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The Mission of the Black Church in 21st century
Anthony G Reddie is a Research Fellow and Consultant in Black Theological Studies for the Methodist Church and The Queen's Foundation, Birmingham
My notion of Black churches is predicated on the notion of ‘the Black Church’ in the African Diaspora. I am writing on the firm premise that there are a number of distinctive cultural and theological markers for Black Churches in the African Diaspora.
What is a Black Church?
Perhaps one of the thorniest problems when trying to talk about the Black church is the question of definition. What do we mean by the term ‘The Black Church’? For reasons that will soon become readily apparent, the question is somewhat easier to answer within the U.S. context than it is in Britain or the Caribbean. In the U.S. the notion of the Black church is an ingrained historical, theological, sociological and experiential reality for many African Americans.‘The Black Church’ has an automatic efficacy that finds expression in myriad forms of discourses and academic courses.
The Black church has been perceived by many scholars as the key social, political, educational and organisational entity in the collective and communitarian experience of Diasporan people of African descent. In Britain, the Black Church is often seen as the key location for the intimations of Black selfhood and collective solidarity. Within the U.S. the Black church is a normative context out of which the Black religious experience has arisen.
The roots of Black churches can be found in the radical and subversive re-interpretation of Christianity by enslaved Africans in the so-called New World, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Black people, having being exposed to the tendentious Christian education of the exploitative planter class in the Americas and the Caribbean began to ‘steal away’ from beneath the close confines of their slave masters to worship God in their own existential spaces.
The desire of Black people to form their own ecclesial spaces was the process of a long period of history, arising from the ‘Great Awakening’ in the middle of the eighteenth century. It is beyond the scope of this brief essay to mount a detailed analysis of the historical development of Black Churches in the African Diaspora, but it is worth noting the importance of Black existential experience and context to the historical manifestation of such ecclesial bodies. Black ecclesiological method begins with Black existential experience and not historic mandates born of the often abstract philosophical musings as to the nature of the ‘Body of Christ’. Black churches were born of the existential need to create safe spaces in which the Black self could rehearse the very rubrics of what it meant to be a human being...
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