• Latest
  • Trending
women preachers

How Black Women Preachers Spoke Truth to Power

March 11, 2018
Tony Lowden, Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter's personal pastor, delivered the former first lady eulogy at her funeral on November 29, 2024.

Watch: Tony Lowden, Pastor to Rosalynn Carter and Jimmy Carter, Delivers Former First Lady’s Eulogy

December 1, 2023
aaron dean charged with murder

Zion Carr: Boy Who Witnessed Cop Kill His Aunt Awarded $3.5M Settlement

November 30, 2023
Botham Shem Jean

Sister of Botham Jean — Killed in Home by Off-Duty Cop — Shares Struggles With Forgiveness, Justice in New Book

November 25, 2023
Sandra Maria Van Opstal

‘The Next Worship’ Author Sandra Van Opstal Undergoes Multiple Surgeries to Fight Rare Infection

November 25, 2023
Bishop Carlton Pearson passed away. Carlton Pearson died Sunday, November 19, 2023

Bishop Carlton Pearson, Once Celebrated Pentecostal Preacher, Dies After Brief Battle With Cancer

November 20, 2023
palestinian farmer

‘These Are Biblical Lands Promised to Us,’ Say Jewish Settlers in West Bank Amid Gaza Conflict

November 18, 2023
hans schmidt shot while street preaching near victory chapel church

Victory Chapel Outreach Director Hans Schmidt Shot in Head While Evangelizing Near Church

November 18, 2023
from the river to the sea meaning

Behind the Slogan ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free’

November 18, 2023
Ayaan Hirsi Ali conversion

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Outspoken Atheist and ‘Muslim Apostate,’ Says She Is ‘Now a Christian’

November 17, 2023
Breonna Taylor was killed by cops as she was in bed.

Brett Hankison Verdict: Mistrial for Ex-Cop Who Blindly Fired 10 Shots Into Breonna Taylor’s Home

November 17, 2023
Dexter Wade story

Mississippi Man Secretly Buried by Police in Unmarked Grave Had ID With Address Yet Cops Failed to Inform Family

November 17, 2023
arrested in handcuffs

Therapist Specializing in Helping Gay Mormon Men Arrested for Allegedly Sexually Abusing Clients

November 10, 2023
Faithfully Magazine
  • Members
    • Log In
    • Member Home
    • See All Members
    • What’s New
    • Start or Join a Group
    • Your Freebies
Subscribe
No Result
View All Result
  • About
    • Advertise
    • Submit Content
    • Join the Team
    • Contact Us
    • Give Via PayPal
  • Exclusives
  • Q&As
  • Specials
  • NJ News
  • Listen & Watch
  • Shop
    • Faith Heroes Bookmarks
    • Clothing
    • eBooks
  • Events
    • Community Events
    • FM Live Q&As
  • Resources
    • Black Christian Content
  • Newsletter
Cart / $0.00

No products in the cart.

  • About
    • Advertise
    • Submit Content
    • Join the Team
    • Contact Us
    • Give Via PayPal
  • Exclusives
  • Q&As
  • Specials
  • NJ News
  • Listen & Watch
  • Shop
    • Faith Heroes Bookmarks
    • Clothing
    • eBooks
  • Events
    • Community Events
    • FM Live Q&As
  • Resources
    • Black Christian Content
  • Newsletter
No Result
View All Result
Faithfully Magazine
Home Faith

How Black Women Preachers Spoke Truth to Power

FM Editors by FM Editors
March 11, 2018
in Faith, Features
Reading Time: 5 mins read
0
women preachers

(Photo: Stephen Radford)

72
SHARES
ShareTweetPin It

By Kenyatta R. Gilbert, Howard University

Each semester I greet the students who file into my preaching class at Howard University with a standard talk. The talk is not an overview of the basics–techniques of sermon preparation or sermon delivery, as one might expect. Outlining the basics is not particularly difficult.

The greatest challenge, in fact, is helping learners to stretch their theology: namely, how they perceive who God is and convey what God is like in their sermons. This becomes particularly important for African-American preachers, especially African-American women preachers, because most come from church contexts that overuse exclusively masculine language for God and humanity.

Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth Memorial in Florence, Massachusetts. Lynne Graves, CC BY-ND

African-American women comprise more than 70 percent of the active membership of generally any African-American congregation one might attend today. According to one Pew study, African-American women are among the most religiously committed of the Protestant demographic–eight in 10 say that religion is important to them.

RelatedArticles

Brian Allain founded Publishing in Color to bring diversity to Christian publishing

How an ‘Old White Guy’ Attacked Christian Publishing’s Diversity Problem

October 18, 2023
woman on mic

Professor Charrise Barron Talks Teaching Protest Music’s Evolution From Gospel to Hip-Hop

September 28, 2023

Yet, America’s Christian pulpits, especially African-American pulpits, remain male-dominated spaces. Still today, eyebrows raise, churches split, pews empty and recommendation letters get lost at a woman’s mention that God has called her to preach.

The deciding factor for women desiring to pastor and be accorded respect equal to their male counterparts generally whittles down to one question: Can she preach?

The fact is that African-American women have preached, formed congregations and confronted many racial injustices since the slavery era.

Here’s the history

The earliest Black female preacher was a Methodist woman simply known as Elizabeth. She held her first prayer meeting in Baltimore in 1808 and preached for about 50 years before retiring to Philadelphia to live among the Quakers.

An unbroken legacy of African-American women preachers persisted even long after Elizabeth. Reverend Jarena Lee became the first African-American woman to preach at the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. She had started even before the church was officially formed in the city of Philadelphia in 1816. But, she faced considerable opposition.

AME Bishop Richard Allen, who founded the AME Church, had initially refused Lee’s request to preach. It was only upon hearing her speak, presumably, from the floor, during a worship service, that he permitted her to give a sermon.

Lee reported that Bishop Allen:

“rose up in the assembly, and related that [she] had called upon him eight years before, asking to be permitted to preach, and that he had put [her] off; but that he now as much believed that [she] was called to that work, as any of the preachers present.

Lee was much like her Colonial-era contemporary, the famed women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth. Truth had escaped John Dumont’s slave plantation in 1828 and landed in New York City, where she became an itinerant preacher active in the abolition and woman’s suffrage movements.

Fighting the gender narratives

For centuries now, the Holy Bible has been used to suppress women’s voices. These early female Black preachers reinterpreted the Bible to liberate women.

Truth, for example, is most remembered for her captivating topical sermon “Ar’nt I A Woman?,” delivered at the Woman’s Rights National Convention on May 29, 1851 in Akron, Ohio.

In a skillful historical interpretation of the scriptures, in her convention address, Truth used the Bible to liberate and set the record straight about women’s rights. She professed:

“Then that little man in Black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, because Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.”

Like Truth, Jarena Lee spoke truth to power and paved the way for other mid- to late 19th-century Black female preachers to achieve validation as pulpit leaders, although neither she nor Truth received official clerical appointments.

The first woman to achieve this validation was Julia A. J. Foote. In 1884, she became the first woman ordained a deacon in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion AMEZ Church. Shortly after followed the ordinations of AME evangelist Harriet A. Baker, who in 1889 was perhaps the first Black woman to receive a pastoral appointment. Mary J. Small became the first woman to achieve “elder ordination” status, which permitted her to preach, teach and administer the sacraments and Holy Communion.

Jarena Lee
Jarena Lee. TradingCardsNPS, CC BY

Historian Bettye Collier-Thomas maintains that the goal for most Black women seeking ordination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was simply a matter of gender inclusion, not necessarily pursuing the need to transform the patriarchal church.

Preaching justice

An important voice was that of Rev. Florence Spearing Randolph. In her role as reformer, suffragist, evangelist and pastor, she daringly advanced the cause of freedom and justice within the churches she served and even beyond during the period of the Great Migration of 20th century.

In my recent book, “A Pursued Justice: Black Preaching from the Great Migration to Civil Rights,” I trace the clerical legacy of Rev. Randolph and describe how her prophetic sermons spoke to the spiritual, social and industrial conditions of her African-American listeners before and during the largest internal migration in the United States.

In her sermons she brought criticism to the broken promises of American democracy, the deceptive ideology of Black inferiority and other chronic injustices.

Randolph’s sermon “If I Were White,” preached on Race Relations Sunday, Feb. 1, 1941, reminded her listeners of their self-worth. It emphasized that America’s Whites who claim to be defending democracy in wartime have an obligation to all American citizens.

Randolph spoke in concrete language. She argued that the refusal of Whites to act justly toward Blacks, domestically and abroad, embraced sin rather than Christ. That, she said, revealed a realistic picture of America’s race problem.

She also spoke about gender discrimination. Randolph’s carefully crafted sermon in 1909 “Antipathy to Women Preachers,” for example, highlights several heroic women in the Bible. From her interpretation of their scriptural legacy, she argued that gender discrimination in Christian pulpits illustrated a misreading of scripture.

Randolph used her position as preacher to effect social change. She was a member and organizer for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which led in the work to pass the 18th Amendment, which made prohibition of the production, sale and transport of alcoholic beverages illegal in the United States. Her affiliation with the WCTU earned her the title “militant herald of temperance and righteousness.”

The ConversationToday, several respected African-American women preachers and teachers of preachers proudly stand on Lee’s, Small’s and Randolph’s shoulders raising their prophetic voices.


Editor’s note: This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.


Kenyatta R. Gilbert, Associate Professor of Homiletics, Howard University

Leave your vote

0 Points
Upvote Downvote

Browse and manage your votes from your Member Profile Page


Share This Post

Share via

Share This Post

  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • Flipboard
  • SMS
More
  • Report
Advertisement
Ancestry US
72
SHARES
ShareTweetPin It
FM Editors

FM Editors

Faithfully Magazine is a fresh, bold and exciting news and culture publication that covers issues, conversations and events impacting Christian communities of color.

More Articles

ethiopia
Opinion & Analysis

Genocide in Ethiopia? Why Answering the Question Will Be a Challenge

May 20, 2021
disasters
Features

What Kirk Cameron Misses in Claim About Disasters and God’s Retribution

September 14, 2017
relief sculpture
Opinion & Analysis

Why We Call Them ‘Church Fathers’ and ‘Desert Mothers’

September 22, 2022

Discussion about this post

Upcoming Events

Dec 13
6:30 pm - 7:30 pm EST

Event: ‘Framing the News: Can Humanities Build Audience Engagement?’

View Calendar

Trending

  • Trending
  • Comments
  • Latest
Tony Evans and Carla Crummie engaged to be married

Dr. Tony Evans Engaged to Former Pastor’s Wife and Widow Four Years After Lois Evans’ Death

September 12, 2023
Sandra Maria Van Opstal

‘The Next Worship’ Author Sandra Van Opstal Undergoes Multiple Surgeries to Fight Rare Infection

November 25, 2023
Christian Cultural Center

5 Largest Churches in New York City

May 29, 2018
Bishop Carlton Pearson passed away. Carlton Pearson died Sunday, November 19, 2023

Bishop Carlton Pearson, Once Celebrated Pentecostal Preacher, Dies After Brief Battle With Cancer

November 20, 2023
stream movies laptop

Free Christian Movies: How and Where to Watch Free Christian Movies Online

March 15, 2021
jackie hill perry tbn fruits of the spirit heterosexuality

Sexuality Has Nothing to Do With Salvation, Jackie Hill Perry Says in TBN Talk About ‘Gay Girl, Good God’

October 8, 2021
Tony Lowden, Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter's personal pastor, delivered the former first lady eulogy at her funeral on November 29, 2024.

Watch: Tony Lowden, Pastor to Rosalynn Carter and Jimmy Carter, Delivers Former First Lady’s Eulogy

December 1, 2023
aaron dean charged with murder

Zion Carr: Boy Who Witnessed Cop Kill His Aunt Awarded $3.5M Settlement

November 30, 2023
Botham Shem Jean

Sister of Botham Jean — Killed in Home by Off-Duty Cop — Shares Struggles With Forgiveness, Justice in New Book

November 25, 2023
Sandra Maria Van Opstal

‘The Next Worship’ Author Sandra Van Opstal Undergoes Multiple Surgeries to Fight Rare Infection

November 25, 2023
Bishop Carlton Pearson passed away. Carlton Pearson died Sunday, November 19, 2023

Bishop Carlton Pearson, Once Celebrated Pentecostal Preacher, Dies After Brief Battle With Cancer

November 20, 2023
palestinian farmer

‘These Are Biblical Lands Promised to Us,’ Say Jewish Settlers in West Bank Amid Gaza Conflict

November 18, 2023

Most Shared Articles

  • ‘The Next Worship’ Author Sandra Van Opstal Undergoes Multiple Surgeries to Fight Rare I...
  • Bishop Carlton Pearson, Once Celebrated Pentecostal Preacher, Dies After Brief Battle With Cancer...
  • Victory Chapel Outreach Director Hans Schmidt Shot in Head While Evangelizing Near Church...
  • Tye Tribbett Makes Reunion Tour Appearance After Being Rushed to Hospital for Minor Surgery...
  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Outspoken Atheist and ‘Muslim Apostate,’ Says She Is ‘Now a Chris...

From The Archive

street sign
Inspiration

David Brooks, Reparations, and White Christian America

by Timothy I. Cho
March 9, 2019
teacher classroom students
Opinion & Analysis

What Black Teachers Face Today Isn’t Much Different From What They Faced During Segregation

by FM Editors
September 29, 2023
Nigerian gospel singer Osinachi Nwachukwu, who died on April 8, 2022
Spotlight

Nigerian Gospel Singer’s Death Puts Christian Beliefs About Divorce in Spotlight

by FM Editors
May 5, 2022
historically black college
Education

Trump’s Executive Order Promises Support–Not Money–for HBCUs

by FM
March 1, 2017
border
Uncategorized

Despite U.S. Down Payment, Trump Insists Meixco Will Pay for Wall

by FM Editors
April 24, 2017

Who’s Online

There are no users currently online

Latest Votes

  • FM Editors on

    Jesus Likely Had Olive Skin and Short Black Hair, But What Did He Wear?

  • valexander on

    Christena Cleveland on ‘God Is a Black Woman’ and What Compelled Her to ‘Step off the Plantation’

  • FM Editors on

    Sexuality Has Nothing to Do With Salvation, Jackie Hill Perry Says in TBN Talk About ‘Gay Girl, Good God’

Facebook Twitter Youtube Instagram
Faithfully Magazine

Faithfully Magazine is a news and culture publication centered on Christian communities of color.

We participate in various affiliate programs that allow us to earn fees by linking to affiliated sites. FM is independently owned and published and is supported by digital subscriptions, advertising, merchandise sales, and affiliate links. We use these funds to maintain operations and pay our writers. Donations are welcomed.

Recent News

  • Watch: Tony Lowden, Pastor to Rosalynn Carter and Jimmy Carter, Delivers Former First Lady’s Eulogy
  • Zion Carr: Boy Who Witnessed Cop Kill His Aunt Awarded $3.5M Settlement
  • Sister of Botham Jean — Killed in Home by Off-Duty Cop — Shares Struggles With Forgiveness, Justice in New Book
  • ‘The Next Worship’ Author Sandra Van Opstal Undergoes Multiple Surgeries to Fight Rare Infection

Most Shared Posts

  • ‘The Next Worship’ Author Sandra Van Opstal Undergoes Multiple Surgeries to Fight Rare Infection...
  • Bishop Carlton Pearson, Once Celebrated Pentecostal Preacher, Dies After Brief Battle With Cancer...
  • Victory Chapel Outreach Director Hans Schmidt Shot in Head While Evangelizing Near Church...
  • Tye Tribbett Makes Reunion Tour Appearance After Being Rushed to Hospital for Minor Surgery...
  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Outspoken Atheist and ‘Muslim Apostate,’ Says She Is ‘Now a Christian’...

© 2023 Faithfully Media, LLC (Owner and Operator)

  • From The Magazine
  • Inspiration
  • News
  • Opinion & Analysis
  • Profiled
  • Q&As
  • Remember
  • Specials
  • New Jersey
  • Listen & Watch
  • Web Exclusives
  • Shop
    • Clothing
    • Faith Heroes Bookmarks
    • eBooks
  • Events
    • FM Live Events
    • Community Events
  • Resources
    • Black Christian Content
  • About Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Submit Content
    • Join the Editorial Team
    • Give Via PayPal
  • Members
    • Log In
    • Your Freebies
  • Subscribe to Faithfully Magazine
  • Newsletter
No Result
View All Result

© 2023 Faithfully Media, LLC (Owner and Operator)

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password? Sign Up

Create New Account!

Fill the forms bellow to register

*By registering on our website, you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.
All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
Share via

Share This Post

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Email
  • WhatsApp
  • Copy Link
  • Tumblr
  • Digg
  • Flipboard
  • SMS

Add New Playlist

Log In

Sign In

Login with Facebook
Login with Twitter
Forgot password?

Don't have an account? Register

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Back to Login

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Accept

Add to Collection

  • Public collection title

  • Private collection title

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.

Try a 14-day free trial today with Ancestry® (We may earn a commission) Dismiss

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this website you are giving consent to cookies being used. Visit our Privacy and Cookie Policy.
Are you sure want to unlock this post?
Unlock left : 0
Are you sure want to cancel subscription?
Send this to a friend