The Church
Catholic in theology, independent Black churches.
Founded September 2, 1921 — New York City — by George Alexander McGuire.
The Founder
George Alexander McGuire — Garvey’s Chaplain-General.
George Alexander McGuire was Antiguan-born, an Episcopal priest who rose to become Chaplain-General of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The UNIA, in its 1920 Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, had called for Black churches under Black authority — a church where Black people would not worship under the oversight of any white body. McGuire answered that call not with a new sect but with the old catholic faith, claimed in freedom.
On the second of September, nineteen twenty-one, in New York City, he founded the African Orthodox Church. Twenty-six days later, on the twenty-eighth of September, he was consecrated bishop — securing the apostolic succession that would carry the denomination forward. His thesis was plain and durable: “We are Catholic in theology, independent for Black churches so that we would not necessarily have to be under the authority of any white body.”
George Alexander McGuire, founder and first Patriarch of the African Orthodox Church, in the year of its founding, 1921 — vested in the episcopal habit of the apostolic succession he had secured for a Black-led church.
Patriarch Alexander I — George Alexander McGuire (1866–1934). Antiguan-born, an Episcopal priest turned Chaplain-General of Garvey’s UNIA, he carried the old catholic faith into a freedom the old structures had not granted.
The Garvey Lineage
A church born of the Black self-determination movement.
Marcus Garvey, 1924. McGuire served as Chaplain-General of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association — the movement that called for Black churches under Black authority, and to which McGuire answered with the African Orthodox Church.
Apostolic Succession & the Western Rite
Orthodox in succession, Catholic in theology, African in inheritance.
The AOC ran two seminaries, including the George Alexander McGuire Theological Institute in Miami, training Black clergy for the denomination’s jurisdictions. It reached the South through West Palm Beach in 1925 and established its Miami parish — the parish that would become the Mother Church. The church year and its colors are kept as in the Western customary: Advent violet, Christmas white and gold, Lent violet, Easter white and gold, Pentecost red, the long season after Pentecost green. The colors are customary, not rubrical law, and remain parish-adjustable.
The Negro Churchman, Vol. I, No. 1 — January 1923. The AOC’s own monthly, edited by Bishop George A. McGuire. Its motto, In Tenebris Lumen, is the design theology of this site: a light carried into the darkness, a church vested in candlelight.
The Mother Church’s Place
Seat of the Southern Jurisdiction.
“The African Orthodox Church” — an introduction to the denomination’s history and succession.