Introduction to the Practice of African American Preaching

by Frank A. Thomas

Overview

The Introduction to African American Preaching is an important,
groundbreaking book. This book acknowledges African American preaching
as an academic discipline, and invites all students and preachers into a
scholarly, dynamic, and useful exploration of the topic.

Author
Frank Thomas opens with a “bus tour” study of African American
preaching. He shows how African American preaching has gradually moved
from an almost exclusively oral to an oral/written tradition. Readers
will gain insight into the history of the study of the African American
preaching tradition, and catch the author’s enthusiasm for it.

Next
Thomas traces the relationship between homiletics and rhetoric in
Western preaching, demonstrating how African American preaching is
inherently theological and rhetorical.

He then explores the
question, “what is black preaching?” Thomas introduces the reader to
methods of “close reading” and “ideological criticism.” And then
demonstrates how to use these methods, using a sermon by Gardner Calvin
Taylor as his example.

The next chapter considers the question, “what is excellence in black preaching?”

The
next chapter seeks to create bridges and dialogue within the field of
homiletics, and in particular, the Euro-American homiletic tradition.
The goal of this chapter is to clearly demonstrate connections between
the African American preaching tradition and the field of homiletics.

Thomas
next turns to questions about the relevancy of the church to the
Millennial generation. Specifically, how will the African American
church remain relevant to this generation, which is so deeply concerned
with social justice?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501818950
Publisher:	Abingdon Press
Publication date:	11/15/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Frank A. Thomas currently serves as Nettie Sweeney and Hugh Th. Miller Professor of Homiletics and Director of the Academy of Preaching and Celebration at Christian Theological Seminary of Indianapolis, Indiana.

Frank A. Thomas, PhD, serves as the Director of the PhD Program in African American Preaching and Sacred Rhetoric and the Nettie Sweeney and Hugh Th. Miller Professor of Homiletics at Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, Indiana. Thomas is the author of How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon and Introduction to the Practice of African American Preaching, released by Abingdon Press respectively, February, 2018 and November 2016.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction to the Practice of African American Preaching

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By Frank A. Thomas

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2016 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5018-1895-0

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CHAPTER 1

The Bus Tour of the Study of African American Preaching

The quest for African American preaching to become a discipline in its own right continues a historical line of study of African American preaching. In order to fully appreciate this historical legacy, the first stop on our Bus Tour is to understand an important distinction in African American preaching that exists even to this day: the mutual and competing genres of "folk preaching" and "intellectual preaching." Basically, African American preachers operated from either a grassroots, folk approach ("old-time" and "old-fashioned Negro preaching") or an academic approach practiced primarily by preachers attending college and seminary (intellectual or educated preaching). The educated preaching tradition has left more written materials, while the folk tradition is primarily lodged in oral tradition. While these two traditions can often be at odds, many of the best of African American preachers were able to creatively combine elements of the best of both traditions, what Richard Lischer calls "theological erudition, with old-time religion."

Folk Preaching and Educated Preaching

African people were brought to America initially as indentured servants, but quickly and principally became racial slaves and human chattel, experiencing what Orlando Patterson calls "social death." The slave had no socially recognized existence outside of the master, and therefore became a social nonperson. The "natal alienation" of the socially dead person was expressed initially as being bereft of a soul, then once acknowledged as having a soul, not allowed to be baptized as a Christian because doing so could imply manumission. Despite their social death, African American religion existed and was initially practiced under slavery as "the invisible institution," mentioned by Albert J. Raboteau, consisting of secret and illegal gatherings for worship on plantations. Many of these meetings were during the middle of the night in brush harbors, in barns, in fields, in gullies, under trees, and away from the purview of whites, and therefore considered relatively safe. Martha Simmons and I, in Preaching with Sacred Fire: An Anthology of African American Preaching, from 1750 to the Present, define the invisible institution as

blacks participating in social and religious practices from preaching to conjuring to rebellion-hatching, to mourning, to moaning, to calling on Jesus. ... This invisible institution existed alongside the churches that blacks attended with whites and alongside the gospel that was preached by whites who advocated submission and docility. Later it continued to exist alongside church formed by blacks and for blacks that began with white preachers, and those black churches that were more attentive to the espousal of white social and biblical doctrines than they were to black liberation.

The style of worship was traditionally African with "shouts," "ring dancing," hand-clapping, and ecstatic expressions and utterances and led by one of their own. Therefore, the invisible institution generated the first African American leadership and for our purposes, the first African American preachers.

The majority of African American slaves did not become Christians until after the second decade of the nineteenth century, which many scholars attribute to the emotional means of evangelization of the Second Great Awakening. For some slaves and free persons of color, especially in the Methodist and Baptist persuasion, this emotional evangelization signified a bridge of commonality Christianity had with African Traditional Religion and they joined the Christian church in huge numbers. In Methodist revival services, where blacks and whites were allowed to participate together, passion ruled the day over doctrine. Indicative of this evangelism, Stephen H. Webb suggests:

Weeping, shouting, and groaning were common at these services, although the emphasis was on deliverance from sin and the joyful experience of salvation. ... [Blacks] were also inspired by the strong stand the Methodist leadership, following the guidance of Wesley himself, took against slavery. The Methodist message of personal holiness cut across racial, social, and economic lines, and a few of the most gifted blacks who joined the movement were encouraged to become preachers.

One of these gifted black preachers was the well-known and widely traveled Black Harry (Harry Hoosier, d. 1810). He was a servant of the Methodist Bishop Asbury, and reputed by some to be the "greatest preacher in America," and drew large crowds of blacks and whites.

After being evangelized, black Christians were included as second-class Christians in white congregations, while some even branched out and formed their own churches. Free blacks in the North founded African American denominations, while large congregations in the South composed largely of enslaved blacks. The common denominator was that black preachers preached in all of these expressions of the church. What can be said from the earliest times, starting with the invisible institution, black preachers and black preaching existed, and so did the division between folk preaching and intellectual preaching, highly influenced by freedom related to geography and social status.

Intellectual preaching came from mostly the North, done by blacks who either were born free or purchased their freedom (freedmen), and had gained access to education, such as Lemuel Haynes, John Chavis, Absalom Jones, and Hosea Easton. In the nineteenth century, Richard Allen, father of the first independent African denomination in the United States, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Rev. Andrew Marshall, pastor of the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, preached to large numbers of blacks and whites. Many of these preachers followed the form and structure of Euro-American preaching with the propositional nature of deductive reasoning as the argumentation structure of the sermon and classical rhetorical tenets, modes, and methods of persuasion as the basis of the homiletical preparation and delivery. Preaching in this educated strand was didactic and centered in formal language, usually addressing erudite theological issues. O. C. Edwards, in A History of Preaching, explains one of the critical goals of educated preachers: "to show that members of their race were as intellectually capable as whites, and that they could produce sermons that were as eloquent and closely argued as the best white preaching of the time." As a result, the educated preaching tradition sought to distinguish itself from folk preaching, too often regarding it as undignified, emotional, illiterate, buffoonery, and embarrassing.

Folk preachers, by contrast, represented preachers without formal education and include Brother Carper, Gullah Negro preacher Brudder Coteney, John Jasper, and Sojourner Truth, from the earliest periods of African American preaching, 1750–1865. Walter Pitts provides clarity on the black folk preacher and sermon: "The term black folk sermon refers to the Sunday verbal performance of the black folk preacher who is not seminary-trained but called to the ministry by some visionary experience and whose congregation consists principally of black working-class worshipers [the folk]." The oral tradition of folk preaching affirmed the power of story, imagination, imagery, analogy, metaphor, narration, and extemporaneous and dramatic retellings of Bible stories. Intonation, or "whooping," is one of the common hallmarks of the folk-preaching tradition. Whooping is the rhetorical practice, traditionally at the end of the sermon, in which the preacher sings or chants in rhythmic cadence in the vernacular of call and response that raises the emotional intensity and impact of the sermon. Speaking specifically of folk preachers on phonograph records in the twentieth-century interwar period, but true generally for all folk preachers, Lerone A. Martin comments:

Their [folk] preaching was marked by metaphor, simile, double descriptors (high-tall, low-down, kill-dead, more-better) and the use of verbal nouns such as "funeralize." The sermons were also chanted, beginning with conversational prose and then transitioning to a "metrical, tonal, and rhythmic chant." ... Moreover, these antiphonal sermons avoided scholarly theological discourse. Instead, they employed black dialect, idioms, and memes to preach on topics such as Christian piety, racism, and popular cultural events: everyday black life.

While such preachers probably did not formally know the tenets of Western rhetoric, they employed many of the same rhetorical communication strategies, and therefore, rhetoric, broadly conceived, can help describe what happens in the folk sermon tradition. Several chroniclers of the African American tradition have applied Cicero's five canons of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery) and Aristotle's modes of persuasion (ethos, logos, and pathos) to African American preaching, but more about the rhetorical nature of African American preaching later. With this important distinction of folk/educated preaching clarified, I want to make the second stop on the Bus Tour of the historical development of the study of African American preaching, the paucity of the academic study of African American preaching.

The Paucity of Academic Study of African American Preaching

While there are many chronicled sermons and much commentary about black preaching in slave narratives and American religious and social history, the academic study of the homiletic methods of the African American preaching tradition, until the early 1970s, was minimal. It was not that sermons were not published, but few sermons entered academic and scholarly literature. Gerald L. Davis comments:

Most African American churches found the occasion to publish one or a set of sermons, frequently on the occasion of an anniversary. The archival collections held in the libraries of Fisk and Howard Universities and other African American institutions, the Library of Congress, in New York Public Library and other university and municipal libraries around the nation include a number of significant and historically important sermons "published" by African American preachers and their congregations.

While African American churches and preachers published their sermons, O. C. Edwards labels the emergence of African American preaching in majority and academic consciousness as a "homiletical epiphany":

Among the many streams of tradition that converged to form late-twentieth-century understanding of the nature of preaching, none showed the proclaimed word's potentialities to move people and change society as did the classical homiletic of the African American church. As much as its pulpit had done to sustain its people through slavery, reconstruction, and segregation, it was hardly known to the rest of American society until the civil rights movement got underway in the late-1950s. Then, however, it burst on the national scene with dazzling brightness.

There are at least four principal reasons for this significant omission of scholarship: (1) much of the genius of African American preaching traveled in oral tradition, (2) black homiletics, for the most part, was passed on in the apprenticeship model of the black church, (3) based upon Western intellectual bias, few scholars paid serious attention to the complexity of African American preaching, and (4) until the 1970s African American preaching was primarily studied by nontheological and few homiletical scholars.

First, much of the genius of the folk tradition of African American preaching tradition has been oral, and as such, traveled for years in the oral tradition. The drawback to this oral tradition has been that some of the best of African American preaching has gone to the grave with preachers because much of that genius was not captured, written down, or archived. Or, if it was written down, it was not accessible to the wider community because it was stored in church basements; in personal, denominational, and convention archives, newspapers, pamphlets, and the like; or in the hands of family members. Again, it is here that one of the main reasons for my vision of African American preaching as an academic discipline locates itself: the need for scholars to capture, archive, research, and publish the genius of this oral tradition that is potentially diminishing as I write this sentence. Not only is black preaching lessened, but all traditions of preaching are diminished by the loss of these treasured resources that travel almost exclusively in the oral tradition.

Second, connected to the oral folk tradition of black preaching, homiletical theory and method was passed on in the apprenticeship model of the black church, where primarily one learns to preach through observation, study, and imitation of models. Every preaching tradition, including African American preaching, has models that because of their excellence in manifesting the tradition are considered to be worthy of imitation. In the African American preaching tradition, performers of the tradition observe and learn directly from these models more than the application of rules or homiletical textbooks. There are few explicit written rules per se, but a multitude of lived practices represented by the models. In oral tradition, models are more important than written rules and textbooks. For example, Jesse Louis Jackson said that C. L. Franklin was "the most imitated soul preacher in history." As part of oral culture, Franklin made significant inroads into the black community through proliferation of sermons on radio stations, travel preaching tours, and phonograph records, which facilitated his imitation in the observation, study, and practice of the apprenticeship model of the oral tradition of African American preaching.

Third, as part of the apprentice model for those to whom formal education was not available, accessible, or affordable, the educational and skill development choice was also denominational meetings and institutes. It was at these gatherings that many got exposure to the aforementioned models. These conferences provided teaching, training, lectures, instruction, and workshops in Bible, theology, ethics, hermeneutics, and preaching, as well as much needed spiritual inspiration and fellowship. The Hampton University Ministers' Conference and Choir Directors' & Organists' Guild (Hampton) is the most distinguished historical and contemporary African American conference for the training of ministers, with thousands attending each June on the campus of Hampton University, Hampton, Virginia. The conference began in 1914 and stated that the critical objective of the Ministers' Conference was "the promotion of the work of the Kingdom of God through study and discussion of those problems and tasks with which all ministers share in common." Training and instruction was provided on "the problems and tasks with which all ministers share in common." What distinguishes Hampton is the combination of the interdenominational nature of attendees and its attraction of folk and intellectual preachers.

Across the years, while continuing the focus on training, it was the distinguished preachers who were lifted up as the models worthy of imitation that fundamentally set the conference apart from all others. Preachers such as Sandy Ray, C. L Franklin, William Holmes Borders, Ella Mitchell, Vernon Johns, J. H. Jackson, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., Benjamin E. Mays, Charles G. Adams, Prathia Hall, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and the list could go on and on. Hampton became known for the preaching going on there. Aside from the preaching, there were practical lectures and seminars, on church growth, Christian education, contemporary culture and trends, ministerial ethics, business practices of the church, and so forth. While there is not time on our tour to explore Hampton, this is a rich source of material for scholarship on African American preaching. It would be fruitful to study not only the sermons of Hampton but also the lectures on preaching done there. My hope is some future scholar would explore the depths of this preaching and homiletical instruction, not only at Hampton, but also at all of the historical and contemporary institutes and denominational assemblages.

Next, according to Gerald L. Davis, few scholars "have fully appreciated the complexity of the structures of the performed African American sermon." Few scholars treat "the performed African American sermon as a unified system of sociosemantic structures." Davis gives three basic reasons for this underestimation and underreporting of the African American sermon. First, many scholars were distrustful of the high emotionalism of the African American sermon, equating such with a lack of sophistication and education. Second, closely tied to the first, is the belief that "rationality is inversely proportional to the presence of emotionalism in the church and the academic training of the preacher." Third, connected to the first two, is that the overarching belief was that the performed African American sermon was not based in reasoned philosophical sensibilities. Davis argues that preaching performances in African American churches tend to be "densely layered" and conventional research approaches might be inadequate to understand the rhetorical, cultural, and religious dynamics involved. As evidence of this, scholars were ignorant of the fact and possibility that a preacher can be learned and emotional at the same time. And last, the African American–performed sermon is fully reasoned and philosophic. There is without a shadow of doubt, from the structural level, rhetorical theory and method, including "aesthetic dimensions" and "organizing principles" that guide and direct the performed African American sermon.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Introduction to the Practice of African American Preaching by Frank A. Thomas. Copyright © 2016 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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Table of Contents

Contents

"Acknowledgments",
"Introduction",
"Chapter One: The Bus Tour of the Study of African American Preaching",
"Chapter Two: Negro Expression, Signifying, and the Rhetoric of African American Preaching",
"Chapter Three: "It's Alright Now": A Rhetorical Analysis of Gardner C. Taylor's Sermon "His Own Clothes",
"Chapter Four: "Keepin' It Real": The Validity of the Existentially Authentic Performance",
"Chapter Five: The Truth Is Always Relevant: Race and Economics in Contemporary African American Preaching",
"Afterword: "Seven Decades of African American Preaching" by Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.",
"Selected Bibliography of African American Preaching",
"Appendix A: "His Own Clothes" by Gardner C. Taylor",