Black Church & Faith Tradition

For Black women in the Black-church tradition — AME, AME Zion, Baptist, COGIC, CME, Methodist, Catholic, non-denominational, charismatic, Pentecostal, and the long list of homes our faith has built across the African and African American religious landscape. We are in the pews. We are in the choir. We are in the kitchen. We are in the ministerial-alliance meetings. We are running the women's ministry and the youth ministry and the prison ministry and the after-school program. We are pastoring. We are church-mothers. We are deacons. We are tired and we are still here and this network is for us.

Membership includes women across the full range of relationships to the Black church. Women who are currently active members of a local church and feel held there. Women who are members and feel ambivalent. Women who are taking a season away. Women who have left their childhood denomination and are part of a different tradition now. Women who have left organized religion entirely but who hold the Black church in their cultural and theological formation and want to talk about it. Women who are clergy themselves — pastors, associate ministers, chaplains. Women who are in seminary or considering seminary. Women in the choir, the praise team, the dance ministry, the usher board.

What we talk about. The labor of women in Black churches that has historically held the institutions together while not being equally recognized in the formal leadership. The slow shift in denominations that are now ordaining women and the denominations that are still not. The work of being a woman in ministry in a tradition that has the complicated history with women in ministry that ours has.

Theology. The theology we were raised on, the theology we have grown into, the theology we have argued with and come back to and argued with again. Womanist theology and its writers — Jacquelyn Grant, Delores Williams, Renita Weems, Kelly Brown Douglas, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Eboni Marshall Turman. The reading list that has shaped what we now bring to scripture and to practice.

Liturgy. The hymns and the gospel and the contemporary praise. The preaching styles. The order of service in different traditions. The way the spirit moves in a Black-church service that does not move the same way in any other space we know. The cultural particularity of Black-church worship and how it has held us through generations.

Practice. Prayer life. The corporate prayer of the church and the private prayer of the believer. Fasting. Study. Tithing and what we have learned about prosperity gospel and what we still believe about stewardship. The practice of returning to the church season by season, year by year, when we have drifted.

The relationship work with our pastors and our churches. The pastor who has been a real presence in our lives. The pastor whose marriage scandal broke the congregation. The pastor whose money management was questionable. The transition from one pastorate to the next. The transition between churches. The work of finding a new church home when a move or a season requires it.

Raising children in the Black-church tradition. Children's church and what we want our kids to absorb from it. Youth ministry and the specific work it does for adolescents. The teenage pull-away years and the long question of whether our children will be in their own Black-church relationship in adulthood. The intergenerational work of passing forward what was passed to us.

The hard conversations. Sexism in the pulpit and in the pew. Homophobia in particular congregations and the slow theological work of changing the conversation. The way the Black church has and has not been a refuge for queer Black women and how we are part of changing that. The way single mothers have been received in church communities, and the way we are receiving each other now.

Sexual abuse and pastoral misconduct. The cases that have surfaced. The denominational responses, where there has been a denominational response. The accountability work that is still ahead of us. The way survivors have been treated in our churches and the way we are demanding that change.

Politics. The Black church's civil-rights legacy. The contemporary political engagement of Black churches in voter registration, in policy advocacy, in mutual aid. The internal disagreements about what the church should and should not be doing politically. The specific moments when the church showed up well in recent years and the moments when it did not.

Cadence: a weekly thread for the Sunday after. A monthly long-form thread on a single theological or practical question. A quarterly virtual gathering. An annual in-person retreat. Smaller subgroups for clergy, for seminarians, for ministry-leaders, for women in the Catholic tradition specifically, for women in Pentecostal traditions specifically.

Rules. Respect across traditions. No conversion attempts toward members who are at different points in their relationship to the church. No outing of any member's faith life outside the network. No naming specific pastors or congregations in publicly identifying ways outside the closed subgroups where that conversation may be appropriate.

All denominations welcome. So are women who have left and women still deciding. The Black church is wider than any one of us and this circle holds that width with care.