Black Preaching
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Henry H. Mitchell has completely revised and integrated his popular books The Recovery of Preaching and Black Preaching for seminarians and pastors--both Black and White--who are seeking to add power and vision to their sermons. Mitchell persuasively demonstrates that Black culture and preaching style are vital for the empowerment of Black congregations and have much to offer the preaching method of all preachers. By focusing on the use of storytelling, imagination, and style of preaching rooted in African-American culture, Mitchell spotlights effective techniques for lively preaching.
Diverse Worship
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Let the nations sing.What are the universal constants of Christian worship? What are the unique elements that arise out of diverse local contexts? How do we appropriately respect and honor both the constancy and the diversity?In Diverse Worship Pedrito U. Maynard-Reid explores the multiethnic dimensions of worship by looking at three specific cultural contexts--African-American, Caribbean and Hispanic. After surveying worship and culture through history, he devotes a section of his book to each of these three cultural context for worship. Maynard-Reid colorfully describes and characterizes each worship tradition, and he explores its historical development and change.Throughout this engaging and enlightening book, we gain new perspective on what it means to worship God.
The Heart of Black Preaching
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Cleophus LaRue argues that the extraordinary character of black preaching derives from a distinctive biblical hermeneutic that views God as involved in practical ways in the lives of African Americans. This hermeneutic, he believes, has remained constant since the days of slavery. LaRue analyzes the distinct characteristics of African American preaching and brings the insights of both theory and practice to bear on this important subject matter.
I believe I'll testify : the art of African American preaching
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Cleo LaRue is one of the best-loved preachers and writers about preaching. In past volumes, he has brought together great collections of African American preaching to showcase the best preaching from across the country. Here he offers his own insights into what makes for great preaching.
Filled with telling anecdotes, LaRue's book recognizes that while great preaching comes from somewhere, it also must go somewhere, so preachers need to use the most artful language to send the Word on its journey.
Introduction to the Practice of African American Preaching
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The Introduction to African American Preaching is an important,groundbreaking book. This book acknowledges African American preachingas an academic discipline, and invites all students and preachers into ascholarly, dynamic, and useful exploration of the topic. AuthorFrank Thomas opens with a "bus tour" study of African Americanpreaching. He shows how African American preaching has gradually movedfrom an almost exclusively oral to an oral/written tradition. Readerswill gain insight into the history of the study of the African Americanpreaching tradition, and catch the author's enthusiasm for it. NextThomas traces the relationship between homiletics and rhetoric inWestern preaching, demonstrating how African American preaching isinherently theological and rhetorical. He then explores thequestion, "what is black preaching?" Thomas introduces the reader tomethods of "close reading" and "ideological criticism." And thendemonstrates how to use these methods, using a sermon by Gardner CalvinTaylor as his example. The next chapter considers the question, "what is excellence in black preaching?" Thenext chapter seeks to create bridges and dialogue within the field ofhomiletics, 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. Thomasnext turns to questions about the relevancy of the church to theMillennial generation. Specifically, how will the African Americanchurch remain relevant to this generation, which is so deeply concernedwith social justice?
The Journey and Promise of African American Preaching
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In many communities, both black megachurches and storefront congregations have been infected by a so-called prosperity gospel, far removed from the liberatory gospel that has been a mark of the black church since the earliest incarnation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and most celebrated in the preaching and oratory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This book examines all these strains of African American preaching and points to a theologically and socially responsible renewal of black churches and their pastoral, prophetic, and wisdom functions in their communities.
Preaching for Black
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"What's goin' down? I know you don't expect a seventy-five year old man to talk all that talk. . . " A strong and much needed book addressing black youth today, Preaching for Black Self-Esteem is geared to a generation of black men and women who can--suggests the authors--proudly face issues such as caste systems, one's own physical characteristics, feelings of ambivalence and inferiority, and even 'buppies'--economically upwardly mobile Blacks. A very powerful collection of sermons for a generation of Blacks coming of age after the Civil Rights era.
Preaching in Black and White
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Preaching in Black and White offers a unique look at two distinct preaching traditions and the wisdom they have to offer each other. But this book goes much deeper than mere stylistic nuances, for authors E. K. Bailey and Warren Wiersbe are far more than prominent pastors and preachers. They are men with a penetrating understanding of history, culture, and church tradition--and they are friends who genuinely enjoy and respect each other. The warmth of their relationship shines in this book, matched by a depth of honesty and humility as they address topics of vital interest to pastors, speakers, and church leaders of all ethnic backgrounds.In a winsome dialog format, Drs. Bailey and Wiersbe look at the preparation not only of the sermon but also of the preacher's heart. They discuss sermon content and delivery and how it all comes together in practice. Taking a well-known Bible story, the authors demonstrate and then discuss their distinctive preaching styles and what it takes to learn from others (sermon transcriptions included). A section containing brief biographies of black preachers concludes this engaging and illuminating book.
Preaching with Sacred Fire
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A groundbreaking anthology, Preaching with Sacred Fire is a unique and powerful work. It captures the stunning diversity of the cultural and historical legacy of African American preaching more than three hundred years in the making. Each sermon, as editors Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas reveal, is a work of art and a lesson in unmatched rhetoric. The journey through this anthology--which includes selections from Jarena Lee, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Gardner C. Taylor, Vashti McKenzie, and many others--offers a rare view of the unheralded role of the African American preacher in American history.The collection provides new insights into the underpinnings of the black fight for emancipation and the rise and growth of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Sermons from the first decade of the twenty-first century point toward the future of African American preaching. Biographies of the preachers put their work in the cultural and homiletic context of their periods.The preachers of these sermons are men and women from a range of faiths, ancestries, and educational backgrounds. They draw on a vast and luminous landscape of poetic language, using metaphor, rhythm, and imagery to communicate with their congregations. What they all have in common is hope, resilience, and sacred fire. "Even during the most difficult and oppressive times," Simmons and Thomas write in the preface, "the delivery, creativity, charisma, expressivity, fervor, forcefulness, passion, persuasiveness, poise, power, rhetoric, spirit, style, and vision of black preaching gave and gives hope to a community under siege."This magnificent work beautifully renders the complexity, spiritual richness, and strength of African American life.
Prophesying Daughters
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In nineteenth-century America, many black women left their homes, their husbands, and their children to spread the Word of God. Descendants of slaves or former "slave girls" themselves, they traveled all over the country, even abroad, preaching to audiences composed of various races, denominations, sexes, and classes, offering their own interpretations of the Bible. When they were denied the pulpit because of their sex, they preached in tents, bush clearings, meeting halls, private homes, and other spaces. They dealt with domestic ideologies that positioned them as subservient in the home, and with racist ideologies that positioned them as naturally inferior to whites. They also faced legalities restricting blacks socially and physically and the socioeconomic reality of often being part of a large body of unskilled laborers. Jarena Lee, Julia Foote, Maria Stewart, and Frances Gaudet were four women preachers who endured such hardships because of their religious convictions. Often quoting from the scripture, they insisted that they were indeed prophesying daughters whom God called upon to preach. Significantly, many of these women preachers wrote autobiographies in which they present images of assertive, progressive, pious women--steadfast and unmovable in their religious beliefs and bold in voicing their concerns about the moral standing of their race and society at large. Chanta M. Haywood examines these autobiographies to provide new insight into the nature of prophesying, offering an alternative approach to literature with strong religious imagery. She analyzes how these four women employed rhetorical and political devices in their narratives, using religious discourse to deconstruct race, class, and gender issues of the nineteenth century. By exploring how religious beliefs become an avenue for creating alternative ideologies, Prophesying Daughters will appeal to students and scholars of African American literature, women's studies, and religious studies.
A Pursued Justice
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The narrative of Civil Rights often begins with the prophetic figure of Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. City squares became a church, the body politic a congregation, and sermons a jeremiad of social change--or so the story goes. In A Pursued Justice, Kenyatta Gilbert instead traces the roots of King's call for justice to African American prophetic preaching that arose in an earlier moment of American history. In the wake of a failed Reconstruction period, widespread agricultural depression, and the rise of Jim Crow laws, and triggered by America's entry into World War I, a flood of southern Blacks move​d from the South to the ​urban centers of the North. This Great Migration transformed northern Black churches and produced a new mode of preaching--prophetic Black preaching--which sought to address this brand new context. Black clerics such as Baptist pastor Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr., A.M.E. Bishop Reverdy Cassius Ransom, and A.M.E. Zion pastor Reverend Florence Spearing Randolph rose up within these congregations. From their pulpits, these pastors "spoke truth to power" for hope across racial, ethnic, and class lines both within their congregations and between the Black community and the wider culture. A Pursued Justice profiles these three ecclesiastically inventive clerics of the first half of the twentieth century whose strident voices gave birth to a distinctive form of prophetic preaching. Their radical sermonic response to injustice and suffering, both in and out of the Black church, not only captured the imaginations of participants in the largest internal mass migration in American history but also inspired the homiletical vision of Martin Luther King Jr. and subsequent generations of preachers of revolutionary hope and holy disobedience.
Rethinking celebration : From Rhetoric to Praise in African American Preaching
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"This book is a clarion call for African American preachers to think more deeply about the aims and ends of their preaching—namely to stop putting so much emphasis on celebratory endings to our sermons and focus more on the substantive content in our sermons. Our so-called celebratory preaching, designed to excite the congregation into action through a highly emotional closing of the sermon, has had the opposite effect. Rather than inducing action, it has lulled generations of black congregants to sleep. While we are jumping up and down, shouting, and waving our hands in the air every Sunday during the worship hour, we seem not to notice the growing number of churched and unchurched alike who are becoming powerfully alienated from any form of institutional religion."
—from the introduction
"Celebration" is a term that has long been used to describe African American preaching, characterized by content that affirms the goodness and powerful intervention of God as well as style that builds from quiet beginnings to an emotionally rich crescendo in conclusion. Cleophus J. LaRue argues that while celebration is one of African American preaching's greatest gifts to the larger church, too many black preachers have become content with the form of celebration—volume, vocabulary, pitch, speed, rhythm, and the like—to the neglect of its essence—the proclamation of the mighty acts of God in the lives of their congregations and communities. This kind of preaching, LaRue contends, fails to address the ongoing problems of the African American community and is powerless to prevent the growing disaffection of black America with the black church. In words both prophetic and practical, LaRue suggests ways to improve black preaching that honor both the form and the power of the African American homiletical practice of celebration. Preachers will learn how to use celebration more selectively and as part of a fully formed preaching practice rather than as a means of distracting the congregation from pressing social and theological questions. The book includes six illustrative sermons from LaRue as well as Paschal Sampson Wilkinson Sr., Brian K. Blount, and Claudette Anderson Copeland.
The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination
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Characterized by oral expression and ritual performance, the black church has been a dynamic force in African American culture. In The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination, Dolan Hubbard explores the profound influence of the sermon upon both the themes and the styles of African American literature. Beginning with an exploration of the historic role of the preacher in African American culture and fiction, Hubbard examines the church as a forum for organizing black social reality. Like political speeches, jazz, and blues, the sermon is an aesthetic construct, interrelated with other aspects of African American cultural expression. Arguing that the African American sermonic tradition is grounded in a self-consciously collective vision, Hubbard applies this vision to the themes and patterns of black American literature. With nuanced readings of the work of Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, Hubbard reveals how the African American sermonic tradition has influenced black American prose fiction. He shows how African American writers have employed the forms of the black preaching style, with all their expressive power, and he explores such recurring themes as the quest for freedom and literacy, the search for identity and community, the lure of upward mobility, the fictionalizing of history, and the use of romance to transform an oppressive history into a vision of mythic transcendence. The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination is a major addition to the fields of African American literary and religious studies.
Teaching Preaching
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"If you ain't got no proposition, you ain't got no sermon neither." This was the battle cry of Isaac Rufus Clark, one of the most influential and colorful professors of homiletics in the black church in the twentieth century. Clark taught at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta for twenty-seven years (1962-1989). In Teaching Preaching, Katie Cannon, one of Clark's myriad preaching protégés, conceives her role as purely "presentational": "to bring Clark face to face with a reading audience, allow him to explain the formal elements of preaching from the inside out." Teaching Preaching is an invaluable resource for ministers who struggle from Sunday to Sunday to find their ethical voice in the preparation of each and every sermon.
Voices in the Wilderness
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FINALLY, a scholarly description of the development of Black preaching in the United States that is accessible to the average reader, but also contributes to the academic conversation about both style and theological content. Written from the perspective of a seasoned practitioner and tenured practical theologian, Thomas surveys Black preaching as it has responded to various social and historical time periods. Starting with the brutality of chattel slavery, early formations in segregated Southern life, rapid migration to and urbanization in Northern cities, and various events throughout the post-civil rights era, the book gives convincing details and examples of how the Black preacher helped to guide and sustain the masses of African American people through the wilderness of social change. At the heart of the book, three prime examples are presented as models of the real "genius" of Black preaching. The reader will never again think about Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson in the same way. A special chapter is devoted to the contributions of Black women preachers along with a closing chapter that makes new proposals for the future. The book is a provocative and critical analysis of why Black preaching still matters.
Women - to Preach or Not to Preach?
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Should women be equally free to use their God-given gifts in fulfilling their calling to preach the Good News of Jesus Christ? confronting this question head-on brings a distinctively new approach to this third volume of sermons Mitchell has compiled.