While the varied cultures of the Christian world each have their beautiful and distinctive ways of worshiping, there is something uniquely enriching about African-American Christian worship.
Anybody who has observed or participated in an African- American Christian worship service will admit that there is an undeniable difference between the way American Blacks worship and the worship of other racial and ethnic groups. In this reflection I shall explore contemporary African-American Christian worship, beginning with an examination of the religious heritage African slaves brought with them to the New World.
One school of thought, championed by E. Striking a balance between these two extremes are scholars like Albert J. Raboteau, who though admitting that the gods of Africa all but died in America posit that early African-American religion was a syncretism of the African and the European.
An Africanism, for instance, that survived the "Middle Passage" and had a powerful impact on early African-American spirituality is the African understanding of life.
Because Africans tend to view life holistically, the secular and the sacred are not mutually exclusive realities that exist in antagonistic tension but interconnected phenomena.
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Because people of African descent in North America tend to view life as a single system, their worship is integrative, holistic, and experiential. Traditionally, it has been inextricably woven into the stuff of their life.
Children praying at vacation bible school.
Community and Worship
Community is a grounding principle of Black worship, understood by African-Americans as an encounter involving God, the worshiper, and the broader community.
For them worship is not primarily the expression of one's private devotion to God, but is rather a community event.
Martin Luther King, Jr. asserted that at its core, and best, Black worship is a social experience in which people from all walks of life affirm their unity and oneness in God.
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Always a divine experiment and dynamic happening, it is experienced as a response to the Holy Spirit's call to the believer to cast off his or her coat of cares and enter the divine presence.
In African-American Christian worship God is known and understood as the One who sides with the weak and oppressed.
For Blacks, a God who does not care does not count, and they believe that the sovereign God continues to intervene in history in very concrete ways on their behalf.
God's Son, Jesus Christ, whose incarnational commitment to the poor was evidenced in His suffering, death, and resurrection, holds out hope for the personal and corporate transformation of humankind.
There are no metaphysical distinctions between God and Jesus Christ in African-American Christian worship.
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African-American Christian worship is the corporate celebration of what God, through Jesus Christ, has done for the community in diaspora.
For African Americans, worship is not as cerebral and rationalistic as it is experiential and dynamic. African Americans, in their worship, do not want only to learn something but to feel something, namely God's Spirit.
They aspire to know God personally rather than to know about God through doctrines and creeds, and they frown on the mere recitation of dogmas as proof that God is known.
Yet their emphasis on experience does not mean that their worship is hollow and mere emotion.
Few things have provided African Americans with the coping and survival skills so vital to their experience in the United States as has worship.
Black worship supplied slaves with effective psychological and emotional medicine to combat slavery's decimation of their sense of being and worth. Today it is still a veritable "Balm in Gilead" that keeps African Americans sane and balanced in their world of traditionalized disenfranchisement and powerlessness.
How are comfort and healing engendered during worship? Yet it is in drawing people into God's never-ending story of love that African-American worship functions best as pastoral care.
Liberation and Empowerment
Another characteristic of African-American Christian worship is liberation. African-American worship is a celebration of freedom in which people enter and experience the liberating presence of the Holy Spirit.
A critical aspect of the liberation themes characteristic of Black worship is its refusal to be victimized by the tyranny of the clock.
Liberation in African-American Christian worship is also evident in the ways in which music is performed, with Black singers and instrumentalists seldom being content to render a piece as it appears in print.
African-American worship not only comforts and liberates, but empowers for current and future struggles.
Today, Black religious leaders continue to responsibly sensitize African Americans about the social, political, and religious structures that seek to rob not only them but all of God's people of their God-given rights as persons.
An African American Church
Celebration, Prayer, Music, and Preaching
A fourth characteristic of African-American worship is celebration. Simply put, Black worship is a celebration of who God is, what God has done, is doing, and will do for His people.
For a people still facing daunting challenges, waking up "clothed in your right mind and experiencing a measure of health and strength" is reason enough to praise God that things are as good as they are.
Among the many elements of Black worship are prayer, music, and preaching. The Spirit of God takes possession of the person who prays as much as He does the preacher, with the result that the person approaches "the throne of grace" humbly, an empty vessel waiting to be filled.
African Americans place a premium on the moment of prayer, which (for many of them) is the high point of the worship service. During slavery music was used to beckon the faithful to a predetermined spot for worship.
Unlike the ancient Jews who refused to sing in a strange land (Psalm 137:1-4), slaves sang, bequeathing to Western culture a genre of music that is uniquely and authentically American the Negro Spiritual.
Thus, Spirituals protested the social conditions in which Blacks were locked even as they pointed to a better day of freedom and justice.
There is little doubt that the African-American preacher occupies a prominent place in Black history. Today, Black preaching continues to pique, fascinate, and inspire people of all races and walks of life.
What is Black preaching? Cleophus LaRue posits that it is not so much a matter of style or technique as it is a function of the historical and contemporary experiences people of color have had in the United States, out of which they forged a distinctive biblical hermeneutic.
In a similar vein, Calvin B. For Black Seventh-day Adventist preachers, the challenge to keep Christ as the core and center of their preaching is even more acute, given the premium Adventists place on content.
African-American preaching is at its best when it is undergirded by two important hermeneutical principles. The first is that the gospel must be declared in the language of the people.
Historically, African-American preachers have had no qualms about utilizing these two principles, especially the second.
Which is not to say that the Black sermon does not feed the mind as much as it satisfies the soul. An African-American sermon is an experience of truth, not just a notion of truth.
It must be felt and not just heard. Black preaching is dialogical. It travels both vertically and horizontally. Black preachers know that each sermon they preach must originate with God, who will not bless the preaching moment if the preacher has not spent ample time with Him.
"I feel the Spirit moving" is an utterance the African-American preacher will emit to let the people know that the preacher has established a connection with heaven and is hearing from God.
Because Black preachers take evangelism seriously, they seldom just wind down, Wrap up, and take their seats without appealing for people to accept and confess Jesus as Lord. The invitation for people to accept Jesus is usually preceded and/or accompanied by a song.
Contemporary Tasks of African-American Worship
With no pretension's to being exhaustive, the following are some contemporary tasks of African- American worship:
- To reflect the communal experience of African Americans without minimizing the ultimate focus of worship adoration of and for God!
A gospel choir singing praises.
The African American Lectionary
Under the visionary leadership of Martha Simmons, a trailblazing African American minister and scholar, The African American Lectionary debuted in December 2007. This historic resource will enrich American liturgical practice for decades to come.
The Revised Common Lectionary used by many white, Christian denominations does not incorporate the theological presuppositions or liturgical particularities of African American Christianity.
Consequently, Martha Simmons assembled an expansive network of African American ministers, scholars, musicians, liturgists and activists to create the first online, ecumenical preaching and worship lectionary for African American Christians (www.theafricanamericanlectionary.org). It was my privilege to serve on the lectionary creation team, a small group of scholars who supervised the project.
The African American Lectionary provides a yearly cycle of biblical readings and commentaries, cultural materials and worship resources to enhance the preaching and liturgical life of African American churches. Yet the roots of the lectionary are embedded in the soil of the protracted African American quest for freedom.
The lectionary's special liturgical moments present the distinctive, sweet fruit of African American worship that has fed the spirits of millions of people amid the bitterness of oppression and genocide.
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Distinctive Liturgical Moments
I highlight two distinctive liturgical moments on the African American lectionary calendar as a demonstration of how the quest for freedom impacts many aspects of African American Christian worship and prayer. The two liturgical moments are: 1) the Watch Night service and 2) the Maafa service.
