Mary and Joseph Gomer:
Extending the Spirit of Amistad in Sierra Leone
By Darrell Reeck
From Historical Bulletin of the World Methodist Historical Society,
Volume 27 (Third Quarter 1998)
Used by Permission.
The Amistad incident exploded on the American scene in 1839 and led to the beginning of American missions in Sierra Leone, West Africa. In that year, the U.S. Coast Guard captured a boatload of Africans in Long Island Sound. 1 The Africans wanted to go home, but certain Spanish surfaced and claimed the right to send them back to slavery in Cuba. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately determined that the prisoners had been forced into slavery illegally and all 35 surviving prisoners were freed. They returned to Sierra Leone in 1841, accompanied by five missionaries of the American Missionary Association (AMA) who established a mission post about ninety miles south east of Freetown as the crow flies. Though the Amistad repatriates gradually dispersed to their villages, AMA missionaries continued to build the mission.
 United Brethren in Christ Chapel in Sierra Leone From a 19th Century Print |
In the following decade the Church of the United Brethren in Christ (UBC), a forerunner of The United Methodist Church, resolved to establish international mission work. As they evaluated locations for their endeavors, through connections with the AMA they decided on West Africa. In 1855, with a Rev. J. D. Flickinger leading, the original UBC party landed in Freetown, Sierra Leone. In that city they found Anglicans, British Methodists, and Baptists already well-established. After further scouting, the Americans chose to locate their first post in Shenge, an idyllic beach town with swaying palms and fragrant blossoms, located south of Freetown and north of the AMA mission.2 |
Very shortly, risks associated with tropical high humidity, temperature and disease took a toll. Over the next fifteen years the agency sent several missionaries, none of whom survived the "fever", as they called malaria, for more than three years. Several died in Africa, others returned to the U.S. With little maintenance, the buildings deteriorated. Furthermore, Africans had been disappointingly slow in taking up the cause. After all of their investment, the UBC could count only two converts in fifteen years. The chief of Shenge was inhospitable and kept his people from attending church meetings.
In 1870 the dispirited UBC reluctantly was about to throw in the towel on the mission. Then the American leaders decided to take one last measure. They invited an African-American couple to take over the mission. Results eventually confirmed that this was a brilliant decision.
Joseph Gomer was born in Michigan in 1834. When he moved to Chicago in 1850, he made two lifetime decisions. First, he announced his conversion to Christ. Second, he took up the carpentry trade, working for a home furnishings company.
Later, as an African-American soldier during the Civil War, Joseph served in the Union Army as a cook. In 1865 the army discharged him in New Orleans. To get back home Joseph took a riverboat up the Mississippi. On that trip the war veteran met and then fell in love with a certain "Mary B.", a lovely widow. Before the boat had docked he had proposed and she accepted. The decisive Mary and Joseph tied the knot in Dayton, Ohio, within days, and settled there.3
Joseph and Mary affiliated with an African-American congregation, the Third Church of the UBC. It was this carpenter—the carpenter Joseph and his wife Mary—that the UBC mission identified in 1870 in its final attempt to save the mission in Sierra Leone from collapse. Neither Mary nor Joseph had theological training, but they were skilled in practical matters and had been leaders of their congregation.
Illustration of Mary and Joseph Gomer adapted from 19th century book.
The Gomers arrived in Shenge in 1871. Immediately Joseph and Mary charmed the Africans. Right off, the opponent of the mission, Chief Thomas Stephen, converted. The ebb tide of deep despair began to yield to a flood tide of hope.
Missionary reinforcements arrived but only the Gomers stayed long. To a large extent, the continuity in the next two decades is the story of Mary, Joseph and African assistants they trained. Consistent with Joseph’s farming and carpentry skills, they pioneered a deeply practical style of mission lived out through the establishment of churches, schools, and farms. Joseph was noted for peace-making diplomatic activities among warring chiefdoms roundabout. In time the couple recruited a large African constituency and built up a strong mission program. While he was on leave in 1876, the Miami Annual Conference in Ohio ordained Joseph. He died in 1892 in Africa. Mary stayed on for a while, then moved to the U.S. where she died in 1894. Their reputation lived on in Shenge.4
The Rev. Doris Caulker Lenga-Koroma, a United Methodist minister of the Sierra Leone conference, recalls singing a "Gomer memorial" chorus in the Krio language in the Sunday school in Shenge when she was a child:5
I like to think of Joseph traveling, as he did in the second decade of this period, up and down the coastal waterways in a mission boat, the John Brown. That topic brings us back to the AMA and the Amistad heritage.
By 1882 the AMA had focused its program specifically on mission projects in the U.S. Meantime Joseph and Mary had become respected colleagues of the AMA missionaries in West Africa. J. D. Flickinger, now a bishop, saw an opportunity and arranged for the transfer of all the AMA property in Sierra Leone to the UBC. In addition to program and property the AMA provided an annual supplement of $5,000 for several years. The John Brown was among the property.6 The point of connection made in 1855, when the UBC decided to work in Sierra Leone near the Amistad mission, now came full circle as the AMA program was incorporated into the UBC, doubling its impact.
The Gomers laid the foundation upon which their colleagues and successors built and continue to function through good times and bad. In 1946, the UBC merged with the Evangelical Church to form the Evangelical United Brethren Church. In 1968 the Evangelical United Brethren united with The Methodist Church to form The United Methodist Church. Today, the Sierra Leone Conference of that church proudly takes its place in the worldwide United Methodist family. The conference’s wholistic outreach of congregational ministries, relief work, schools, and medical clinics, continues to lift up the spirit of Amistad today.
1. Darrell Reeck, "The Spirit of Amistad in the United Methodist Church," The New World Outlook, http://gbgm-umc.org/umhistory/sierra-leone/amistad.html, 1998.
2. Arthur Abraham, "Give us Free! Give us Free!", New African, June 1998, pp. 37-43.
3. John H. Ness, Jr., "Gomer, Joseph", Encyclopedia of World Methodism, 1974.
4. Ness, loc. cit.
5. Doris Caulker Lenga-Koroma, personal interview, August 8, 1998.
6. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 284-85, 373, 419-21, 429, 473.
Darrell Reeck, Executive Secretary, United Methodist Development Fund. He thanks Christie House for editorial assistance with the article, and Lois Olsen and Vernon Phelps for references.
The Spirit of Amistad in The United Methodist Church by Darrell Reeck, New World Outlook Online
Historical Links, including John Wesley's "Thoughts Upon Slavery," other Church Amistad Links, and Amistad, the Film.
| United Methodist History | GBGM | Global Connections: Sierra Leone | Sierra Leone History |