The Gathering, A Womanist Church. Irie Lynne Session

matter; it means health is everyone’s right; it means there is no group of people upon whom everyone else can step up from at that group of people’s expense.” Because Bishop Flunder sees “a connection between hatred and abhorrence of LGBTQ persons and an idea that cheapens the value of women and girls,” City of Refuge has a robust LGBTQIA+ ministry. Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, senior pastor of Middle Collegiate Church in New York City, explains that their first social justice issue was feeding folks with HIV/Aids, which then led to addressing economic injustice, then a living wage and paid time off. Dr. Jacqui and Middle Church operate with a global understanding that we’re all connected. She says, “If someone else is hungry, our stomachs are growling.” Racial justice became a key issue for Middle Church when Treyvon Martin was killed. That justice work put her squarely in the Black Lives Matter Movement. Middle Church, like each ministry studied, is anti-racist and pro-LGBTQ, where all voices matter.

      3.Communal Christology

      A womanist ecclesiology is informed by a communal Christology. Jesus invited a community of men and women to follow him, learn from him, love one another, and then communicate that transformational love in the world. Dr. Melva Sampson and Pink Robe Chronicles (PRC) demonstrate this communal element each Sunday morning in their Cyber Assembly on Facebook Live. For Dr. Sampson, the PRC community preaches with her. For example, if she references a website or quote during her sermon but can’t remember where it’s located, someone from the PRC community finds it and posts it in the thread. Dr. Sampson, a homiletics professor and practical theologian, describes her sermon offering as an “active communal approach” to preaching and explains: “We all preach it together because they (PRC community) have an active role in it. It’s not, ‘This is what I came to give you’—it may start out that way, but the PRC community is like seasoning on food; they enhance whatever dish is being made by me.”

      4.Organically Trauma-Informed

“Trauma is an emotional wound resulting from a shocking event or multiple and repeated life-threatening experiences that may cause lasting negative effects on a person, disrupting the path of healthy physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual development.”40 At Rize Community Church, there are women who have been prostituted as well as members with histories of drug addiction. Dr. Handy and other ministry leaders understand the trauma that accompanies such histories and have created an environment where each person feels valued and is able to live authentically. Rize also has a large Black LGBTQIA young adult population, many of whom have been dislocated and disconnected from their families due to unhealthy theological and biblical perspectives.

There is also cultural trauma which occurs when “members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.”41 Black women live at the intersection of varied and multiple levels of trauma, such as race-based and gender-based discrimination and oppression. By virtue of Black women’s lived experiences at the intersection of racial and gender-based trauma, a womanist ecclesiology speaks to the impact of that trauma on their relationships with other people and their understanding of God and spirituality. A womanist ecclesiology means womanist practitioners understand how vulnerable people are who have been traumatized and that their sense of safety can be triggered by any number of things. Most importantly, those who have been traumatized need to be encouraged and supported in being hopeful about their own healing and wholeness. Consequently, a trauma-informed approach to ministry asks and seeks to address the question, “What happened to you?” rather than “What did you do?” A womanist ecclesiology, as evidenced by all the ministries in Irie’s study, is a conduit of healing and wholeness for humanity.

      5.Universal God

A womanist ecclesiology is wide and broad enough to encompass a variety of spiritual and religious expressions. It sets forth that God is Spirit and cannot be contained, controlled, or confined. One of the most clarifying experiences of the universality of God occurred while Irie attended Sunday afternoon worship at Rize Community Church. Rize is a blending of Christianity and Ifá, a Yoruba religion originating in West Africa. This particular Sunday, Rize celebrated Pastor Regina Belle-Battle42 with a Kwatakye award presentation. The Kwatakye is an African symbol for bravery, fearlessness, and valor. Kwatakye was a famous, fearless African warrior and captain. The manner in which the women of the congregation honored Pastor Belle-Battle was especially moving to Irie. They engaged in a naming and water ritual and presented Pastor Belle-Battle with a piece of kente cloth as a stole.

      Similarly, Dr. Melva Sampson experiences God as Universal as she embraces an Afro-centered Christian spirituality. In a sermon preached at the Festival of Homiletics in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Dr. Sampson made the following assertion:

I am unapologetically Afro-centric; I see myself in the words of Dr. Molefi Asante as a subject in a world, in a Christian tradition, and in a preaching praxis that so often objectify me. Hence, I illumine the history, the current experiences, and the hopes of African diasporan people in contrast to what is often posited from particular hegemonic, colonialist, and imperialist pulpits . . . I am also unapologetically a follower of Jesus.43

      Upon hearing her words, those in attendance, particularly the Black clergywomen seated with and around Irie, erupted with thunderous applause. Dr. Sampson expressed in her sermon what all of them believed and have in one way or another claimed as true for themselves and their respective ministries—it is possible to mine the values, virtues, and culture of their African heritage and be followers of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, all at the same time, because they believe they serve a Universal God. More specifically, Black Christian women who are clergy, social justice activists, preachers, biblical scholars, and theologians are finding healing and wholeness rooted in learning their ancestral African heritage and histories.

      6.Womanist Preachers as Primary Proclaimers

      In each of the ministries Irie explored, the primary preachers and proclaimers are womanist practitioners. Some are senior pastors with several paid staff members, as in the case of Dr. Jacqui Lewis and Dr. Maisha Handy. The word of liberation, transformation, and hope comes forth out of the mouths and bodies of Black clergywomen.

In making her way toward this revolutionary and transformational constructive framework, Irie found it helpful to reimagine Black women in terms of their embodiment. Specifically, she considered what it means to live, work, and carry out ministry in a Black female body, particularly when “the various ways in which black bodies are put upon by structures and ideologies of oppression land upon the black female body.”44 Malcolm X, during his iconic May 1962 speech in Los Angeles, confirmed a truth about Black women’s embodiment that most Black women, even to this day, resist internalizing: “The most disrespected woman in America is the black woman. The most un-protected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.”45 As a consequence of this flagrant discounting and dehumanization, Black female bodies are not typically embraced or sought out in North American religious, theological, and ecclesial spaces as sites of knowledge production and socio-religious innovation and transformation. However, the North American church would do well to cease misinterpreting the Black female body. In order to accomplish such a paradigmatic shift, the North American church might reimagine the body of Jesus. That is, consider alternative theoretical models of incarnation. Here’s what I mean: “Just as Jesus in-fleshed God, God is in the flesh of Black women as well.”46 Below, Marshall Turman articulates the idea of God in Black women’s flesh, as a womanist ethic of the incarnation:

Positing black women as Jesus, that is, as the image of God’s ethical identity in the world, however, a womanist ethic of incarnation insists that the black church’s parousia is possible only insofar as it remembers Jesus by looking to the bodies of black church women who, in their apparent brokenness, claim that God is not only with us in terms of God’s presence in history on the side of the oppressed; but even more, God is in us, namely, that God is in the flesh of even the “oppressed of the oppressed.”47

      Funding

      Irie discovered that, with the exception of Middle Collegiate Church, each ministry