Black American Christians: An Introduction
Much of what missional theology appears to be about is understanding religious stories and our part in them. Michael Goheen defines missional as the “very essence of the church as it takes up its role in God’s story in the context of its culture…”. The Missional Training Center (MTC) in Phoenix Arizona taught by the head Professor Michael Goheen forms and develops leaders in the city in missional theology. Preparing students to be faithful witnesses of Jesus according to their time and place. A lesson taught in my MTC cohort experience is being able to affirm and reject what I am taught and information I am given about culture and the world recognizing that no one is without bias. This was taught to us so that we can affirm and reject thoughts and ideologies that do not allow us to be a faithful witness of Jesus and the Biblical story.
I am a Black man in America who also identifies as a disciple of Jesus. I believe an expansive part of The Black American story as it relates to being a witness of Jesus was lacking in this educational experience. Awareness of the bias of my majority white male professors has allowed me to recognize the hole in the curriculum of diving into Black theology along with other expressions centering on a Black-lived experience in America while trying to be a faithful witness of Jesus. It is this lived experience that has influenced this six-part blog series which will also be my research paper for my final seminary assignment.
Congregation of a Black church in the mill district of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania January 1941.
Distinctions
There are two distinctions to be made before continuing through this series of essays. The first distinction is concerning the difference between missions and mission. As it relates to this study, missions will relate to programs from a Christian institution that may involve evangelism, cross-cultural partnerships, church planting, and other programs that may offer a service. Mission or being missional is a broader category referring to everything the church is doing and the identity of the church as it participates in God’s story of redeeming and restoring all of creation. Much of the research done in this paper focuses on the missional aspects of the Black church and Black Christians. There is much to be researched as it pertains to Black Americans' participation in missions such as George Liele, a black man, being the first American missionary. Additionally, different missions stemming from the Black church and Black Christians will be discussed as well throughout the essays. However, the focus will be on the overall theological ethos of the Black community in the U.S. that directly impacted Black Christians words and deeds in relation to their witness of Jesus.
The second distinction is the centering of a Black lived experience. Understanding the experience of being Black in the U.S. informs how Black Americans should and should not navigate the white majority country. The Black experience is different from the white experience because of significant historical and cultural differences. We are all connected to a story, and the Black American story is vastly different from the story of White Americans. These essays will explore the stories and lived experiences of Black Americans along with their relation to the religion of Jesus. James Cone states that a person’s social and historical context give way to the questions that are created to understand God and His involvement with creation. Centering the Black experience in this research blog series communicates the response to the historical and social contexts of Black Americans throughout different timeframes in the U.S. story. Black theology and the doctrinal beliefs of today’s traditional Black churches can be explained by looking through the American story and centering the lives of Black Jesus followers abducted and born in the U.S.
Mephis Gospel Choir.
Get Ready
This blog series will explore the role Black Americans in the United States have played in the Christian religious story. The next four writings will cover different moments in history: slavery, reconstruction, the civil rights era, and the current state of the Black church. The last writing will close out the series and express key takeaways from the historical observation of Black American Christians. Often it is the powerful in society who get to tell the story from their lens. This has left those in the margins of society, BIPOC, poor, immigrants, LGBTQ+ in accordance with U.S. society, to exist without their stories being centered and told among the majority. Walter Strickland III in his lectures discusses how historically, Black people’s storytelling has traditionally been passed down orally leaving little written record of the Black witness. These articles will attempt to gather recorded stories to communicate the Black church and Black Christian's faithful witness of Jesus and the Gospel.
