11. “The Church Service That Worships Beyonce,” YouTube, May 17, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXci-sRayAQ&t=202s.
12. “The Church Service That Worships Beyonce,” YouTube.
13. Imani Perry, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019).
14. Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (New York: Orbis Books, 2015), 130.
15. The Very Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas, “The Work Our Soul Must Do,” keynote address, November 15, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLTDDFSxMVA&t=2058s.
16. Brené Brown, “The Quest for True Belonging and Courage to Stand Alone,” interview on The IA, September 12, 2017, https://the1a.org/shows/2017-09-12/brene-brown-the-quest-for-true-belonging-and-thecourage-to-stand-alone.
17. Bryan Stevenson, “Get Proximate to People Who are Suffering” (commencement address given at Bates College, May 27, 2018), https://www.bates.edu/news/2018/05/27/get-proximate-to-people-who-are-suffering-bryan-stevenson-tells-bates-college-commencement-audience/.
IS THERE A WORD FROM THE LORD?
We really “had church today!” is a familiar expression among African Americans following a Spirit-filled worship experience. The implication of this folksy phrase is that the Spirit of God had moved with such power that all social barriers were removed and worshipers were able to “have a good time in the Lord.” The passionate, celebrative style of preaching had no doubt reached the depth of worshipers’ souls and had “set them on fire!” The Word of God in sermon and song had spoken to the conditions of the gathered community, who could say emphatically that they had “heard a word from the Lord.”
—Melva Wilson Costen 1
If the only thing a preacher hears from a congregation week after week is how much they enjoyed the sermon, it is very likely that the preacher is not dealing with challenging content.
—Marvin McMickle 2
“African American spirituality is a spirituality that was born and shaped in the heat of oppression and suffering.” It included a tradition of Jesus that connected the dissonant strands of grief and hope in the experience of black people who trusted in God to make a way out of no way. “Blackness is the metaphor for suffering,” [Prof. J. Alfred Smith] said. “To know blackness is to be connected to the suffering, hope, and purpose of black people.”
—Reggie L. Williams 3
Bryan Stevenson, the genius behind the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, has said that racism can be eradicated when we become proximate or close to one another. Sometimes I wonder if that, in fact, is true. How much closer can you get to a person than to engage in the sexual act that creates new life? How much closer can you get to a person than to give your child over to the Black wet nurse and have that woman’s milk coursing through your child, nourishing your child, providing the antibodies that will keep your child healthy? How much closer can you get to someone who works in your home every single day? Who is on duty twenty-four hours a day? Who cooks every meal you eat, who shares your living space, who shares the air you breathe? How much closer do you have to be to be proximate?
The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer tested proximity. When he came to New York in 1931 on fellowship at Union Theological Seminary and affiliated with the Black Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, under the leadership of Adam Clayton Powell Sr., he found a Black Jesus who suffered with Black Americans in a White supremacist society. For Bonhoeffer, the ministers of White churches of New York lacked content in their sermons. They preached everything except of the gospel of Jesus Christ—a gospel of resistance, of survival. He found in the worship of Abyssinian a style that had a different view of society than White churches. It was a style that acknowledged the suffering of Black people in a racist society that viewed African Americans as subhuman and legitimized brutality against them in so many ways.4 Preaching came alive and strengthened those in Abyssinian’s pews to fight against a Church and society that viewed Blacks as less than human.
In Harlem, and at Abyssinian, Bonhoeffer found the Black Jesus who understood the colonized lives of African Americans as opposed to a White Christ who was used to justify Black suffering and maltreatment. He found and worshiped a Black Jesus who disrupted White supremacy; a Black Jesus who negated the White Christ who, since colonial times, had been at the foundation of racial terrorism, served as an opiate to sedate Black people to see themselves through the eyes of Whiteness as subhuman, and to accept their unjust lot in life as a condition that had been ordained by God. The White Christ inculcated racial self-loathing for Blacks. They were taught to hate everything African: African religion, African customs, African traditions. They were taught that they descended from heathens and had no history worth the time of Whites to study. Bonhoeffer found a Jesus who was the antithesis of the Christ Whites claimed to follow, but whose actions and lives told otherwise. He found a Black Jesus who turned White supremacy on its head, who dispelled the notion of a White-centered world where “morality and racial identity are comingled and measured in proportion to the physical likeness to white bodies.”5 He came to understand that White Christianity was infected with and by White supremacy and a Black Jesus was a frightening disruption to Whites who were made comfortable when Black people accepted the structures of a White world.6
A Black Jesus, on the other hand, enabled oppressed African Americans to imagine him outside White societal structures and a Christianity that upheld White supremacy. A Black Jesus had a “this world” focus that pursued justice here and now, as opposed to an other-worldly orientation that encouraged Black people to accept their dehumanized lot on earth and look toward freedom in heaven. This focus in the here and now mandated activism in the politics of a racist society that denied Black people their share of what was God’s. Under the tutelage of Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Bonhoeffer learned that the Black church was