A faith enduring through change

As area residents prepare to mark Black History Month with a variety of cultural events in February, congregation members of Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church joined in prayer and song and shared memories Sunday.

The church on East Commerce Street, which originally was named the Colored Methodist Church, will turn 120 this May. The simple white chapel is home to a congregation of only 11 members, but those who attended the service Sunday were outspoken about their will to continue their worship traditions.

Congregation member Esther Ramsey remembered crawling on the church's dented wood floors as a child decades ago. She was baptized, married and saw her daughter baptized in the church.

“We are small in number but we're big in heart,” Ramsey said. “At one time, one of the ministers told me, ‘Don't apologize for that because where there is one or two in number, there's Christ. Whether it's one person here on Sunday morning or if it's none, if it's just a pastor, there's always church.'”

The church, which was founded in the Victorian era, experienced the cultural changes that came with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.

The Rev. Anthony Evans, president of the National Black Church Initiative that's based in Washington, D.C., said black churches like Allen Chapel inspire social and emotional allegiance more than ever now.

“African American churches had been forced, because of segregation laws, to stay to themselves so they had to create their own theology in reference to their own struggle,” Evans said. “That's where you get the emergence of black theology from. ... The black church not only gave moral instructions but also gave social instructions.”

In New Braunfels, the black community is even smaller than the Texas average. Only 1.7 percent of the New Braunfels population is black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2006-2008 American Community Survey. In Texas, the black population is 11.5 percent, the survey said.

Allen Chapel, one of very few black churches in New Braunfels, sits within a block of another predominately African-American church, Live Oak Baptist, which is nearly as old as its neighbor.