Search for the Soul of Black Preaching

History is replete with examples of the prolific power of Black rhetoricians. Operating underneath oppressive skies, their oratory has dissipated darkness, offered balms to lift spirits, catalyzed imaginations, and healed the wounded souls of their people. Their analeptic offerings have come in many forms: songs, poetry, literature, humor, political speech, and social commentary. Yet, of all these forms, it is not hyperbole to suggest that none has been more consequential than that of the sacred rhetoric of Black preaching. From its origins, Black preaching has served as a beacon of spiritual enlightenment, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, and a powerful force for social transformation in the face of unwavering resistance and overwhelming opposition. Black preaching has often shone brightest in the darkest of nights and inspired its communities to thrive despite profound societal limitations. The power of Black preaching rests in its mysterious dance with the Creator and creation as it echoes the call of the Creator for Black lives to exist and dream in a manner consistent with the divine dignity bestowed on them. This sacred rhetoric has served as an impetus for resilient resistors tenaciously asserting the value of Black life. Concomitantly, Black preaching articulates the future hope of a renewed world while simultaneously confronting us with the present summons to bring forth that future reality through our engaged struggle. This sacred rhetorical effort lives in the tension of seemingly contradictory concepts: present and future, hope and antipathy, fear and fearlessness, victory and surrender. In this tension, Black preaching finds a bi-vocality that gives voice to the amalgamation of both spiritual aspirations and material existence, present concerns and future hope, and communal joy that, at times, seems stillborn.

Black preaching provides complexity, diversity, and gravity that is neither simplistic nor reductionist to the realities of the divine presence in the midst of Black life. In the caustic contextual caldron of America, poignant and powerful places of inspiration for Blacks have been anchored in the words emanating from Black preachers and prophets who have reminded their community to remain hopeful that one day, we would witness “justice run down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream” (Amos 5.24). It has been Black religious speech, and the actions sustained by this speech, that have left an indelible mark on our being and etched itself upon our collective hearts and minds. This is evident in Black preaching's harmonious interplay of style and substance, where captivating oratory and narration interweave seamlessly with profound theological insight and wisdom born of experiences that challenge congregations to entertain the possibilities inherent in the liberating instincts of a gospel story that runs counter to the pervasive and pestiferous meta-narrative of the culture. It is this broad and rich tradition, in all of its complexity, that we gathered at the 2023 Black Theology and Leadership Institute (BTLI) to consider. Of particular interest to the scholars and pastors gathered, many of whose thoughts and reflections are captured in this edition of Theology Today, was the connective tissue between the style and substance of rhetorical, theological, and communal considerations that make up Black preaching.

Power of Performance

Black preaching and preachers have been consistently celebrated for their preaching's “aesthetic richness, persistent calls for justice, ecclesiastical reform, moral and ethical responsibility, spiritual redemption, and transformation.” ¹ This signature of Black preaching originates in the cultural and rhetorical richness of African religious, cultural, and communal practices. One cannot underscore enough the formative influence of West African religious practices on what will evolve into the religious practices of the enslaved preacher and participants as both give witness to the encounter between the creator and the creation. The performative aspects, first manifested within the sacred space of the clandestine religious gatherings of the enslaved known as the invisible institution, eventually evolved into the Black homiletical tradition. Through the many instantiations throughout Black religious experience, we find instances of the creativity, orality and lyricality of Black preaching. Over time, these performative practices displayed the fullness of the Black rhetorical imagination, intensified through the shared experiences of oppression, offering testimony of a theological framework resistant to classic Western theological and homiletical parameters. The voice of lament and sorrow, joy and celebration, tears and shout, all infused themselves in countless homiletical moments traversing time and space to relentlessly exclaim that we indeed know why the caged bird sings. Throughout the many chapters of Black sacred rhetorical performance, we witness a tradition whose orality, musicality, and inventiveness represent truly distinctive features of these practices. To enumerate the preachers whose talents exhibit the very best of the Black homiletical tradition requires more space than available in this journal. In each period of Black life in America, we have witnessed, time and time again, the power of Black preaching to exceed our wildest expectations in speaking to the perplexity of Black life while holding fast to a faith that offered optimism in the presence of despair. Black preaching's poetic capacities sought to embody the presence of a living God while inviting listeners to experience that God through the spiritual, emotional, and rational majesty of incarnational preaching.

Power of Proclamation

However, the indescribable brilliance of Black preaching's oratory should not obscure the equally critical contribution the content of the Black homiletical tradition has made to the shaping of Black identity or the construction and sustaining of communal responses to the harsh realities ever present in Black life. The homiletical content of Black preaching has been contextually shaped and one of the consistent catalysts to that preaching has been the reality of oppression in Black life. While the full scope of Black life is not singularly shaped by experiences of oppression, they have been one of the most constant combatants to the flourishing of Black life in America and, by extension, to the substantive places of reflection for Black theological thought and homiletical engagement. With each instantiation of oppression, Black preaching provided its community with the tools needed to form a liberative response fueled by a theological commitment to the realization for Blacks of the fullness of the human experience God offers.

What Black homiletical content never lost sight of was the constitution of oppression as both individual and institutional in nature. ² As such, Black preaching never advanced an understanding of oppression, and its remedy, that rested solely on the mediation of proper relationships between individuals. ³ Instead, Black preaching sought to address formal and informal structures within a society that maintained behaviors that sustained oppression. Black preaching turned its attention to how religious, social, or economic institutions served as sources of oppression or facilitated oppression's maintenance. It sought to theologically interrogate how oppression intersected with and operated through communal structures and discourses of power and how oppression influenced social dynamics and group identities for the oppressed and the oppressor. Most critically, Black preaching understood how oppression shapes and is shaped by its reproduction within social institutions. ⁴ It is this understanding that equipped Black preaching, in several critical historical seasons, to place its thumb on the heartbeat of racism and dare to imagine theologically sound and societally impactful solutions. Consequently, any consideration of the oppression historically faced by Blacks in America invites consideration of communal responses to oppression or efforts to mitigate the conditions of oppression while fostering the hopes of liberation. ⁵ While the response of resistance has not been the only response promulgated by the Black church, it has been a consistent element of the Black church's homiletical response to the oppression providing breath and form to responses of resistance from this community.

Places of Homiletical Complicity

However, acknowledging the vital role the substance of Black preaching has played is not to ignore how Black preaching and preachers also have a history of complicity with oppression. Just as Black preaching offered liberatory hope to dark-hued lives longingly listening to its soaring oratory and liberative content, it is equally true that there have existed strands of Black preaching that affirmed the oppressive instincts of the dominant culture, replicated patterns of subjugation within the Black community, or failed to apply its critical liberatory lens to the Black church. For example, any review of the history of the Black church and its preaching on the issue of gender reveals this calamitous disconnect. There is a tragic history of Black preaching that affirmed a vision of the human community reflecting a hierarchical structure that also undergirded the virulent racism faced by Blacks. This structure served as a theological and homiletical presupposition, resulting in homiletical proclamations that the lives of men held greater communal value and vocational possibility than the lives of women. From the time of Jarena Lee, through the complex history of the Black church, streams of Black preaching engaged in the torturous gymnastics of rejecting racism but affirming sexism. ⁶ Fortuitously, the liberative instincts of the gospel and Black preaching, often born from womanist theologians, ensured that a response to oppression through internal critique was provided even if not always heard. While sexist homiletical practices still exist within Black churches, and are affirmed by some Black preaching, one can see that change is still coming.

One would have imagined that the historical failure of some Black preaching to respond definitively on the issue of sexism would have left it better informed when considering the issue of sexuality. However, what we instead see is the repeated error of the diminishment of the human dignity of lives that do not submit to the binary of sexuality. Streams of Black preaching borrow from the oppressive structure of white religion to craft homiletical responses that continue the tragic history of domination and oppression. While there are increasing voices that illustrate the liberatory capacity of Black preaching, this is yet another place of growth in Black preaching and theology.

The Homiletical Hope of Black Preaching

One might reasonably wonder how Black preaching has extricated itself from these places of theological challenge, given the mutating nature of oppression. The key for Black preaching has been for it to free itself from the captivity of memorialized images of Black preaching existing only in the collective memory of its community. These memorialized, and often caricatured standards are places where Black preaching is seen only as an embellished source of spiritual, political, economic, and emotional support for its community without deviation. A more effective approach for ensuring the faithfulness of Black preaching is through a complete embrace of its historical tradition that celebrates its strengths but does not shy away from its weaknesses. The historical-theological norms of Black preaching represent the Black church's self-identification as an institution committed to nurturing responses of resistance to the oppression historically experienced by Blacks. This historical evaluation of Black preaching demonstrates the church's service as an incubator and sustainer of ideas of freedom that were constitutive elements of its theological development over time. It also acknowledges the places in which Black preaching has failed to live up to its liberative standard and invites Black preaching to remain ever vigilant for the possibility of the repetition of prior failings.

Additionally, I recognize critics of Black preaching may argue that it has promoted passivity to oppression and suppressed an instinctual human and entirely Christian response of resistance. However, this conclusion diminishes the instances of Black preaching's demonstrated capacity for recontextualization, reconstruction, and redeployment of theological concepts to resist oppression. While instances of homiletically fueled passivity must be acknowledged, this does not negate the rich history of Black preaching that has always been concerned with the oppressive material realities in which Blacks exist. Out of this concern, Black preaching contained responses of resistance to oppression even during early encounters with Christianity in North America where “the mindset and philosophical inclinations of the oppressed Christian were diametrically opposed to those of the oppressor.” ⁷

The use of Black historical-theological homiletical norms allows interrogators of Black preaching to evaluate its response to oppression and to offer a homiletical north star to guide contemporary preaching of the Black church. Against the historical backdrop of Black preaching's nurturing of communal responses of resistance to the ubiquitous experience of oppression by Blacks, one sees Black preaching responding to America's racial, political, and economic fault lines. The historical liberative theology of Black preaching remains distinguished by its embrace of a structuralist and systemic perspective of the causes of trauma. It also shapes the response to systemic issues by directing the church to work towards change in the systems responsible for the perversity of racial and economic disparity.

So, we celebrate Black preaching as grounded in an ideological or theological framework found in the history of the Black church. The history of Black preaching offers evidence of a theological framework guiding the Black church in responding to the oppression its community has all too often faced. This theologically driven response addresses institutional and systemic forces that have sought to diminish the flourishing of Black life. Some may argue that this picture of the history of Black preaching as affirming a pursuit of a theologically informed liberation of the oppressed is itself a memorialized or romanticized version of Black preaching and the Black church. These voices contend that Black preaching has had to overcome its history of oppression or its promotion of passivity governed by the idea of an eschatologically realized divine reversal. However, the birth and history of Black preaching demonstrate the vibrant tributary of liberative theology that continues to shape many Black churches’ identity. Even in this contemporary moment, one of the abiding hopes of Black preaching is that it continues to inform a Black Christian identity shaped by a liberative theology despite the overwhelming presence of oppression. The hope of Black preaching rests in a belief that its theology can withstand the worse impacts of oppression in this contemporary moment and offer a path forward that, while not removing the church from its context, resists the deformations of the church's liberative instinct and identity.