Liturgical Language in African-American Worship and Preaching

Language used in black preaching has a musical ring and rhythm. The spirit and delivery of this language has much to do with the emotional vitality of worship in black churches, a fine example of how the aesthetic qualities of language shape the meaning and experience of worship.

The Pervasiveness of the Idiom

One who observes the black church from within the context of its life as a worshiping community is soon struck by the degree to which the preaching is musical. The spectrum of musical expression ranges from the sonorous delivery, which has a pleasant melodiousness, meter, and cadence, to the full-blown chant or song. To those who are a part of the tradition in which musical delivery is normative, such a form often emerges as the criterion for preaching. This valuation categorizes other styles of delivery as mere speech, address, or lecture, but hardly as preaching. Consequently, the preacher uninitiated in the customs of this segment of the black church may be thanked for his or her “talk” as a courteous intimation that “preaching” per se had not occurred. Although few credible preachers and even fewer homileticians would make musical delivery a measure for preaching, it remains a highly treasured aspect of the culture.

The manner in which black preaching speaks to the black experience in America with a divinely inspired word is doubtless its most distinctive feature. To a situation characterized by bleakness, despair, oppression, and frustration, a word of hope is declared, offering to a people the promise of a brighter day and strength to endure the times in which they find themselves. This preaching is not solely “otherworldly” nor simply “protest.” Emerging from the depths of a religious consciousness in which God is trusted against all odds posed by history, black preaching is an affirmation concerning the will and power of God before it is a protest against or a gesture away from this world. It is a celebration—that point to which the preacher leads the congregation in moments of thanksgiving and transport—wherein the skills of musical delivery are unsurpassed in attaining the exalted moment. Not only does such celebration enhance the understanding and retention of the gospel; it is, as Henry Mitchell asserts, essential to faithful communication of the gospel, without which there would be a “defacto denial of the good news” (The Recovery of Preaching [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977], 55).

This “celebration” is, of course, distinct from what Mitchell calls “celebration.” “Celebration” is more effective and emotional than “cerebration,” which is reflective and intellectual. This is not to diminish the significance of the cognitive aspect, for celebration does not stand independent of responsible exegesis, careful penetration of the teachings of the church, and sensitive theological insight. The detail that is supplied by careful and tedious exegesis, analysis, and the application of theology and doctrine supplies the material used in celebration. Musicality expresses that which is beyond the literal word; it takes rational content and fires the imagination. Indeed, at the point of celebration all that has been generated in the cerebral process is offered up in the moment of exaltation.

The persistence and pervasiveness of this form of delivery from one generation of black preachers to the next are astounding when one considers the paucity of reflection on the idiom. Among those who appreciate and practice the art, it is almost as though it were a secret of the guild’s oral culture. Whereas some academicians ignore or disdain the idiom, denoting it a vestige of “folk religion,” black preachers who have come under their tutelage not only maintain the tradition but also practice the art with consummate skill. Restricted neither by denomination nor by educational status, it continues to span the gamut from the preaching of Father Andrew Bryan and Andrew Marshall at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Charles Adams in the twentieth century, from the “cornfield preacher” to the “Harvard Whooper,” from the “No D” to the Ph.D., and “every D in between.” It is no surprise, then, that contemporary black preaching resembles descriptions of preaching within the slave community (see Jon Michael Spencer, Sacred Symphony: The Chanted Sermon of the Black Preacher [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987], 1-16).

This skill of musical delivery is not possessed by all black preachers; neither is it a feature unique to black religion. On occasion, it is found among white Pentecostals whose worship style is more closely aligned to that customarily found in the black church. Among these white preachers is television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who (perhaps because of his style of preaching) attracts a substantial black audience. However, the larger American culture greatly influenced by the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science offered little support for a genre of preaching that even hinted of the mystical. In African-American culture, the idiom has been highly appreciated as a form of religious expression, and it is in this latter cultural context that insight can be gleaned into its religious meaning. Such a focus eliminates the necessity of having to account for an aberration in larger American culture by reducing the idiom to some modality that is an epiphenomenon of a truly religious expression. (An epiphenomenon is the representation of an event that is regarded as incapable of explanation in terms of itself. A religious experience is regarded as an epiphenomenon, for example, if it is considered explainable solely in terms of nonreligious categories such as psychology or economics.)

Any overlap between black and white cultures (between a Charles Adams and Jimmy Swaggart, for instance) invariably invites inquiry as to who is mimicking whom. Although perhaps valuable for determining the origin of the practice in North America, such questions do little for the description, interpretation, and preservation of the form. Therefore, the concern of this essay is not to validate musicality in preaching by recourse to homiletical canons. Rather, it is to explore the character of this musicality in the context of the culture which sustains it as a normal occurrence.

Musicality as Surplus in Preaching

The very definition of Christian preaching is an attempt to account for its transcendence over ordinary speech. Nearly all homileticians address this dimension wherein the preacher is “outside of self” and speaking on behalf of a divine power. Gardner C. Taylor, one of the most influential black preachers of this generation, correctly argues the awesomeness and presumptuousness of the task undertaken by one who supposes to speak for God:

Measured by almost any gauge, preaching is a presumptuous business. If the undertaking does not have some sanctions beyond human reckoning, then it is, indeed, rash and audacious for one person to dare to stand up before or among other people and declare that he or she brings from the Eternal God a message for those who listen which involves issues nothing less than those of life and death. (Gardner C. Taylor, How Shall They Preach [Elgin, Ill.: Progressive Baptist Publishing House, 1977], 24)

John R. W. Stott, the Director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity and one of the foremost evangelists and lecturers of the day, attends to the same dimension of this reality by noting that the preacher can speak only because God has spoken:

No attempt to understand Christianity can succeed which overlooks or denies the truth that the living God has taken the initiative to reveal himself savingly to fallen humanity; or that his self-revelation has been given by the most straight forward means of communication known to us, namely by a word and words; or that he calls upon those who have heard his Word to speak it to others. (John R. W. Stott, Between Two Worlds: The Art of Preaching in the Twentieth Century [Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1982], 15)

Stott illustrates the implication of this insight with a somewhat humorous anecdote from the career of George Whitefield, the eloquent and spellbinding preacher of the eighteenth century. During a preaching campaign in a New Jersey meeting-house, an old man fell asleep during Whitefield’s discourse, provoking him to exhort:

If I had come to speak to you in my own name, you might rest your elbows upon your knees and your heads on your hands, and go to sleep! … But I have come to you in the name of the Lord God of hosts, and (he clapped his hands and stamped his foot) I must and I will be heard. (Ibid, 32–33)

In spite of the keen and penetrating focus on “this world,” preaching through the ages has been uttered as a word coming from another world. Because the order which it assumes as normative does not exist in history, human beings have found it difficult to utter in ordinary speech the extraordinary pronouncements which preaching requires. The ancient prophets often resorted to signs; the apostles of the early church accompanied their words with signs and wonders; the saints were known to retreat into prolonged silent contemplation, only later to emerge with pronouncement; still others have incorporated the enchanting and mystical powers of music in their delivery. Black preaching is an instance of this latter employment.

The very word music is derived from an ancient view of the world which considered the art forms essentially enchanted. Music was a means for evoking and expressing the rapture of the soul. To the present day, it has been integral to the cultic life of nearly every culture and, by implication, inseparable from religion. Analysis and reflection by the ablest scholars of religion have revealed further that music, celebration, and ecstasy are crucial ingredients differentiating religion from philosophy. Anthropologist R. R. Marrett, who pondered and explored the threshold of religion, concluded, for instance, that “religion is more danced than thought out” (Handbook on Religion [London: Metheun and Co., 1914], xxi, 175).

Within the comparative framework of religion, black preaching (as a human phenomenon) employs music in the delivery of meaning from another world. In a skillful and stalwart way, music is one of the instruments which bridges the chasm between the world of human beings and God who speaks to them through preaching. Establishing a direct link between the spirit within the preacher, the word being uttered, and the worshiping congregation, the surplus of musicality operates beneath the structures of rational discourse, producing a mystical and enchanting effect upon the audience waiting to hear what saith the Lord. There can be no denial of the potency within this form of preaching, which has been a source of untold healing and motivation for the strivings of the people.

Music in the African Tradition

One of the greatest errors that can be made in attempting to understand black culture is to assume that it is but a carbon copy of some monolithic American culture. Invariably when American culture is projected as such a mythical caricature, it is viewed as a reflection of European culture, thus obscuring the rich interpenetration of African and Amerindian civilizations and authenticity of the truly American genre. Hence, there is no chance of coming to terms with the musical aspect of black preaching without a backward and sideward glance to Africa, for in African culture we can clearly observe the structures of meaning embedded within the religious consciousness of its people, which has allowed for the sustentation of music as a means of communicating the “surplus.”

In traditional Africa, human life exists in synthesis with other forms of life and in relation to rhythmic patterns observable in the natural order. These patterns—the coming and going of daylight and darkness, the phases of the moon, the periodic varieties of rainfall, planting, and harvest—indicate an essentially rhythmic structure to the forces that sustain life. Even biological life has a rhythmic fundament—the conception and bearing of children, the process of reaching puberty and adulthood, and the phase of aging and passing on to join the ancestors. The connection between rhythm and life is the primal nexus from which the manifold expressions of culture flow. In its unity, rhythm/life surges forth in the multifarious forms through which the world is known: language, art, society, religion, government, and so forth. It is therefore only a short step to the realization that the very force of life that pulsates through individuals and communities is given objective tangible expression in rhythmic motion and music, and that musical rhythm is the aesthetic sanguification of the force of life-sustaining the people.

In traditional Africa, one can find this principle of structural unity from one tribal group to another. Among the Fon of Dahomey, it is Da, represented by a serpent coiled under the world. Among the Dogan it is the nommo pair, which signifies a word full of power. Among the Bantu it is ntu, the root from which all categories of life are derived. This principle of motion graphically illustrates the pulsating force of life that connects all living things (including plants and animals) and establishes the tie between them and the cosmos. During moments of ecstatic dancing in the cultic shrine, the powers of the universe coalesced and surged through the living being in question. Rhythm, which undergirded trance possession and the resultant “preaching” gave extensity to the African soul and in turn to those Africans who were taken as slaves to North America. Every conceivable effort was made by the enslaved to preserve the primal connection between the noumenal world of deities, ancestors, and spirits and the objective world in which they found themselves. This consciousness, which Gayraud Wilmore calls “hierophantic nature of historical reality” (Black Religion and Black Radicalism [New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1973], 4), preserved within Africans and their descendants an openness to spiritual power. However, the surplus of deep stirrings, intensity, and zeal within the African spirit, easily expressed in African languages by means of rhythm, tone, and pitch, found little correspondence with the vocabulary of the strange land. And drumming, a precise means of communicating with human beings and the deities was strictly forbidden in the slave regime. But rhythm and musicality were sustained within the worship of the slave community, a portion of its residue being deposited in black preaching.

The presence of rhythm within the African and African-American worldview corresponds to the oppugnancy slaves felt toward the world. To them, rhythm was essentially numinous: it was the property of the deities, and it moved the community backward away from present reality into the time of the deities. The same atavistic influence operated upon the adherents of Afro-Christian faith: rhythm and music in preaching, operating beneath the structures of rational and discursive communication, moved the hearers away from the history that unleashed terror upon them (Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982], 19; Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return [New York: Harper and Row, 1959], 139). Only through perpetuating their quarrel with history while simultaneously sidestepping its terror could they forge a positive identity for themselves.

That the direction of black preaching has ever been “a gesture away from history” has understandably given rise to the charge that it is otherworldly. However, because there has never been a historical epoch in which blacks could behold their dreams fulfilled, the rhythm and music in Afro-Christian preaching, correlative to the content of the message, is an affirmation of the atavistic and the primal—the world that God has truly willed.

Preaching as Kratophany

Within the tradition of the black church, preaching is truly a manifestation of power, or (in a word used by Eliade) a kratophany. As in a “theophany,” which is a manifestation of deity, some object is present which opens to the transcendent while simultaneously being rooted in the world of tangible, historical reality. With a theophany, the object may be a tree or a stone, as in African traditional religions, while with preaching the kratophany is spoken word and rendered gesture. Further, within the context of the culture that sustains black preaching, there is no modality more indicative of the presence of deity, power, and intrusion from another order than that of the preached word entrenched in musicality.

As kratophany, more must accompany the preached word than the claim that it has power or a theory of preaching. Because the Word is like “fire shut up in the bones” (Heb. 4:12; Jer. 20:9, 23:29), something special is supposed to happen in preaching. Replete with drama and musicality, its performative power is expected to move people and to cause reaction. Nodding the head, shedding a tear, holy dancing, speaking in tongues, singing, humming aloud, and saying “amen” are responses to the power manifested in effective black preaching.

Words thusly preached are akin to ancient Hebrew tradition, wherein words were believed to have accomplished and performed the action contained in them, especially when spoken on behalf of God. Moreover, the spoken word could by no means be retracted. When, for instance, Balaam, the Mesopotamian diviner, was summoned by the king of Moab to curse the Israelites as they came up from Egypt, Balaam instead blessed Israel, declaring that he could not retract the spoken word under some circumstances (Num. 22:12–18, Jer. 23:29). Again, when Jacob surreptitiously received the blessing that should have gone to his brother Esau, their father Isaac insisted that once the word bestowing inheritance had been spoken reversal was impossible (Gen. 27:36–38). The prophets declared too that the word they spoke for the Lord would not return without doing what it was sent to do, and that word was like “a hammer that breaks a rock into pieces” (Isa. 55:11). When caught up in the more intense musical phases of speaking the word, the trance-like state of the black preacher parallels that of the early Old Testament prophets, the nabiim, who claimed no responsibility for their speech under the conditions caused by the Spirit of the Lord upon them. They spoke what “thus saith the Lord” without fear of punishment or death (George T. Montague, The Holy Spirit: Growth of a Biblical Tradition [New York: Paulist Press, 1976], 17-33; see also Amos 1). The preacher who genuinely enters this state of spirituality is able to deliver discourse far exceeding that which had been prepared.

Down through the ages music has provided the added dimension of communication through which one spirit could reach another. This non-discursive level of communication is apparent in the way listeners experience musical performance. On the one hand, there is the objective dimension that can be set on the bar and governed by the scale, whereby a musician correctly executing the score will produce the expected sound. Technical correctness aside, there still remains the subjective element—the surplus. The exceptional artist is able to “touch the spirit” for the sake of the audience. Similarly, the music of black preaching can be understood as a sort of “singing in the spirit” (1 Cor. 14, 15), for there is a surplus (glossa) expressed in music that accompanies rational content (logos) expressed in words. The rational portion is contained in the formal structure of the sermon which reflects the homiletical soundness and the doctrinal tradition in which the preacher stands. For the glossal portion, the preacher becomes an instrument of musical afflatus: a flute through which divine air is blown, a harp upon which eternal strings vibrate. For the sake of the audience, the preacher becomes an oracle through which a divinely inspired message flows.

When preaching attains the level wherein rhythm and musicality are unrestrained—wherein the preacher “lets the Lord have his way”—it is customarily said that the preacher is “under the anointing” and is “being used of God.” In the vernacular of the culture, we say, “the preacher has come.”

African-American Hymnology

There are considerable resources for black songs among African-American denominations and churches that are now widely available for churches in every tradition. This article is especially helpful in describing the different types of songs that have developed from the black worship tradition.

Black Methodists, Baptists, Holiness, and Pentecostals, as well as black Episcopalians and Catholics, have each produced their own hymnists and hymnody. Among nineteenth-century black clergy who were also hymnists are Bishop Daniel A. Payne of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Rev. Benjamin Franklin Wheeler of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Among early twentieth-century hymnists were Charles Albert Tindley of the Methodist church, Rev. F. M. Hamilton of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, William Rosborough of the National Baptist Convention, USA, and Charles Price Jones of the Church of Christ (Holiness), USA.

The Episcopal church has to its credit such contemporary black hymnists as David Hurd and William Farley Smith. In addition to singing the hymns of the traditional black churches, black Episcopalians have at their disposal complete musical settings of the Communion service by black hymnists. Smith’s setting in the black Episcopalian hymnbook, Lift Every Voice and Sing (New York: Church Hymnal Corp., 1981), is entitled “Communion Music for the Protestant Episcopal Church.” Its eight parts include the Introit, Gloria in Excelsis, the hymns “Hungry and Thirsty” and “Lord, We Come,” Doxology, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, The Lord’s Prayer, and Benediction.

African-American Catholics have at their disposal a distinctive body of hymnody composed by black Catholic hymnists. Included in the hymnal entitled Lead Me, Guide Me: The African American Catholic Hymnal (1987) are not only the standard favorites of the traditional black church but also Edward V. Bonnemere’s jazz-styled “Christ Is Coming: Prepare the Way’ ” (complete with guitar chords) and Fr. Clarence Joseph Rivers’s “Mass Dedicated to the Brotherhood of Man” (1970). Other black Catholic composers represented in this hymnal are Edmund Broussard, Marjorie Gabriel-Borrow, Avon Gillespie, Rawn Harbor, Leon C. Roberts, Grayson Warren Brown, and Edward V. Bonnemere.

Black Methodists, Baptists, Holiness, Pentecostals, Episcopalians, and Catholics also share a body of hymnody that is hardly differentiated doctrinally or denominationally, namely the spirituals and gospel music. The antebellum spirituals may still constitute the largest body of black sacred music in this consortium of black Christians known as the black church. Among the several thousand spirituals handed down to the present generation of black worshipers, spirituals often found in black denominational hymnbooks, are songs reminiscent of the wide range of sentiments felt by the enslaved. There are songs of joy such as “Every Time I Feel the Spirit,” songs of thanksgiving such as “Free at Last,” and songs of praise such as “Ride On, King Jesus.” The spirituals also expressed with unyielding faith the belief that God would repeat on behalf of the Africans enslaved in America the liberating act performed for the biblical Hebrews subjugated in Egypt. Spirituals of this mood include “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” “Freedom Train A-Comin’,” “Go Down, Moses,” and “Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho.”

Also among the spirituals are the “sorrow songs.” These songs, which seem to be individual rather than communal expressions, include “I Been in the Storm So Long,” “Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen,” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” Many of the sorrow songs, illustrating the unyielding faith of the enslaved, commence on a low note of dejection but conclude on a high pitch of praise. Two of the very few exceptions to this characteristic are “Were You There” and “He Never Said a Mumbling Word,” both of which show no glimmer of hope. Today, spirituals have been arranged in hymnic, anthemic, and soloistic forms to be sung by the congregation, choir, and trained soloist, respectively. Among the musical arrangers are such historic figures as H. T. Burleigh, R. Nathaniel Dett, and John Wesley Work, Jr., and such contemporary musicians as Verolga Nix and Roland Carter. In whatever form spirituals are arranged—as hymns, anthems, or solo songs—they can be used to complement every phase of the church year.

Complementing the spirituals in the folk, hymnic, and anthemic repertoires of the black church are the songs of racial pride and liberation. The most important song of racial pride is the “Black National Anthem,” J. Rosamond Johnson’s setting of his brother James Weldon Johnson’s poem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The principal song of liberation, made popular during the civil rights movement, is “We Shall Overcome.” Like numerous civil rights songs, this historic piece is a synthesis and adaptation of extant hymnody. Combining the tune of the old Baptist hymn, “I’ll Be Alright,” and the text of the Methodist gospel hymn, “I’ll Overcome Someday,” the anthem of the civil rights movement is emblematic of how the black oral tradition adapts extant hymns to meet new social and religious needs.

The composer of “I’ll Overcome Someday” is the great Charles Albert Tindley, the creator of such well-known gospel hymns as “We’ll Understand It All By and By.” Many black hymnologists have considered Tindley, a Methodist minister from Philadelphia, to be the most important, if not prolific, hymn writer in the history of the black church. Actually, the most prolific, and certainly one of the most significant, is Charles Price Jones, the founding bishop of the Church of Christ (Holiness), USA. While Tindley composed approximately forty gospel hymns, Jones composed over one thousand hymns (including anthems). Among his hymns is the resplendent “I Will Make the Darkness Light.”

Following the Tindley and Jones era of the gospel hymn (1900–1930) arose what has been called the “golden age of gospel” (1930–1969). This period is represented by the “gospel songs” of such black composers and arrangers as Doris Akers, J. Herbert Brewster, Lucie E. Campbell, James Cleveland, Thomas A. Dorsey, Theodore Frye, Roberta Martin, Kenneth Morris, and Clara Ward. Two of the most famous gospel songs of this period are Campbell’s “He Will Understand and Say ‘Well Done’ ” and Dorsey’s “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” Together, the musicians of this era transformed the congregational gospel hymn of the Tindley and Jones era into the solo, quartet, and choral gospel song of the “golden” period.

Succeeding the golden age of gospel is the modern gospel era. This has been, from its inception in 1969, dominated by black Pentecostal artists of the Church of God in Christ. Among these artists are Walter Hawkins, Edwin Hawkins, Andrae Crouch, Sandra Crouch, and Elbernita Clark (of the Clark Sisters). Among the popular pieces of this period that have been sung by young adult “inspirational choirs” in the black church are Walter Hawkins’s “Be Grateful” and “He’s That Kind of Friend,” Andrae Crouch’s “Through It All,” and Sandra Crouch’s “Come, Lord Jesus.” Some of their songs have appeared in the black denominational hymnals published since 1980.

Christian hip-hop is the newest form of gospel music. Similar to modern gospel, Christian hip-hop (orginated c. 1989) began as concert rather than liturgical music; it too will likely find its way into the black churches that are seeking to speak to today’s youth. Among hip-hop gospel singers are PID (Preachers in Disguise), ETW (End Time Warriors), SFC (Soldiers for Christ), DC Talk, Witness, D-Boy Rodriguez, Helen Baylor, Michael Peace, and Fresh Fish. These groups often have a message that is experientially oriented. For instance, PID addresses such issues as homelessness, sexually transmitted disease, and racism, and does so in a language that today’s inner-city youths speak and relate to.

The music that falls into the gospel hymn, gospel song, and modern gospel eras still coexists in the black church, and it is unlikely that even the rise of gospel hip-hop would ever change this inclusive nature of the black church music ministry. These three kinds of gospel that continue to co-exist in the black church generally fulfill the three principal liturgical functions in black churches—testimony, worship, and praise. The testimony hymns are used by worshipers to commence their “testifying” during the testimony service, a ritual practiced especially in black Holiness and Pentecostal churches. In testifying, a worshiper stands, sings a verse or two (or the chorus) of a favorite hymn, and then gives her or his spoken testimony. Using the theme and language of the song, the speaker tells the story of how God has worked positively in their lives during the past week. The fact that testimony typically begins with and is thematically built upon a hymn illustrates that these songs have been an essential source of theology for black worshipers over the years of social, political, and economic struggle. One of the favorite testimony hymns of the black church is “Jesus, I’ll Never Forget What You’ve Done for Me.”

The worship and praise songs have a close kinship. The worship hymns do not focus on individual experiences like the testimony hymns, but specifically on the worship of Jesus Christ. Familiar examples of worship songs are “We Have Come Into This House” by Bruce Ballinger and “Bless His Holy Name” by Andrae Crouch. The kindred praise songs are cheerful declarations of exaltation to God, which welcome God’s presence in the life of the believer. Among the best-known songs of praise are “Yes, Lord” and “My Soul Says, ‘Yes.’ ” Both of these were composed by Charles Harrison Mason, the founder of the Church of God in Christ, and are published in that denomination’s first and only hymnal, Yes Lord! (1984). Either during or following the singing of worship and praise songs, Holiness and Pentecostal worshipers may engage in giving the Lord a “wave offering” by means of the “lifting of hands,” or by giving “hand praise” (applause in gratitude for the Lord’s blessings).

Much of the music that is sacred to the tradition of black worship can be found in hymnals compiled by black denominations. Among the most recent and historically important are the American Methodist Episcopal Church Bicentennial Hymnal (1984); The New National Baptist Hymnal (1977) of the National Baptist Convention; His Fullness Songs (1977) of the Church of Christ (Holiness), USA; and Yes. Lord!: The Church of God in Christ Hymnal (1982). Among the important hymnbooks published by the black constituencies of predominantly white denominations are Songs of Zion (1981) from the United Methodist Church; Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Collection of Afro-American Spirituals and Other Songs (1981), from the Episcopal church; and Lead Me, Guide Me: The African American Catholic Hymnal (1987) of the Roman Catholic church.

The Function of Praise Songs in African-American Worship

The praise song is integral to worship in the black tradition, expressing Spirit-filled praise and demanding the full participation of the worshiping community. Black praise singing is also expressive of themes important in the black Christian experience and in the theology that has been formed out of this experience.

Black religious music and black theology are correlative in meaning. From the beginning, black music has sprung from black theology as a meaningful and life-affirming medium in the black experience. This article intends to take a brief look at this interplay between music and theology as revealed in the black Pentecostal praise song.

Luther Gerlach and Virginia Hine have studied Pentecostalism as a mode of social transformation involving a seven-step commitment process required to recruit, convert, and maintain members. The two steps most germane to the Pentecostal praise song are the original commitment event and the orientation process that features group support for modified cognitive and behavioral patterns (Luther P. Gerlach and Virginia H. Hine, People, Power, Change: Movements of Social Transformation [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970], 110).

Pentecostals call the most significant event effectuating commitment “baptism of the Holy Ghost.” Following the acceptance of Christ as their personal Savior, believers are encouraged to seek this experience by prayerfully petitioning God to “fill them” with the Spirit. As recorded in the Book of Acts, the initial sign of Spirit baptism is “speaking with other tongues” (glossolalia; cf. Acts 2:1–13).

In addition to expecting new members to be Spirit-baptized, the established Pentecostal community maintains a strict code of personal conduct. One of the traditional ways black Pentecostals communicate this expectation to new members is through their praise songs. New members do more than simply learn the words of praise songs by joining the community in choruses of faith affirmations; they also learn by rote the theological meanings of the songs and the behavioral expectations of their new religious community. Gerlach and Hine claim that the popular aphorisms contained in black Pentecostal songs are “conceptual models which spring into life and take on deep meaning” (Gerlach and Hine, People, Power, Change, 162). Aphorisms such as “I have crossed the separating line,” which abound in praise songs, are not mere pat phrases. They represent the “cognitive building blocks” of Pentecostal belief because they are saturated with theological meaning (ibid.).

In part, what new members in the black Pentecostal church are oriented to is the black religious worldview and the theological reflection that sustains it. Black theology is a defiant act of faith and human will. When black people decided to interpret the Scriptures so that the words would speak to their particular experiences, they concluded that God had not intended for them to be slaves (James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed [New York: Seabury Press, 1975], 8). Black religious music is a fascinating artifact of this theological dynamic because it demonstrates how black people, for the purpose of their liberation, reinterpreted their religion designed to reinforce white supremacy. Born in black people’s struggle for survival and liberation, the theology of the black worldview continues to transform the meaning of songs black Pentecostals adapt from the white religious tradition.

Conversely, members of other denominations, black and white, have hardly begun to appreciate the musical contribution black Pentecostals have made to the Christian hymnic tradition. Like other denominational groups composing the black church, black Pentecostals have long sung hymns by white hymnists, but the praise songs were created out of the Pentecostals’ own unique style of worship. Improvisatory in nature and simple in structure, these songs of praise are rendered differently each time they are sung. Black Pentecostals sing their praise songs in a way similar to the way jazz musicians play their instruments. Just as jazz musicians have an inventory of jazz riffs and chord progressions to call upon, so have the Pentecostal praise leaders an inventory of familiar calls at their disposal for leading the singing of praise songs. Black Pentecostals learn their praise songs by rote via the medium of oral transmission, and it is the spiritual mood of the moment that determines what is sung or played. Walter Hollenweger asserts that black Pentecostals are duplicating the way primitive Christians transmitted theology, through oral channels (“Creator Spiritus,” Theology 47 (1978): 35).

An integral aspect in the improvisatory singing of the praise song is call and response, the African-derived pattern that survived the cultural transition to America. Jack Daniel and Geneva Smitherman define call and response as the verbal and nonverbal interaction between speaker and listener in which each of the speaker’s statements (or “calls”) is punctuated by expressions (“responses”) from the listener. As a fundamental aspect of the black communications system, call-and-response spans the sacred-secular continuum in black culture.… More than an observed ritual in Church services, call-and-response is an organizing principle of black Cultural Reality that enables traditional black folk to achieve a unified state of balance or harmony which is essential to the Traditional African World View. (Jack L. Daniel and Geneva Smitherman, “How I Got Over: Communication Dynamics in the Black Community,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 62:1 (1976): 26–39)

In black Pentecostal praise songs, the very act of punctuating the singer’s call with a unified response instills a forceful sense of allegiance to the theology of the song being sung. Call and response bind all participants together in meaning and purpose. Observe, as an example of call and response, the following words of a favorite black Pentecostal praise song, “On My Way to Heaven and I’m So Glad”:

Goodbye, goodbye, I’ve left this world behind.
I’ve crossed the separating line.
I’ve left this world behind.

In the call and response mode, the song is sung like this:

Leader:     Goodbye
Congregation:     Goodbye
Leader:     Goodbye
Congregation:     Goodbye
All:     I’ve left this world behind. I have cross the separating line. I have left this world behind.

The following are the words of another favorite praise song. As in the previous song, the worship leader calls out various verses to which the congregation responds:

Leader:     I’m a soldier.
Congregation:     In the army of the Lord.
Leader:     I’m a soldier.
Congregation:     In the army.
Leader:     If I die, let me die.
Congregation:     In the army of the Lord.
Leader:     If I die, let me die.
Congregation:     In the army.

As these examples illustrate, praise songs are meditations on simple theological themes which help orient new members to the worldview and theology of black Pentecostalism. Praises to God for salvation, explications of Christ’s atonement, and pledges of determination to continue the Christian life are among the familiar themes in these songs. So simple are the songs, and so familiar are their themes to Pentecostals, that the creative worship leaders can “call” a medley of songs on a particular theological theme without even breaking the tempo between songs. This makes the worship leader an important factor in the instruction and orientation of new members—a teacher of sorts.

How does the praise song serve black Pentecostal theology? The praise song was never intended to be an exhaustive explication of Christian theology. It is a song that thanks God for the salvation promised to those believers who are faithful and Spirit-filled. In this regard, the praise song is more concerned with rejoicing over salvation than with plotting out the salvation process. The latter—the more in-depth doctrinal aspects of black Pentecostal theology—are taught to members in the contexts of Bible study, Sunday school, and preaching. But the praise song has prepared the way for this more formal instruction. The praise song, then, can afford to concentrate on worshipful acts and on orienting new members (and reorienting old ones) to the more common tenets of Pentecostal belief: the praise of God and human submission to the indwelling Holy Spirit.

Black Pentecostals transmit their theology through the oral channel of praise songs to communicate group values and expectations to individual members. Using song to teach group expectations and to engender worshipful solidarity is an aspect of communal life that has been maintained in black culture from its traditional African religious roots.

Church Music in the African-American Tradition

One of the richest contributions to church music in America has undoubtedly come from the heritage of the African-Americans who came to America as slaves. Their hymns and spirituals, which are sung today across the world, give evidence of both the extreme hardships and the fervent faith that was a part of their experience in America.

Africans in America

A glance down the “for sale” columns of eighteenth-century American newspapers would reveal dozens of small ads such as this: TO BE SOLD a valuable young handsome Negro Fellow about 18 or 20 years of age; has every qualification of a genteel and sensible servant and has been in many different parts of the world.… He lately came from London, and has with him two suits of new clothes, and his French horn, which the purchaser may have with him.

Slavery had begun two centuries earlier—the first slaves were brought to America by Sir John Hawkins in 1563. The plantations that developed in America’s middle colonies in the eighteenth century increased the demands for slaves enormously, bringing the number by the 1750s to 300,000. By the end of that century this figure had tripled. One estimate suggests that altogether 15 million black slaves were brought to the continent (including the West Indies and South America) before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

The Music of Africa

The wonderful musicality of Africa came with the slaves. It could be heard even in the appalling and life-threatening conditions of the slave ship: The slaves on the ship] sang songs of sad lamentation.… They sang songs expressive of their fears of being beat, of their want of victuals, particularly the want of their native food, and of their never returning to their own country. (Ecroyd Claxton, Minutes of the Evidence … Respecting the Slave Trade, 34, pp. 14–36, House of Commons, quoted in D. J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War [Urbana, Illinois, 1987].)

The slaves on board had to make music whether they liked it or not, being forced to dance for the entertainment of the sailors: and if they do not, they had each of them [the boatswain and his mate] a cat to flog them and make them do it. (Ibid., p. 8)

The many musical traditions brought over from Africa were transformed by the conditions of slavery and by the arbitrary mixing of peoples of differing cultures (this was a specific policy believed to make the slaves less rebellious) but they were not eradicated. On the contrary, music and dance remained, as in Africa, far more than a diversion from the hardship and injustice of slavery. They were vital expressions of identity occasionally permitted in a life of almost unremitting labor.

Dancing and music-making using traditional instruments were celebrated at festivals such as Pinkster Dagh (a corruption of “Pentecost Day”) when white spectators could look on at a great carnival of ecstatic dancing and music lasting several days.

It was also possible to hear the musical expression—the hollers—of black slave-workers in the fields and open spaces: Suddenly one raised such a sound as I never heard before, a long, loud, musical shout, rising and falling, and breaking into falsetto, his voice ringing through the woods in the clear, frosty night air, like a bugle call. As he finished, the melody was caught up by another, then by several in chorus. (F. L. Olmstead, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, vol. 2 [New York, 1856], 19, and quoted in E. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 2d ed. [New York, 1983], 156.)

The conversion of the blacks to the Christian faith went ahead slowly, for not all whites felt it appropriate for their slaves to know for themselves the privileges of their faith. But in such scraps, as the slaves could pick up, they discovered the God who ignores human barriers, who delivers people from oppression, and in whose sight everyone is equal. These were messages of hope and eventual liberation that came to be celebrated in music and dance of great power: it was musicking and dancing … with their unique power to weld into a higher unity the contradictory experiences of sorrow, pain, joy, hope, and despair, that were at the center of their religious expression. (C. Small, Music of the Common Tongue [London, 1987], 87)

Hymns

So when the slaves adopted Christianity and began to sing the Psalms and hymns in the white churches (albeit segregated) they brought a life and vigor to the music which the whites could not fail to notice: … all breaking out in a torrent of sacred harmony, enough to bear away the whole congregation to heaven. (S. Davies, Letters from the Reverend Samuel Davies and Others … , quoted in C. Hamm, Music in the New World [New York, 1983], 128.)

The skill and passionate sincerity in Christian music-making was brought into the homes of white Christians. In 1755 the Rev. Samuel Davies described the slaves singing from their Psalters and hymnbooks:

Sundry of them have lodged all night in my kitchen, and sometimes when I have awaked about two or three o’clock in the morning, a torrent of sacred harmony has poured into my chamber and carried my mind away to heaven.… I cannot but observe that the Negroes, above all the Human species that I ever knew, have an Ear for Musicke, and a kind of ecstatic Delight in Psalmody … (S. Davies, quoted in C. Hamm, Music in the New World, 128.)

By now it will be evident how significant are those last few words, for through their continued celebration of “ecstatic delight,” the black community in America has proferred a great gift to the legacy of Christian music.

It was not until the 1770s that blacks were permitted to form their own churches. The first hymnal for black churches was published in 1801, the Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors. The hymns, with texts by Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and others, were selected by Richard Allen, minister of one of the first independent black denominations, the African Methodist Episcopal Church (his church was in Philadelphia). The many editions of this influential hymnbook (even up to recent times) have been a touchstone for the changing tastes of hymn singing in many black congregations. The early editions, for instance, contain simple, folklike tunes popular at the revival meetings of the late eighteenth century. Subsequent editions contained the most popular contemporary spirituals.

The folk tunes of the early editions were not to everyone’s taste. A Methodist Minister, J. F. Watson, wrote in 1819 of a growing evil, in the practice of singing in our places of public and society worship, merry airs, adapted from old songs, to hymns of our (the whites’) composing: often miserable as poetry, and senseless as matter … most frequently composed and first sung by the illiterate blacks of the society. (J. F. Watson, Methodist Error [Trenton, 1819])

Spirituals

Camp meetings were an important basis for the growth of what are now known as spirituals. These songs, whether sung by blacks or whites, were essentially the music of the countryside. The blacks brought special qualities to their spirituals, namely, a background of field hollers (see above) and the ecstatic character of their African musical heritage.

The words of the spirituals were directly biblical, drawn especially from passages which speak of liberation (Moses, Daniel, and the Book of Revelation were favorites) and perhaps adapted from popular English hymns, for example, the popular hymn by Isaac Watts:

When I can read my title clear
To mansions in the skies,
I’ll bid farewell to ev’ry fear,
And wipe my weeping eyes.
This became the basis for several spirituals, such as the following:
Good Lord, in the mansions above,
Good Lord, in the mansions above,
My Lord, I hope to meet my Jesus
In the mansions above.
My Lord, I’ve had many crosses, and trials here below;
My Lord, I hope to meet you,
In the mansions above.

The music tended to be of the call-and-response type. This simple structure, so common in African traditional music, allows great freedom: no books are needed, for the chorus is easy to pick up and the solo calls can be improvised on the spot. All this was accompanied by hand-clapping and foot-stamping, creating Christian protest music of distilled and concentrated ecstasy.

White spirituals of the same period often adapted the texts of hymns in the same kind of way, perhaps repeating lines or adding a short refrain (like “Glory, hallelujah!”) between them, just like the black spirituals. The music was often borrowed or adapted from well-known folk-melodies.

Conversely, black Christians were well aware of the songs that the whites were singing in the camp meetings and were happy to sing tunes from white traditions. There were more pragmatic reasons for white ministers’ disapproval of the wild conduct of black worship in the South. The words of their songs had layers of meaning which could be as temporal as they were spiritual, such as the following lines from the spiritual “Dere’s No Rain,”: “no more slavery in de kingdom/no evil-doers in de kingdom/all is gladness in de kingdom.” (Quoted in E. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 159.) Besides being a spiritual home in “the heavens above,” “de kingdom” could have also meant the North, where an escape from the bondage of slavery was possible.

One organization to assist slaves to flee their masters was called the Underground Railroad. A black slave, Frederick Douglass, became involved with it in 1835 in an attempted escape and later explained the coded messages embedded in spirituals: We were, at times, remarkably buoyant, singing hymns and making joyous exclamations, almost as triumphant in their tone as if we had reached a land of freedom and safety. A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of “O Canaan, sweet Canaan,” something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the North—and the North was our Canaan. (F. Douglas, My Bondage and My Freedom [New York, 1855], 87, quoted in E. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 143.)

Many whites felt that the preaching of the Christian gospel of justice and liberty for all men was dangerous. It seems they were right.

The Period of the Civil War

The population of the industrial areas of North American grew rapidly during the nineteenth century. With the inexorable move towards the abolition of slavery, more and more black churches were established that did not have to suffer the strict control of the white Episcopal church. They reflected a number of traditions, from an orderliness that emulated the atmosphere of many white congregations, to an ecstatic and physical abandon characteristic of African tradition.

African Worship

Frederika Bremer visited some black churches in Cincinnati in 1850. The Episcopal church there left her with the impression of a service that was “quiet, proper and a little tedious.” But the African Methodist church was quite a different matter: I found in the African Church African ardor and African life. The church was full to overflowing, and the congregation sang their own hymns. The singing ascended and poured forth like a melodious torrent, and the heads, feet, and elbows of the congregation moved all in unison with it, amid evident enchantment and delight in the singing.… (A. B. Benson, ed., American of the Fifties: Letters of Frederika Bremer [New York, 1924])

Another report comes from William Faux who visited a black church in Philadelphia in 1820:
After the sermon, they began singing merrily, and continued, without stopping, for one hour, till they became exhausted and breathless.… While all the time they were clapping hands, shouting and jumping and exclaiming, “Ah Lord! Good Lord! Give me Jesus! Amen.” (W. Faux, Memorable Days in America … [London, 1823], 420)

Such descriptions are evidence that informal dance was a central part of much black worship. Paradoxically, it was the suppression of dance by influential Puritan whites in the eighteenth century that encouraged its development when the black churches became independent.

The Abolition of Slavery

By the 1840s the ideological split between the Northern and Southern states was affecting every aspect of life. The white Southerners no longer holidayed in the North, nor sent their sons to be educated in the famous Northern universities of Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. The issue that polarized North and South was slavery. The Northern states, better educated and more liberal than the South, had long accepted its abolition as inevitable, but the Southern states refused to comply. The issue split the church: in 1840 the Methodists in the South were unable to agree with those in the North over the morality of slavery; Baptists divided on the same issue a year later. (The rift between the Methodists was not formally settled until 1936.)

The issue was finally settled in the Civil War, where the eventual defeat of the Southern forces allowed Congress to bestow freedom on slaves in all states in 1865. Tragically, this victory did not necessarily improve the lot of the ex-slaves, many of whom found themselves worse off than before. In an atmosphere of vengeance, the South established Black Codes and Jim Crow laws that made segregation almost universal. Blacks were still dependent on whites for their livelihood and given no chance to improve their position. The deprivation and suffering of ex-slaves were made worse still by the activities of white gangs such as the Ku Klux Klan, which attempted to preserve white supremacy by merciless terrorism.

The exodus of liberated slaves from the South, therefore, continued for the rest of the century. Gradually the spirituals of the countryside were replaced in the minds of migrant freedmen by the music of the growing city churches. A schoolteacher in Tennessee noted this change after the Civil War: How I wish you could hear my children sing their strange, wild melodies, that bring back so vividly the old slave life with its toil and servile ignorance. Yet their old plantation songs are falling into disuse, and in their stead, we hear chanted daily the hymns and psalms so familiar to Northern ears. (L. W. Slaughter, The Freedmen of the South [Cincinnati, 1869], 134)

But the spirituals were preserved in invaluable collections, the first and most important of which was Slave Songs of the United States. They were also popularized worldwide by black singing groups, such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, at a time when the slave culture that produced their music was rapidly disappearing.

But true folk music (like the original spirituals) is a delicate plant. Its transportation away from its natural surroundings and the popular acclaim that follows inevitably changes and probably diminishes it. It seems that the essential qualities of the slave spiritual cannot be sensed from even the earliest collections of the music, let alone from more recently published versions. Its clearest evocation may only lie in the recorded eyewitness accounts of the culture that produced it.

An African-American Theology of Worship

African-American theology of worship arises out of a deep sense of oppression and a high anticipation of liberation. In worship, African-Americans experience the redeeming work of Jesus Christ, which liberates them from sin and the power of the Evil One.

Introduction

When African-American Christians gather for worship, regardless of denominations, they share a mutual understanding of God’s initiative in the call to worship. Although their experiences of God and life as a “marginalized” community of faith are varied, they share common needs and common perspectives on life. Worshipers come just as they are, in response to God’s love and grace, to praise God, to offer thanks, to seek forgiveness and wholeness, and to probe the depths of God’s divine mystery in an oppressive society. Worshipers come, well aware of the liberating power of God, seeking to be empowered by the grace of God, as their personhood is affirmed. The gathered redeemed fellowship—the koinonia—is the worshiping arena of the resurrected community of hope which will scatter as the diakonia empowered by the Holy Spirit to engage in mission and ministry in the world.

African-American Christians are by choice members of diverse communities of faith. There are historical African-American (or black) Protestant denominations and African-American congregations in Euro-American denominations. There are Roman Catholics, as well as nondenominational bodies, and innumerable sects, small and large. The worship styles vary within and between denominations so that African-American worshipers defy stereotypical descriptions of their styles of worship.

The theology of worship set forth here is based on a common history of a people who, having been called by many names, have chosen to call themselves “African-Americans.” This name allows a people socially and politically marginalized by the dominant culture in America to claim two heritages: African and American.

African-Americans in worship proclaim a faith heritage which is a synthesis of African, African-American, and Judeo-Christian traditions. As sojourners, they have entered God’s story at varying points in their lives, and they can together share their stories and God’s story through the lens of familiar love relationships. The gathering itself bespeaks the human need to relate, understand, and interact in an environment where common needs, joys, struggles, and hopes can be shared. Corporate worship allows opportunities for personal and communal transformations to occur. The environment of worship is also conducive to the sharing of personal testimonies of transforming moments that might have occurred outside of worship.

Experiences of God in life and meanings applied as a result of experiences, shape the lives of individuals and also help shape forms and styles of ritual action. Encounters with God, perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes which evoke responses are determined by the cultural context in which the faith is experienced. A basic theology of worship will necessarily explore the fact that God freely encounters humans contextually, wherever they are in the world. Enabled by the Holy Spirit, the human spirit is freed and opened to receive and objectify realities. In this way, people of African descent are able to know God implicitly before knowing about God.

For Africans in America during the horrid period of enforced slavery in a strange and alien land, the freedom to consciously transcend their finite existence was the only freedom that was naturally available to them. While functioning under the constraints of “bonded-servants-by-law,” slaves were free to experience the power, love, and grace of a liberating God. The oral folk method of creating, re-creating, and disseminating songs provided for the slaves a means of shaping and recording basic theological tenets unique to the African American experience.

Foundations for Theological Reflections

It is necessary to set forth some foundational aspects of the African religious heritage in order to understand an African-American theology of worship. First and foremost, there is no monolithic African culture. Nor is there one established canon of religious beliefs and ritual practices for the whole continent of Africa. There are a plethora of societies, customs, cultures, languages, forms of social, political, economic, and religious institutions, which account for separate and distinct societal identities. Many societies had well-developed institutional structures and kingdoms dating back to the beginning of civilization. In spite of the diversity, however, there are shared fundamental worldviews which shape a basic understanding of life, ideals, virtues, symbols, modes of expression, and ritual actions, which give African peoples a common sense of identity. Basic primal worldviews are known to exist and remain operative as new worldviews and cultures emerge and take root.

Most African societies share the worldview that humans live in a religious universe. Thus, nature, natural phenomena, physical objects, and the whole of life are associated with acts of God. (See John S. Mbiti, Concepts of God in Africa [New York: Praeger, 1970], chapters 8–13.) Life is viewed holistically, and this perception is distorted if sacred and secular are compartmentalized. African ontology affirms a state of interrelated belongingness. One is considered fully human and whole in so far as one BELONGS to the divinely created universe and lives in solidarity with, and akin to all that comprises the cosmos.

The North African heritage includes direct involvement in the shaping of Judeo-Christian theologies. Africans were vicariously involved from the time that Abraham came out of Ur and settled in Egypt through the time when the Christian church wrestled with faith statements. Africans were directly involved in the formulation of theological statements and creeds. Nine North Africans who were prominent theological leaders in these struggles included: Clement, Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian, Dionysius, Athanasius, Didymus, Augustine, and Cyril of Alexandria.

Many of the Africans who ultimately helped shape the theology of African-American worship were enslaved and brought largely from the west coast of Africa, from northern Senegal to the southern part of Angola. Prevailing primal worldviews evident in African-American theologies of worship can be summarized as follows:

• God created an orderly world and is dynamically involved in on-going creation throughout the world.
• Human beings are part of God’s creation, and they are therefore divinely linked to, related to, and involved with all of creation. This cosmological perspective undergirds an understanding of beingness (ontology) which is relational and communal.
• Communal solidarity is expressed in terms of kinship in an extended family. This involves an “active” relationship with both the living and the “living dead” or those who have died and are in the living memory of the community. This concept is often explained as a vertical and horizontal community where those that live on earth are in communion with the saints.
• An understanding of the holistic “sacred cosmos” which is relevant for individual and communal life must be internalized if one is to find meaning and purpose in life.
• “Cosmic rhythm” is an embodiment of divine order, harmony, and permanence, and is the foundation for the “rhythm of life.”
• Time is relative and cyclical and is governed by the past and a broad understanding of the present. These two basic dimensions of time (past and present) are connected by a rhythm of natural phenomena which includes events that have occurred, and those which are taking place now and will occur immediately. John S. Mbiti is helpful in his observation that for the African “The Future is virtually non-existent as actual time, apart from the relatively short projection of the present up to two years hence.” (John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy [New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1970], 27–28). Two Shahali terms, Sas and Zamani, are proposed by Mbiti to avoid the English linear conception of time as past, present and future. Sasa, the period of immediate concern for African peoples, has a sense of immediacy and nearness of time. Future events are likely to occur within the inevitable rhythm of nature, but cannot constitute measurable time. Zamani, which encompasses an unlimited past, is not confined to the English conception of past since Zamani has its own past and also involves the present and an immediate future.
• Space and time are closely related experiential concepts in which the same word often used in either context to mean virtually the same thing. Space, like time, is relative and must be experienced in order for there to be any indication of meaning. Just as Samsa includes contemporary life which people experience, space is determined by what is geographically near. Land, therefore, is sacred to African peoples, since it is the source of their existence and mystically binds them to those now dead and buried in the earth.

Africans generally understand and affirm the sacredness of God’s creation, the harmonious structure of the cosmos, and the fundamental need for human wholeness. Ritual action is one of the ways to relate holistically to God and to God’s world. Modalities of the sacred and of interrelational existence are revealed through the natural world and through cosmic rhythms which are called upon in rituals. In worship, the divine connectedness is “activated” through symbols and symbolism. For instance, water, like the land, symbolizes the origin and sustenance of life. Water is often understood as synonymous with God the Creator whose presence and continual creation is evidenced in large bodies of water, flowing streams, and rain. Water is also symbolic of a means of death and new life. Contact with water signifies a return or re-incorporation of finite life into the creation process. Water is used in many rituals, especially rites of passage, to symbolize cosmical relatedness, death of the old, re-creation, regeneration, and purification. (see Melva Wilson Costen, “Roots of Afro-American Baptismal Practices,” Journal of the Interdenominational Center 14 [Fall 1986–Spring 1987]: 23–42)

For African peoples, human responses through ritual actions are necessary in order to establish and maintain an ontological balance in a world fraught with negative and evil forces. Responses may be formal or informal, spontaneous or regularized, personal or communal. Certain divinely gifted individuals can determine particular forms of ritual action necessary at given “imbalances” or periods in the life of a community. These persons are identified by the community as “diviners” or “intermediaries,” and are called upon to “intervene or behalf of the community,” and to facilitate contact with divine spirits.

Worship is generally expressed vocally and physically rather than meditationally (Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 75). The corporate worship of God is more experiential than rationalistic, focusing upon the communal sharing of reality, rather than simply transmitting information. In traditional African religions, God’s existence is not determined merely by a series of ideas which someone passes on to others. God exists simply because God can be experienced in all of creation. This is best expressed in an Ashanti proverb: “no one shows a child the Supreme Being,” which means in essence that even children know God as if by instinct (Ibid., 38).

Since worship is basically a contextual-experiential response to the divine, symbols and symbolic forms common to the community provide the most expressive means of communication. Through symbols that often mirror or re-present sounds and movement in the natural environment, the community is able to express what might be difficult to verbalize. Various forms and styles of music, physical movement (dance), gestures, and familial unity are common symbols of African peoples. Elements of nature such as water, mountains, trees, large rocks, and certain animal life are also symbols of God’s divine presence in the world. Just as in other traditions, symbols are born, adapted, and then die as new symbols emerge.

These, then are the theological foundations that were well ingrained in African peoples in diaspora as they continue their journey in God’s story through Jesus the Christ.

Exposure to Christianity

According to extant records, some Africans who would ultimately shape African-American theology were exposed to Christianity prior to their forced arrival in colonial America. Initial exposure was often limited to hasty baptisms in Africa in order to accommodate European laws regarding the capturing and enslaving of humans by other humans. “Emergency” baptisms are known to have occurred immediately before enslaved Africans were herded as cargo onto ships bound for the new colonies across the Atlantic Ocean.

Parents of the first African child baptized on American soil under the authority of the Church of England were an enslaved African couple “accidentally” brought to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. This was the beginning of the history of reluctant attempts by Euro-Americans to Christianize slaves while holding them in bondage. This history of Christian paradoxes provides substantial evidence of the need for African-Americans to shape a theology free from hypocrisy.

The majority of Africans in colonial America were forced to remain bonded servants under a series of laws enacted by Euro-Americans. With the exception of a few single baptisms recorded in 1624 and 1641, the largest group of (20 black) congregants during this period were hardly noticed by recorders of liturgical history. There is sufficient documentation to ascertain that colonists were not in agreement as to the mental and spiritual capacity of African peoples. For those who held a low opinion of the African capacity to understanding Christian tenets, the tendency was to discourage the Christianization of slaves. Some planters suggested that those who became Christians became “sassy” and unmanageable.

Heated controversies hastened positive and negative theological conclusions among Christian Euro-American individuals and institutions in response to questions about the evangelization of slaves. It is of significance that the questions evoked by the controversy concerning the “status of baptized slaves” in regard to their freedom were fundamental theological questions. First and foremost, what denotes humanity? And who is equipped to determine which people created in the image of God are human and which are not? The next question had to do with the meaning of “engrafting into the body of Christ.” Can anyone receive baptism in the name of the triune God and not be considered part of the body of Christ? Is one portion of the body better or more worthy of inclusion? Is this determination left to the mercy of human beings?

These questions were solved in law courts in altered forms in order to solve a societal problem which the newly emerging United States had created for itself. Sacred and secular were clearly dichotomized in order to enact a series of laws that legalized the enslavement and dehumanized treatment of human beings by other humans. Baptism, it is was decided, did not free Africans from their obligations as bonded servants. Following these decisions the evangelization and baptism of Africans in America proceeded with great fervor, with baptized slaves continuing in their degrading, dehumanizing roles.

Full church membership was not initially granted to slaves by their oppressors, nor were they fully accepted as worshipers. Attendance at worship was permitted by generous planters who made sure that this “questionable” portion of the body of Christ would not be able to interact with them. Since African-Americans had no legal voice in matters that affected the shaping of worship, clandestine religious meetings were skillfully orchestrated by slaves. In secluded “brush harbors” in the woods, out of hearing range of the slaveholders, slaves were free to share their faith experiences in an “Invisible Institution,” the first African-American worshiping church. Faith experiences were shaped by core beliefs, existential struggles, and revised African-American versions of God’s liberating activities with the Israelites and all persons who were willing to believe. An indigenous means of theologizing had been found.

The Great Awakening movement which engendered liberal and often unbridled enthusiasm in worship appealed to worshipers of African descent. Free and enslaved African-Americans participated enthusiastically in camp meeting worship, and concluded the evening when possible in brush harbors long after revivalists had pronounced the benediction. The praise of God was truly an offering of one’s total self in sermons, songs, and prayers in sacred space identified by the African-Americans. Secluded worshipers remembered and reconnected with God’s story as their journey was incorporated into the faith journey of Old Testament communities. Forms and styles of the elements of worship were fashioned out of the authentic expressions of an oppressed people.

Africans in America obviously did not arrive tabula rasa, nor were they unfamiliar with God’s story. The Euro-American versions of God’s story which they heard assumed that God had come only through Greco-Roman history. While the story of God incarnate in Jesus Christ canonized in the Bible may have been new to them, it was necessary to indigenize the Good News. Jesus of Nazareth, whose earthly journey was quite similar to that of the slaves, became, in reality, Jesus the Liberator. The worship of God in Jesus Christ in an oppressive church environment from the vantage point of segregated lofts and segregated pews was void of the liberating contextual-experiential so much needed by an African people. They needed sacred space and time to foster spiritual progress unimpeded by the hypocritical motives of confused evangelizers.

The Holy Scriptures became for the slave the most important resource document from which a new theology could be shaped. It was of course necessary for slaves to apply a different hermeneutical principle as their journey, replete with struggles and suffering, became the lens through which the biblical stories could be seen. Long before slaves were able to read the Word of God as found in Scriptures for themselves, the liberation stories which they heard convinced them that this was the same God that they knew from experience. If God could free the Hebrew children, Daniel in the lion’s den, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the fiery furnace, that same God could free them from the bondage of slavery. The Good News of God incarnate in Jesus Christ was a continuation of their journey with God into whose story they had entered. The coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost when people from a variety of cultures heard the gospel in their own language was equally available to them. The help provided to free them to learn to read the English language added another dimension to the slave’s ability to interpret God’s story as the first step toward shaping their own God-talk.

Theology of Worship in a New Key with Indigenized Harmonies

African-American theologizing is grounded in the African primal worldviews cited above. Finite beings are called to worship by God who freely calls whom God chooses, God enters the lives and experiences of a people and frees them consciously to continue in God’s story. One historical way of documenting core beliefs about God in Jesus Christ is found in the slave songs. The gift of music and song remained available as the basic form of symbolic communication for African people in diaspora. Theologizing for the slaves was not the “systematic” task of any one individual but continued as a “folk-task” of the community.

While oral folk traditions are basic to the ongoing life of many cultures, the continuation of African traditional religions and the shaping of new folk traditions in a new world was the basic means of survival for African-Americans. Reliance upon basic core beliefs transmitted orally undergirded the process of shaping new, dynamic cultures and also became pivotal modulation “chords” for shaping theology in a new key. The well-grounded concepts of God, humanity, life, and nature provided the ability to respond creatively to the realities and rhythms of new situations. Syncretisms evolved naturally without reliance upon council meetings for theological discourses and final theological decisions. Concepts of God in Africa emerged out of experiences. Greco-Roman descriptive terms such as omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, transcendent, and immanent were not used by Africans. Nevertheless, experience had taught that God was all-knowing, all-wise, eternal, everywhere, above and beyond all, yet present. These concepts are especially operative in worship.

The “divinely stolen” freedom of separate sacred space helped shape a doctrine of the church ekklesia, truly called out by God. The estrangement and loneliness of slaves at the margins of a society that ostracized them were overcome in this arena as worshipers were made aware that they belonged to God and each other. The black church was initially formed as a liberating worshiping community. Its vitality has been sustained and continues to be perpetuated in proportion to the genuineness and continuity of authentic worship. The church functions as a living fellowship where the wholeness of persons and communities is sought and found, prior to its functioning as an institution. Separate places of worship, initially in secret, where time and sacred space were relative, ultimately evolved into separate congregations of African-Americans. Having their own sacred space African-Americans can find their highest values as they praise God, under the power of the Holy Spirit. Herein, divine power is garnered and strength to survive is granted.

The Bible, God’s Word in Scripture, has been and continues to be the major resource for shaping God-talk. Slaves relied heavily upon God’s Word as they responded in worship and in life. In the evolution of worship over the centuries, biblical stories are foundational for African-American faith and spirituality. Initially steeped in the King James Version of the Bible, African-American worshipers are generally hesitant about questioning the language, even where the imagery has a negative effect upon them. There is a growing trend for congregations to listen more carefully to the language of newer translations introduced by pastors and other church leaders who are seminary graduates. Recent scholarly studies and contributions by African-American liturgical, biblical, and music scholars are facilitating this process.

African-Americans have diverse opinions regarding the Bible. Common understandings include the biblical source as a record of divine history, a witness to the salvation that appeared in Jesus Christ, a record of human experiences which is relevant for today, and a source of truth concerning redemption and Christian living. The details of how this is understood are delineated by some denominations, and functional in the oral memories of others. Scripture does not always determine the content and sequence of elements of worship in all African-American congregations. Nevertheless, preaching is most often biblically based and is a source of inspiration for worship.

African-Americans continue to respect the role of the black preacher, called of God as spiritual leader, prophet, priest, and divine instrument through which God’s healing wholeness can take place. One of the gifts for which black preachers are noted is their ability to “tell the biblical story” and help bring the story to life for the gathered community. Like the African griot (storyteller and oral historian) the storytelling process is supported and encouraged by the community in a “call-and-response” fashion. The major impetus for familial bonding takes place as the faith community dialogues openly with the preacher during the sermon and frees itself for communal fellowship which continues in music and other acts of worship.

During the period of slavery, preachers were often the most intellectual member of the community and were therefore respected for their leadership abilities. Foundational materials for theologizing were presented by the preacher and then shaped in folk-style by the congregants. The shaping often occurred in the words of songs, stylized and disseminated both in worship and during daily work activities of slaves. Some of the “stuff of everyday life” and nature found its way into the music of the church, thus continuing the African mode of blending sacred and secular as a means of worshiping God.

African-American religious ritual action is often reminiscent of the African heritage in content, symbols, and symbolism. The greatest similarity, however, is the dynamic nature of rituals and cultures, reflected in the ability of worshipers to react creatively to life situations and peak moments in worship. Styles and forms will vary according to the needs and expectations of the particular community, as well as the nature of worship generated by the experiences of worshipers. For African-Americans, worship as ritual action is basically forged and shaped as an anti-structural means of functioning in a society that has attempted to structure African-Americans out of the mainstream of society. (J. Randall Nichols, “Worship as Anti-Structure: The Contributions of Victor Turner,” Theology Today 41 [January 1985]: 401–402; see also Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963]). Worship services, whether contemplative or ecstatic, are Spirit-led, liminal experiences of God on the margin of society where social status is elevated above and beyond the assigned definitions imposed by the larger society. Under the power of God, responses in worship allow a vision of the Almighty which inspires, transforms, and makes one whole.

African-American worship is uniquely experiential and contextual, incorporating in varying ways the understanding of a personal, immanent, and transcendent God who is worthy of worship. Worshipers stand in awe of the Mysterium Tremendum of God’s absolute presence, aware that God is trustworthy and “always on time.” The worship of God is made possible through Jesus the Christ, the object of the Christian faith. As the living embodiment of one who divinely overcame oppression, Jesus the Christ, God incarnate, is the “meeting place” or altar, where an encounter with God can happen. While worship may take place anywhere that humans encounter Christ, it is in corporate worship that African-Americans walk and talk, sing and shout, and experience conversion in an acknowledgment of the true presence of the resurrected Christ among them. It is not uncommon for worshipers to address Jesus as God in prayers, songs, and sermons. Beyond the “Jesus Only” sects, one finds emphasis on the absolute oneness of these two persons in the Godhead especially among some Baptists and Pentecostal traditions.

A theology of African-American worship is also reflective of an understanding of the Holy Spirit as the dynamic of worship. The Spirit is personal and direct, and not merely an “atmosphere.” The intimate, transforming power of the Holy Spirit enables salvation, life in the worship and work of the church, and fortification for mission and ministry. It is important in determining a theology of African-American worship to acknowledge differences in denominational polity and theology which affect ritual action and verbal dialogue about the Holy Spirit. These distinctions are most apparent in reference to the Lord’s Supper and baptism as delineated by various denominations.

The uniqueness of an African-American theology is the “liberation key” established in the tonality of the brush harbors, fanned and flamed first in African-American spirituals, and now also in black gospel music and “metered hymns.” This key is clearly established and sounded in African primal world-views which led the early folk theologians to seek separate places of worship. From these well-established foundations, the power of God is experienced in the community of faith, which leads them to continue to talk and sing their core beliefs in the context of lived experiences. Even when denominational differences create an aura that is unique and distinct, the African-American community can find a common plane on which to attempt to “walk as they talk” out of the belief that a divinely liberated people should walk upright, for the power of God is available to all who believe.