music. He was pastor of East Calvary Methodist Church in Philadelphia — now named Tindley Temple United Methodist Church — from 1902 to 1933.
His hymn, “I’ll Overcome Someday,” was one of the roots of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” He wrote other gospel music standards, such as “(Take Your Burden to the Lord and) Leave It There,” “Stand by Me” and “What Are They Doing in Heaven?”
Tindley, born in 1851 the child of a slave father and a free mother who died young, received no formal schooling as a child — instead being hired out as a field hand. He taught himself to read from newspaper clippings lit by glowing pine knots.
Pursuing whatever education he could afford — night schools and correspondence courses, mostly — while working to support himself, he relocated to Philadelphia with his wife, Daisy, and worked as a church custodian. From there, he progressed to being the pastor of the very same church and writing many memorable gospel songs.
In By and By: Charles Albert Tindley, The Father of Gospel Music, illustrated by Bryan Collier, Tindley’s rather incredible rise is told in lilting verse by Weatherford.
“My life is a sermon inside a song/I’ll sing it for you/Won’t take long,” the book opens.
The illustrations by Collier are vivid and striking, mixing collage and watercolor painting. He has illustrated many children’s books about African Americans including Rosa Parks, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and contemporary musician Trombone Shorty.
“I think Tindley is a testimony to endurance and aspiration,” Collier said. “His insatiable need to learn and read, you can see that theme through a lot of different people like Frederick Douglass and many others growing up in the era of America that he grew up in, when the odds were totally against them to do what he did.”
Collier said his illustration style is influenced by his grandmother, who made quilts when he was a kid. “That’s the collage aspect of it. I try to use earth tones and bright colors for juxtaposition to make it pop. I use family members and friends to pose for the book, so we see ourselves and they can see themselves in books.”
Collier used to play as a child in an abandoned Pocomoke City, Maryland, church named for Tindley. It has since been torn down. Tindley was born in Berlin, Maryland, about 30 miles north of Pocomoke City.
“Every year, they do Tindley Day in Maryland as well as in Philadelphia,” he said. “So I had known about it and had been at the celebration picnics on Tindley Day.”
Collier has projects coming up about a mother’s writing directed to her unborn son and a reinterpretation of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”
Weatherford is working on a book about Henry Box Brown, who in 1849 mailed himself in a wooden box from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia to escape slavery.
No matter how much historical context Weatherford shares when addressing children about her books, she says many are “confused” and ask the same questions:
“Did it really happen?”
“Who made those stupid rules?”
“Why did white people treat black people so badly?”
“They’re constantly trying to figure out how they should respond to history and also to injustices they see in their own lives,” she said. “Bullying in school, how do I respond to that? So kids are learning to navigate situations and they are forming their own values.
“I do hope that my books play some role in shaping their values and helps them form their own system of justice.”
Jim Patterson is a UM News reporter in Nashville, Tennessee.
by Steve | Mar 21, 1982 | Archive - 1982
Methodist Heritage: Tindley Temple United Methodist Church
By William F. McDermott
Coronet magazine, June 1946
Good News
March/April 1982
All Philadelphia went into mourning on July 31, 1933. Government officials and Chinese laundrymen, priests and scrubwomen, corporation presidents and street cleaners, Jews, Catholics and Protestants, blacks and whites, packed 5,000 strong into a church seating 3,200 people, to listen to five hours of inspirational tribute to an aged black man.
Radio stations broadcast the services, downtown streets were roped off to hold back the crowds, hundreds of telegrams of condolence poured in from all over the nation. For several hours previously a continuous stream of mourners had filed by the bier. All this was in heartfelt homage to an ex-slave and hod-carrier.
He was Charles A. Tindley, who at 17 could neither read nor write yet ultimately learned Greek and Hebrew. By day he toiled up and down ladders carrying back-breaking loads of brick, at night he served as janitor of a little mission church. Finally he became pastor of that church, gradually building it into not only one of the largest Methodist congregations in the world with 7,000 members, but also into a city-wide relief center for the poor. Some called him Philadelphia’s foremost citizen, but another title fitted best: a Lincoln in Ebony.
Tindley, 74 at his death, stood six feet two and weighed 240 pounds with a figure as straight as an arrow and a lionesque head. His spirit was one of humility and compassion, particularly for the underdog of any race, and he labored in simple ways that suggested the martyred President. Wherever he went he drew great crowds, often more whites than blacks gathering to hear him. When a theologian asked one of Tindley’s twelve children, “How did your father win such a great success?” the youth answered, “On his knees.”
At the peak of his career during the early 1930s, Dr. Tindley preached to three or four thousand people every Sunday. His great church on Broad Street began filling at 7 a.m. with people eager to attend 10 o’clock worship. During the intervening hours they sang old spirituals, modern hymns, gave testimonies, laughed and cried and prayed. Hundreds were regularly turned away. By 11:20, when the second service started, the sanctuary was jammed. At night there was a similar throng.
Whenever the black clergyman could be lured from his congregation, people of all faiths traveled to hear him. Crowds almost fought to get within earshot. His sermons on ”Trees,” “A Forget-Me-Not,” “Religion in a Blade of Grass,” were masterpieces. He was a landscape artist in words, making nature’s beauty float before his congregation’s eyes .
Always the peak of Tindley’s services was the “altar call,” when penitents were summoned to kneel and seek forgiveness for their sins. One time a young white man, his eyes bleary from drinking, heard Dr. Tindley’s plea and joined him at the altar. Together, before the vast crowd, the two knelt in prayer. Then, as the congregation waited, the pastor and the penitent whispered to each other
“Friends,” Dr. Tindley called to his people, his arm linked through that of the stranger, “I want you to know this young man who has just given his heart to God. He is the grandson of the Maryland planter who once owned me as a slave!”
Tindley was born in a cabin on Maryland’s eastern shore in 1851. A year after his mother’s death, when he was only five, he was separated from his father and sold to a slaveholder in another town. Held in bondage, he was not even allowed to look at a book or attend church. Furtively he sought scraps of printed matter: a torn page of a book in the wood box, a newspaper page along the roadside. He stuffed these inside his ragged shirt, then gathered pine knots and took them to his shanty. There, after the other slaves had gone to sleep, by dim and flickering light the boy tried to make out the mysterious letters.
Night after night he struggled to find the key. Even when he attained freedom after the Civil War, he was still illiterate. But by the time he was 17, he could spell and write the word “cat.”
The only religion Charlie had in those days was what he felt inside, but the longing to attend church grew until he determined to worship somewhere. He would walk to the Chesapeake Bay on Saturday mornings and, with ashes for soap, wash his only shirt and hang it on a limb to dry. Carefully he kept it clean to wear to church next morning.
For long hours he worked in the fields by day, walking 14 miles at night to learn the three Rs. When finally he mastered them he resolved to go to Philadelphia and study further. He became a hod-carrier, for three years toting brick and spending his nights either as a church janitor or school attendant. Tindley determined to enter the ministry and help his people, so he not only attended school but also took correspondence courses. Every spare dollar went into books ….
Especially he loved Greek and Hebrew. He learned Greek by correspondence with a theological school in Boston; Hebrew he studied under a rabbi in Philadelphia. Courses in science and literature were taken privately. Charlie was still church janitor when he took examinations for the ministry. Some of his more formally educated brethren eyed him with amusement. One bumptious young theologian asked: “How do you expect to pass your examination? The other candidates and I have diplomas. What do you hold?”
“Nothing but a broom,” replied Tindley. In the examination he ranked second highest …. In 1902, Tindley was called to Bainbridge Street Methodist Church in Philadelphia, where once he had been a janitor. It was only a storefront mission, barely kept alive by a small group of the faithful. Other pastors consoled Tindley on the “certain failure” that faced him. But his spark of faith touched off a fire of fervor in the congregation. Soon 75 were attending, then a hundred, and finally the mission overflowed. A real church seating 600 was erected. A couple of years later a gallery was added.
About 1907, the old sanctuary of a white congregation, seating 1,500 people, was acquired for $69,000. Soon this building was jammed. Even Tuesday night prayer meetings drew more than a thousand. The movement for a still larger church got under way. Five buildings next door were bought and razed. A huge edifice costing $350,000 was paid for through the tithes of the members, without bazaars or carnivals. Dedication was set for Sunday, December 7, 1924, but at midnight Mrs. Tindley died.
Laboring on despite his grief, and caring for his large brood of children, Tindley built up the congregation to 7,000, plus a Sunday school of more than 2,000. The church, seating 3,200, was filled three times each Sunday and often during the week. Every New Year’s Eve a revival was begun, usually lasling throughout January.
For more than 30 years, the black preacher labored in that one parish, which became famous not only for its services but for its charity. Every winter Dr. Tindley maintained a breadline, often with 500 ragged men and women in it. Hot soup and coffee were dished out freely. If people needed clothing, the pastor provided it. Jobs were also found for the unemployed.
One night the mayor of Philadelphia watched the breadline file by. “I’ve often heard about this relief work,” he told Tindley, “but I never dreamed it was anything like this. I want to help a little.” He pulled out his checkbook and wrote a check for $3,000.
“There’s no politics attached to that,” said the mayor, grinning. “I don’t expect even one vote.” When Tindley’s son remarked that his father won his success on his knees, he spoke literally. Tindley was not only given to prayer but also to self-discipline. Always he arose at 4 a.m. and went to his study for intercession. Sometimes his children awoke at the sound of the key being turned in the study door. Other times they would stir in their sleep as their father sang alone his hymn of devotion. Often he sang his own compositions, for during his lifetime he wrote many songs ….
People of different nationalities and races not only attended Tindley’s services but served as officers of the congregation. Both blacks and whites were represented in the leadership, along with Italians, Jews, Germans, Norwegians, Mexicans, and Danes ….
Many offers and honors came to Tindley, including honorary degrees, but he preferred the humble task of shepherding his flock. More than once his name was submitted to the Methodist General Conference for election as bishop, but he always withdrew it. He was 74, working hard as ever, when one day in July, 1933, he had a premonition that his work was done. He went home, put his affairs in shape, then journeyed to the hospital where he spent a week in quiet talks with his children. Then the father turned weakly on his side and, pointing to the window, said, “I can see my mansion now. It’s as large as the state of Pennsylvania.” He died the next day.
When Tindley’s new church was built in 1924, the name was changed, in spite of the pastor’s protests, to the Tindley Temple Methodist Church. It stands today on Broad Street in Philadelphia, a memorial to the one-time slave and hod-carrier, the Lincoln in Ebony who, by his love of God and devotion to humanity, won the heart of the City of Brotherly Love.
This article first appeared in Coronet magazine, June 1946. Reprinted by permission. Coronet published 1936-1971.
Tindley Temple Today
By Diane Knippers
The “faith of our fathers,” like that of Charles Tindley, doesn’t mean a thing unless it becomes the faith of this generation. So we wondered what the Tindley Temple UM Church was like today. It is still the imposing edifice along a wide thoroughfare in downtown Philadelphia. But what is going on today inside the historic building?
To find out, I called Claude Edmonds, the pastor of Tindley Temple since October 1980. Tindley Temple certainly doesn’t have the size and impact it once did (the present membership stands at 1, 100 with average attendance of about 400). But I did learn that there are significant signs of spiritual vitality in this inner city church.
First, I was curious about what it is like to minister in a church with the kind of history and tradition Tindley Temple has. So I asked Dr. Edmonds if the past is a burden – or if the heritage is a helpful factor.
“I was born and raised in Tindley Temple, and was a baby when Charles Tindley died,” he responded. “So the tradition of the church is not new to me. We are proud of our spiritual roots and heritage. But we can’t live in the past.”
When I asked about his dreams for the future of Tindley Temple, Dr. Edmonds emphasized the centrality of spiritual Edmonds renewal: “We want to see the church, as a community, have a hunger and thirst after righteousness. This must be the basis of all our outreach to the community and society. Right now we are emphasizing our prayer meeting and the things of the Spirit. A strong prayer meeting will spill over into the Sunday worship service and other ministries. If the inner life is growing, that will attract other people to come to Christ. That is basic to a growing community.”
Dr. Edmonds shared the exciting news that Charles Tindley is being recognized by the Smithsonian Institution in May 1982 for his contribution to American life. Tindley wrote some 60 hymns, and many are in our UM hymnal. Dr. Edmonds concluded, “There is no future for a congregation such as ours unless we develop a strong spiritual inner life.”
– Diane Knippers
