Greetings Family and Friends,
St. Augustus African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church the Borden/Cobb Ancestral Home Church has invited our family to worship and dine with them on August 30, 2015. The invitation extends to family, friends, neighbors and all well wishers.
On behalf of the Borden/Cobb family I have written an essay about the intersection of the Borden family and St. Augustus. The essay comes from a larger work that I am researching and writing about my grandparents love story as told by them through their “love letters”. I will distribute bound copies of the essay as a gift to the congregants who attend the Anniversary service. A brief excerpt from the essay follows:
“According to the history of Saint Augustus African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Josiah
Phillips was a man on a mission when he visited his friends Joshua and Judah Borden early in
1865. Perhaps he had returned from a church service at St. Andrews Chapel in New Bern,
North Carolina where he had been inspired by the fiery oratory of a Northern preacher, James
Walker Hood. Reverend Hood was preaching liberation and independence for the newly
emancipated Black man. A movement was underway. Josiah Phillips was sure the Bordens
would be at the forefront of this movement.
St. Andrews Chapel in New Bern, where Black and white congregants had worshipped
together since the late 1700s had undergone a change. Without warning its white members built
and moved into a new church and left the Blacks to themselves in the old church building,
which remained under the control of a White preacher and a White Bishop. Sometime
thereafter the Black Trustees at St. Andrews, after extensive debate and with governmental
authority, voted to leave the white controlled Methodist religion and join the African
Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination, controlled by Blacks. Independence from the
White dominated religion was a subject that Josiah and the Bordens had apparently
previously discussed and now the time was right to create a new thing right there in
Kinston, North Carolina. Joshua and Judah’s parlor cradled the birth of Saint Augustus
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Word passed quickly and not long after Josiah
came to visit, Joshua and Judah invited a group of their neighbors and friends to join them
in their home. This initial meeting included Elijah and Martha Isler, Elijah and Lucy Lofton,
Reverend Lewis Fisher, Jordan and Gatsy Patrick, and Redding and Levinia Coker.”
I look forward to going home to Kinston and our beloved St. Augustus once more to stand on Holy ground that our ancestors helped to nurture.
Warmest Christian regards and family love,
Susan Borden Evans
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