9th and 13th Pastor
John Cornish
- Birth Date:
- Mother Bethel Pastor: 1848-1852; 1857-1858
- Death Date:
BACKGROUND: No birth, death, or family record has been located for John Cornish. He served as Mother Bethel’s ninth pastor from 1848 to 1852, then returned for a second, shorter term as the church’s thirteenth pastor from 1857 to 1858 (see entry #13). Beyond the dates of his two pastorates; confirmed directly against Mother Bethel’s own published pastoral list, no biographical narrative has surfaced in the sources checked to date.
THEOLOGY: No independent record of Cornish’s ordination, prior appointments, or later career has been located; his name does not appear in Daniel Payne’s History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church or in C.S. Smith’s supplemental history covering 1856–1922, both searched without result. Mother Bethel’s third pastor (1824–1825) was a Rev. William Cornish — the minister who, by Bishop Willis Nazrey’s own account, licensed Nazrey to preach in 1837. Whether John Cornish was related to William Cornish is not established in any source consulted; the shared surname and shared pulpit make it worth pursuing as a research question, not a fact of record.
Achievements
- Served two separate terms as pastor of Mother Bethel (1848–1852 and 1857–1858), one of several pastors in the church’s nineteenth-century history to return for a second term.
For Further Research — Physical and Archival Leads
- Wright’s Centennial Encyclopaedia (1916) is organized alphabetically and may include a Cornish entry; its full text was too long to search completely with the tools available for this pass — worth a direct, targeted look.
- Philadelphia Annual Conference minutes/journals, 1840s–1858.
- Mother Bethel’s own session and trustee records for 1848–1852 and 1857–1858.
- Any family link to Rev. William Cornish (3rd pastor, 1824–1825).
SOURCES
Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church. “Our Pastoral History.” Accessed September 16, 2026. https://motherbethel.org/our-pastoral-history/.
Payne, Daniel A. History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Nashville: Publishing House of the A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 1891.
Wright, R. R. (1916). Centennial Encyclopaedia of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. A.M.E. Book Concern. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries
Smith, Charles Spencer. A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church: Being a Volume Supplemental to A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, by Daniel Alexander Payne, Chronicling the Principal Events… from 1856 to 1922. Philadelphia: Book Concern of the A.M.E. Church, 1922.
