The black church (sometimes termed Black Christianity or African American Christianity) is the faith and body of Christian congregations and denominations in the United States that minister predominantly to African Americans, as well as their collective traditions and members. The term "black church" can also refer to individual congregations. While most black congregations belong to predominantly African American Protestant denominations, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) or Church of God in Christ (COGIC), many others are in predominantly white Protestant denominations such as the United Church of Christ (which developed from the Congregational Church of New England), or in integrated denominations such as the Church of God. There are also many Black Catholic churches. Most of the first black congregations and churches formed before 1800 were founded by freed black people—for example, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Springfield Baptist Church (Augusta, Georgia); Petersburg, Virginia; and Savannah, Georgia. The oldest black Baptist church in Kentucky, and third oldest black Baptist church in the United States, the First African Baptist Church, was founded about 1790 by the slave Peter Durrett. The oldest black Catholic church, St Augustine in New Orleans, was founded by free blacks in 1841. However, black religious orders such as the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore have existed as far back as the 1820's. After slavery in the United States was abolished, segregationist attitudes towards blacks and whites worshiping together were not as predominant in the North as compared to the South. Many white Protestant ministers moved to the South after the American Civil War to establish churches where black and white people worshiped together. In Wesleyan Holiness denominations such as the Church of God, the belief that "interracial worship was a sign of the true Church" was taught, with both whites and blacks ministering regularly in Church of God congregations, which invited people of all races to worship there. In some parts of the country, such as New Orleans, black and white Catholics had worshiped together for almost 150 years before the American Civil War—albeit without full equality and primarily under French and Spanish rule. Attacks by the Ku Klux Klan or other whites opposed to such efforts thwarted those attempts and even prevented Black or African Americans from worshiping in the same buildings as whites. In communities where black and white people worshiped together in the South shortly after the American Civil War, the persecution of