The Centennial General Conference of African Methodism opened on May 3, 1916 in Philadelphia at Mother Bethel Church. This towering edifice was situated on the same property on which the congregation built its first structure in 1794. After the traditional singing of Charles Wesley’s “And Are We Yet Alive,” Bishop Joseph S. Flipper delivered an opening prayer to commemorate this historic meeting and to thank God for this “spot where our founder and first Bishop organized this branch of Thy Zion.” He was grateful “for that spirit which Richard Allen manifested to the world, when he with a few others, in 1787, rose from their knees in St. George Church, and marched out to stand up for manhood Christianity, believing that ‘God made out of one blood all men to dwell upon all the face of the earth.’” Flipper also asked the Lord to “bless our brethren from West Africa, South Africa and South America and the isles of the sea, and may they realize as they meet with us here and elsewhere and labor with us, that we are brothers and sisters [from the same] home land.”1