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VOL. 13, NO. 8

Rev. Charles Albert Tindley

Tindley Memorial UMC

| How you can help |

To contribute to the Tindley monument fund, make the check payable to Eastern Pennsylvania Conference and mail to:
Rev. Amy Smith
Lehman Memorial UMC
300 S. York Road
Hatboro, PA 19040

Monument to be raised to hymn writer

BY LINDA WORTHINGTON
UMCONNECTION STAFF

United Methodists seeking to preserve the legacy of gospel hymn writer the Rev. Charles Albert Tindley are trying to raise $20,000 to erect a statue in his honor.

Tindley (1855 1933) was known as the Prince of Preachers. He is also the namesake of the Tindley Temple UMC on Broad Street in Philadelphia, which was named for him in 1924.

Born to slaves in Berlin, Md., in the 1850s, Tindley taught himself to read at 17 and moved to Philadelphia where he worked as a janitor at Bainbridge Street Methodist Episcopal Church and attended night school. He earned a theology degree by correspondence from the Boston School of Theology.

In 1887, he was ordained an elder in Delaware Conference. He pastored churches in Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, was a delegate to seven General Conferences and was twice nominated for the episcopacy.

While he served the church where he had once been a janitor for more than 30 years, Tindley wrote dozens of hymns. One of the most famous, Ill Overcome Some Day, became the basis for the American civil rights anthem, We shall Overcome.

When two Philadelphia pastors, the Rev. Thomas Sligh and the Rev. Frederick Douglas, visited the Tindley grave in Collingdale, Pa., in 1999, it took a long search to find it. When they did, it was overgrown, his wifes name was on it she had been buried on top of him and it was clearly an obscured site.

Sligh and Douglas presented a resolution calling for the erection of a proper monument over Tindleys grave to the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference June 2000 session. It was unanimously passed.

The proposed 7-foot-high black granite memorial which will bear Tindleys likeness and words from some of his hymns, is scheduled to be dedicated Sept. 14 at an 11 a.m. service at Tindley Temple, with a motorcade to the gravesite followed by a reception.