Reconstruction 10.4 (2010)


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Narratives of African American Female Preachers in the 21st Century / Cécile Coquet-Mokoko, Ph.D; Université François Rabelais, GRAAT (Tours, France)

Abstract: This paper offers a comparative analysis of the autobiographical narratives of contemporary African American female ministers and seeks to highlight how they both inscribe themselves in the tradition of spiritual testimonies by Black female preachers initiated in the 19th century and bring up womanist insights into the emotional conditioning of women within church communities and other church-related institutions.

Keywords: African American women clergy, African Americans and religion, African American women and spiritual autobiographies.

<1> Thirteen testimonies of personal calling by now-recognized, highly educated female preachers of various denominational backgrounds were collected and published in 2005 by Rev. Cleophus LaRue1, who confesses having experienced an ideological u-turn when directly challenged by a woman whose divine calling he was self-righteously denying—a confrontation which he significantly describes as his own ‘Damascus Road experience,” so that his introduction to the volume opens with the following prophesy: “The twenty-first century will be the century for black women in ministry.” These narratives of contemporary African American female preachers from two generations (although birth dates are not given, a majority allude to their coming of age in the 1970s, while others, such as Rev. Cokeisha Lashon Bailey, were born in the same period) consciously inscribe themselves in the tradition of spiritual autobiography and militant writing initiated by the pioneering Black Methodist women preachers of the 19th century—Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and Julia Foote. Often poignant, explicitly or implicitly inscribed in the Black womanist theology2 that many of the authors are presently teaching in HBCUs and Ivy League institutions, these texts are as powerful a blend of public activism and private confession as the spiritual autobiographies of the foremothers. They are meant to inspire the community and the upcoming generation of Black female preachers, even as their underlying primary purpose, as with the 19th-century foremothers but with more modern awareness of the patriarchal conditioning of female psychologies, clearly appears as an attempt to heal the pain of being forced into silence and conformity with theological as well as societal rules.

<2> This paper will explore selected excerpts from the life stories of these thirteen female preachers, in an attempt to build a synthesis of their definitions of divine calling to preach and of their affirmations of a personal will to overcome the systematic silencing of female leadership in their communities, across denominational lines and in the often problematic delineation of public versus private persona. Its goal is not theological in itself. Rather, this analysis is rooted in a longtime quest for the specificities of the spoken and written expressions of personal and communal liberation at work in African American spiritual traditions. This attempt has dictated the choice of excerpts and their arrangement as voices echoing and dialoguing with one another around each interlocking theme, in the consciousness that the specificity of each woman’s voice needs to be respected and held as central to our understanding of her articulation of her spiritual experience, but also in hopes that their differences and the non-oratorical nature of the language of the testimonies will help illuminate the consistency in the spiritual life experiences of those who are often viewed as icons of the Black church—emblematic yet silent.

Shyness v. Entitlement

<3> While the narratives nearly all mention the traditional spiritual evolution from a carefree, adolescent attitude to the “restlessness,” “urge,” “hunger” or “thirst” of seeking God and/or feeling sought after by God, it is especially noteworthy to see how all of the authors insist on their shy personalities.

“I was a shy little girl—painfully shy.” (Cokeisha Lashon Bailey qtd. in LaRue 19)

“Once I was a relatively shy young girl who faithfully attended worship.” (Cecelia Greene Barr qtd. in LaRue 41)

“When Rev. Owens first spoke the words from the pulpit that God had God’s hand upon my life and was calling me to ministry, I vividly recall literally going under the pew, because I could not imagine that I was being called among my peers and from the life that I envisioned for myself.” (Deborah K. Blanks qtd. in LaRue 49)

“though these traits [audacity and boldness] do not come naturally for me, I have felt their security, while shaking in my shoes with uncertainty and paradox.” (Delores Carpenter qtd. in LaRue 73)

<4> This common trait of their personalities could be seen as a rhetorical tool meant to further emphasize the transformation wrought by God in each of the women’s lives, as when Puritan theologians extolled the sacrifices of the saintly women who had endured persecutions in England to demonstrate the unconditional nature of God’s grace and the unpredictability of the process of election (See Westerkamp 26).

<5> Yet many of them also insert in their narratives significant depictions of how the church environment that socialized their modes of worship frequently codified messages deterring them to openly express any aspiration to step out of a woman’s proper leadership place as a teacher or missionary, thus silencing their voices even before they could attempt to grasp the meaning of the “inner urge” they felt.

[W]hile my cousins and I were having a prayer meeting, I suddenly fell to the floor, motionless and oblivious to my surroundings. I heard God’s voice, audible only to my spirit’s ears, saying, “You will be my minister. You will preach or die.” My “Yes, Lord” was immediate. … I was eighteen. At the time I was attending St Paul’s Seventh Day Christian Church, pastured by my late uncle…. There were no women preachers in the small denomination, and I had no delusions about being the first. (Alyson Diane Browne qtd. in LaRue 62)

The formative years of my life were spent in the Baptist tradition…. Church was part spiritual, part community, and part family existence. It was in this holistic environment that I responded to the gospel message…. It was also here that I became quietly conditioned to accept ministry as gender exclusive. … The lessons of exclusion were taught each time a man was invited into the pulpit, yet the evangelists, who were always women, were restricted from entering that raised platform. I learned these lessons well, to the point that like the male population, I too emotionally disregarded women who were living out their life of ministry. Even now, when I hear women disdain other women for preaching the gospel and serving in the role of pastor, I know by experience that they are simply responding out of a conditioned error. (Cecelia Greene Barr qtd. in LaRue 35-36)

Growing up in a city that was touted as the “Cotton Capital of the World,” I had never heard of a woman preacher. However, I knew that it was taboo for women to even enter the pulpit unless they were helping with church decorum. In my little home church, which sat off of Money Road, directly in front of the Yazoo River where I was baptized, I learned the realities associated with being a Christian woman…. I learned that there were duties we could perform, places we could not be, and things we should not do. In other words, what was emphasized in our church was more of what we couldn’t do than what we could do. Based on my observations, I “played” church at home and as I “played” church, I felt comfortable singing and shouting and serving as an usher, which often included taking the pastor a glass of cold ice water.” (Charlotte McSwine-Harris qtd. in LaRue 191)

<6> “I don’t want to be a preacher, my dad is the preacher,” Cokeisha Lashon Bailey answers her inner voice tugging at her heart (21). What this author calls her "people-pleasing personality" in her narrative (24) and is more comprehensively analyzed as emotional conditioning by Cecelia Greene Barr, who persuasively deconstructs her own "reluctance to defy [the status quo]" as a "socialized desire to be accepted" (36). Even the women who grew up in church environments that were encouraging of female preaching exemplify in their narratives a similar attitude of reluctance to overstepping the bounds of propriety, especially when having to earn recognition from their male peers in seminary:

Hollins was where I grew up. Hollins was where I faced the real world of racism and discovered that I had to be better than the best as an African American woman…. I had never felt so unsure of myself before. Perhaps it was because I had never had to defend myself and my reason for being, as I had to explain every day at Hollins as an African American woman. (Cynthia Hale qtd. in LaRue 151)

Having grown up in a Baptist church, I have always been loved, cherished, rewarded, and punished by people who accepted a call to care for the youth of the church. … The church of my young adulthood… has one pastor and several assistant ministers. Three of those, including myself, are female. This church affirmed my gifts, not as an aberration but as a part of the natural and normal ministry of the church as a whole…. When I arrived on the campus of Princeton Theological Seminary, I felt out of place among some of my colleagues because of the ways in which we discussed our call. Many of my African American colleagues had been called to preach at an early age…. I was not clearly called to preach. I was certain that as a first-year seminarian, my task was to come to school, learn some valuable information from my professors, and go back home and work with the youth as I had before. (Carla Jones qtd. in LaRue 164)

Rev. Carla Jones’s narrative is revealing of the underlying associations between gendered roles in ministry and the constraints of self-perception for young women searching for their destinies, even in the most accepting “church families.” After ten years in higher and secondary education and a divorce from the father of her child, Rev. Carla Jones describes her experience of being called to seminary along with her rational dismissal of her own potential to reach further than “her place” as assistant minister to the youth:

Teaching had become my place for my ministry to the unchurched children of my neighborhood. Then, it happened. I will never forget the Sunday that my pastor was preaching from the book of Jonah. I cannot remember anything that he preached, and it was as if someone had pressed the “mute” button on my remote control. I didn’t hear a word that he said, but I did hear the word “seminary.” I was so disturbed by it that I looked around for my friend who worked up in the tape room with me because I thought he was playing with me—but he was not in the tape room at that moment. After service, I went home and was almost afraid to pray because I did not want to hear anymore from whomever was whispering in my ear that morning. I did, however, proceed to list all of the reasons why God would not possibly call me to do anything more than go to church, work with the youth, and represent my church when called to do so. I had not served in that church as an officer. I had no qualifications. I had not even memorized much Scripture. What in the world would God want with me? (Carla Jones qtd. in LaRue 165)

Obeying the Call or Finding One’s Place?

<7> At this juncture, it becomes difficult to tell whether the complex notion of “calling” does not actually blend with a deeper quest for one’s true nature and full potential outside of one’s comfort zone. Probably no one has better analyzed than bell hooks the paradoxical situation of a woman coming of age, when she realizes she can no longer ignore the intimation to find herself—a centerpiece of American Protestant culture, with its anxious insistence on conversion—while still desperately missing the feeling she is entitled to do so:

All girls continue to be taught when they are young, if not by their parents then by the culture around them, that they must earn the right to be loved—that “femaleness” is not good enough. This is a female’s first lesson in the school of patriarchal thinking and values. She must earn love. She is not entitled.…Often girls feel deeply cared about as small children but then find as we develop willpower and independent thought that the world stops affirming us, that we are seen as unlovable. …Schooled to believe that we find ourselves in relation with others, females learn early to search for love in a world beyond our own hearts. (hooks xiv and xv)

Rev. Cynthia Hale’s narrative is particularly effective in sharing with the reader the paradox of finding herself in the complex relation with others that ministry delineates, while at the same time clinging to a denial of the words entailed by such a gift. As long as she was able to minister to others, including males, without actually defining herself as a preacher or a woman in ministry, she did not consider herself unworthy. But as soon as her entitlement to lead others through her interpretation of the Word was challenged, she felt powerless to defend her right to achieve what she was already successful at:

During my senior year in high school, I led a young man named Richard to Christ. After Richard got a few Bible verses under his belt (1 Timothy 2:11-12, in particular, where Paul says, “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.”), he announced to the group that I would no longer be permitted to teach Bible study. The Bible said that as a woman I could not teach or have authority over a man. I quickly reminded him that I wasn’t a woman yet and he was not a man. Nevertheless, I stepped down and became Richard’s student, even though I was the one who had been studying the Bible for about eight years and him only about eight weeks. Little did I realize that all of this was preparing me for many future confrontations with men, and women too, who did not believe that women should preach. (150-151)

<8> As in other narratives from This Is My Story, the retrospective standpoint of the autobiographical essay allows the author to offer her reader a way out of the shared sense of frustration, by making sense of discrimination and powerlessness from a spiritual perspective. Yet, her lack of words to defend her entitlement as a minister in this confrontation with a challenger wielding the Word with the assertiveness of patriarchal tradition certainly remains the most poignant aspect of this passage. She was able to say what she and he were not yet, but stepping out of the categories of the known world of religious tradition, even in the midst of an encouraging and nurturing church and community environment, literally boomeranged the young woman into chaos—the chaos of her self-denial, as James Baldwin so brilliantly analyzed in Everybody’s Protest Novel:

Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown of meaning. Those categories which were meant to define and control the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos; in which limbo we whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions…. From this void—ourselves—it is the function of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save us—“from the evil that is in the world.” With the same motion, at the same time, it is this toward which we endlessly struggle and from which, endlessly, we struggle to escape. (Baldwin 1657 and 1658.)

<9> It is as if the dread of setting a precedent and fully assuming the self-definition of the female preacher was conveyed more forcefully in the introspective narrative of this modern pioneer than in the autobiographies of the antebellum foremothers. While praising her discovery of “the power of being a gifted African American woman who believed in her God and herself,” Rev. Hale still dwells on the paradox of having to wrestle with her “demons of insecurity and low self-esteem” in a way that shows how much of an inner struggle this road to self-definition truly consisted in, beyond the violence of her early confrontation with her young convert:

I had never seen or heard of a woman in ministry, so I would never say that I was in ministry or admit that I would ever be, even though the folks in my church and in the community said otherwise. I ignored them. I had no intention of being a preacher. … I thought I was destined to be an opera singer. … It was clear in my own mind that opera was my goal, even though the chaplain said I had the gifts and graces for ministry and the pastor of my home church, Alvin Jackson, agreed with him. In all honesty, I did feel some rumblings in my mind and heart. Already God was speaking to me. But I ignored God and everyone else. I had good reason to ignore them. I didn’t believe that women were called to preach. I had never seen a woman in ministry or heard one preach. It was my sophomore year when Alvord Beardslee [the chaplain of Hollins College where she was a student of music education] announced that he was going on sabbatical. A committee was established, of which I was a part, to choose his replacement. When a woman’s name was suggested, I was vehemently opposed to it, saying no woman will ever preach to me. A year later, I received my call in an undeniable way. (151-152)

<10> Here, Rev. Cynthia Hale is not simply showing the extent to which she had internalized the very type of religious discourse that had so brutally rejected her as a minister in the first place—“no woman will ever preach to me.” In very telling ways, her and other narratives of self-redefinition go beyond the well-established tradition of calling narratives describing how the (male) preacher-to-be desperately tries to eschew the will of a power beyond his control, only to eventually lay down his arms and renounce flight and resistance. These really are tales of confronting and acknowledging the true nature of one’s deepest desire—of finding one’s true self in spite of the reluctance to redefine one’s already well-planned destiny, more than being sought after by a God perceived as imposing a completely separate will on the preacher’s own will. The inner voice—“the still, small voice that had been drowned out by my addiction to ‘busy-ness’,” as Rev. Carla Jones describes it (165)—is first rejected, but mainly because this voice sounds like a disturbing expression of the unconscious self, upsetting the consciously-defined life plans each young professional woman had established. Here, close friends—often female alter egos—provide the young women with a mirror image of their own souls, as if they needed mediation to acknowledge their hearts’ desire. Such is the case for Rev. Cynthia Hale:

I knew that God was speaking to me. It was confirmed by my roommate on “100th night,” a Hollins tradition where seniors dressed up as their roommate’s heart’s desire. I dressed up as Johnny Morrison, my roommate’s boyfriend. When I saw her, she was dressed in a black ministerial robe looking like a preacher. I asked her what in the world she was doing, and she told me to be honest with myself; everyone else knew that this was my heart’s desire. (152)

Spiritual Intimacies with Sister Figures: A Way Out of No Way

<11> Rev. Cokeisha Lashon Bailey’s narrative likewise insists on the moment of self-revelation brought about by a sister figure with whom she shared, not the intimate space of a dorm room, but, in her own terms, an “identical” social and spiritual background. Her depiction of the birthing of her heart’s desire begins with visions of herself preaching to other women:

I began to lose my zeal and passion for selling radio and writing radio success stories. I remember images playing in my mind like a movie. While working I would see visions of myself in a pulpit preaching and praying for women. Sometimes in these dreams I would be dressed in a robe and would reach over the pulpit to touch the women who were hurting. … Finally, I e-mailed a dear sister in Christ, who has been a friend of mine since childhood. I said to her, “Meiki, I am having the weirdest dreams. I keep seeing myself preaching from a pulpit and wearing a robe. It is beginning to frighten me because the dreams are so real. I don’t want to be a preacher and you know my father wouldn’t go for that anyway.” I sighed with a sense of relief because I knew that I had at least admitted to someone how I felt. Then, I waited anxiously for her response. … To my utter amazement, she responded immediately, but it as not the response I was hoping to see. She wrote, “Well, I don’t know what this means, but I do hope that you are open to what God has said for you to do.” She concluded by saying, “Whatever you do, I will support you.” … For over twenty years, she and I had experienced almost an identical lifestyle. Both of our fathers were preachers who believed the Bible and lived by it. Both of us… believed that women should not preach and should keep their place outside of the pulpit. How could she change her mind? She had no idea that I had been struggling with this. I knew she wasn’t just siding with me because of our friendship. I knew it had to be the Lord encouraging her to encourage me. (22 and 23)

The concrete nature of her visions is strikingly reminiscent of the narrative of Jarena Lee, but this foremother had a different way of putting to the test the first stirrings of her heart’s desire. Grappling alone with her doubts, and repeatedly tempted to commit suicide, Lee staged her own moment of truth by finding refuge on her personal praying ground, the ultimate space of privacy so often mentioned in the conversion narratives of ex-slaves collected in the WPA collection of the 1930s, and literally awakened herself to her own gift:

At first I supposed Satan had spoken to me, for I had read that he could transform himself into an angel of light, for the purpose of deception. Immediately I went into a secret place, and called upon the Lord to know if he had called me to preach, and whether I was deceived or not; when there appeared to my view the form and figure of a pulpit, with a Bible lying thereon, the back of which was presented to me as plainly as if it had been a literal fact. In consequence of this, my mind became so exercised that during the night following, I took a text, and preached in my sleep. I thought there stood before me a great multitude, while I expounded to them the things of religion. So violent were my exertions, and so loud were my exclamations, that I awoke from the sound of my own voice, which also awoke the family of the house where I resided. (Andrews 35)

Zilpha Elaw’s self-revelation, on the contrary, was mediated by her sister lying on her deathbed, which lent to her moment of acceptance of the calling the additional urgency of a promise made to her dying alter ego:

After my dear sister had laid in a swoon for some time, she revived, and said, amongst other things which I could not remember, “I have overcome the world by the kingdom of heaven;” she then began singing, and appeared to sing several verses; but the language in which she sung was too wonderful for me, and I could not understand it. We all sat or stood around her with great astonishment, for her voice was as clear, musical, and strong, as if nothing had ailed her; and when she finished her song of praise… She addressed herself to me, and informed me, that she had seen Jesus, and had been in the society of angels; and that an angel came to her, and bade her tell Zilpha that she must preach the gospel; and also, that I must go to a lady named Fisher, a Quakeress, and she would tell me further what I should do. It was then betwixt one and two o’clock in the morning, and she wished me to go directly to visit this lady, and also to commence my ministry of preaching, by delivering an address to the people then in the house. I cannot describe my feelings at this juncture; I knew not what to do, nor where to go... and I stood in silence quite overwhelmed by my feelings. At length, she raised her head up, and said, “Oh, Zilpha! Why do you not begin?” I then tried to say something as I stood occupied in mental prayer; but she said, “Oh! Do not pray, you must preach.” (Ibid., 73-74)

The importance and meaning of mediation and sisterhood in all four instances beg for further investigation. Unique as is each of these narratives of self-recognition, all four stage a displacement of the self in a space defined as an in-between zone where the self-seeker’s mind opens up to new representations of herself—through a quasi-Shakespearean play of disguise in Cynthia Hale’s case; by taking distance from herself by entrusting the cyberspace with her secret in Cokeisha Bailey’s case; by directly confronting her visions in her own chosen hallowed spot (her space of truth) in Jarena Lee’s; and finally, in Zilpha Elaw’s case, by wondering about the degree of delirium or superior consciousness of her sister as the latter found salvation for the two of them in the throes and exultation of her own death.

Laughing at the Call: A Strategy of Avoidance

<12> At the opposite end of the spectrum of intimacy and trusting sisterhood, but equally indicative of the in-betweenness of the situation of women wrestling with the idea of their chosenness, laughter is evoked several times as a strategy to discard the unsettling possibility of challenging the tradition of the established church:

To try to speak on behalf of God or religious tradition and, “God forbid,” the religious community, was perceived by men and women as a mockery before God… (Delores Carpenter qtd. in LaRue 74-5)

When I heard about a woman being called to preach I laughed to myself. “Why does she have to call herself a preacher? My mother and other mentors are great speakers, why can’t she just be a speaker?” I asked myself. (Cokeisha Lashon Bailey qtd. in LaRue 21)

My learned strategy for dealing with discomfort is to find a way to see the humor in a situation. When asked to consider the conditions under which I embraced the ministry, I heard myself laugh out loud and ask in response, “Who said anything about embracing it?” I believe that this ministry that God has presented to me has embraced me and I am not restrained by it but feeling my way into it. I have found the comfortable places in this ministry, but the threshold of comfort seems to change every day. (Carla Jones qtd. in LaRue 163)

<13> But the dilemma between conforming to the role ascribed to women and fulfilling a self-defined sense of their destiny, which grows increasingly precise as the calling grows more persistent, also has more deeply psychological repercussions: How can a deity envisioned as a father be demanding a radical change which cannot but place the elected woman at odds with her socially constructed duties as a daughter, a wife, or a mother?

At this point in my life, I am convinced that I was called to seminary and not to preach or to pastor because it has been this life at seminary that has shown me the many obstacles that exist for women in the ministry. If I had gone into the ministry without going to seminary—a common practice in many Baptist churches—I might have missed out on a great deal of the preparatory work that has come not from the classroom but from daily living. Being a single parent in Long Branch, New Jersey, was not a big deal. Being a single parent in my home church, where people loved me and my daughter, was not a big deal. Being a single parent and living in a “family” housing at Princeton became a big deal. I never knew that being an unmarried woman with a child was an obstacle. In fact, it was not an obstacle for me, but the reactions of those with uninformed definitions of “family” became the obstacle…. I was running myself ragged by competing with my old overachieving self and my younger classmates who had only themselves to care for. I was under the impression that my success as a person was marked by my ability to maintain stellar grades at all costs—including that of my child’s happiness. (Carla Jones qtd. in LaRue 166)

My father was one of my best friends. He was my mentor and hero. The thought of doing anything that he disapproved of would break my heart. So instead of sharing with my father what Rev. Archibald [her first female mentor] and others believed, I laughed at it and pressed harder to prove them wrong. (Cokeisha Lashon Bailey qtd. in LaRue 21)

This particular author implements tactics to gradually win over her father to the idea of her calling, by avoiding a direct confrontation and asking his permission to give up her well-paid job at a radio station for a job as a church secretary in his church; but it takes her three years to finally persuade her father of the reality of her calling. Several other women pastors describe how, in spite of their efforts to save their marriages, they are forced to acknowledge the incompatibility between their husbands’ professional choices and their own life choice, a decision consistently framed in very real terms of life or death in ways strikingly reminiscent of Julia Foote’s spiritual struggles with her husband or Zilpha Elaw, Jarena Lee, or Julia Foote’s decisions to leave their sick children to the care of friends while they went preaching.

<13> Exactly as their 19th-century foremothers, in the narratives of their callings, all women insist on the clarity and directness of their long dialogs with God, explaining how they heard God distinctly pleading with them and sending them ultimatums, either as verbal messages that seem both clear and encrypted or in the form of severe illnesses and burn-outs, eventually redefining them in a radically transformative process, which Rev. Cokeisha Bailey likens to the caterpillar’s metamorphosis in her testimony. However, in the sermon paired with her testimony, she insists on the belief that choosing God’s way is to be equated with dying (to the ways of the world and the rational career plans) and surrendering, which may be understood in contradictory ways:

I believe Chuck Swindoll said it best when he proclaimed, ‘This is not the time for spiritual wimps!’ Finally, we are encouraged to surrender to God’s sovereignty continually. Surrendering involves yielding to the power of another. Surrendering isn’t always easy. I know that full well. (31)

The life choice of challenging the gendered hierarchy within her congregation is, in her specific case, made all the more emotionally loaded as the pastor is her own father. Thus, probably in an effort to defuse the tension between the loyalties to two fathers, she chooses to describe her responding to her call to preach in the patriarchal term of surrender to another’s will and power, rather than in terms of direct empowerment.

Confronting Gender Discrimination Within Church Hierarchies

<14> While she frames her choice in terms of “obedience”, a term slightly less ambiguous than that of “surrender”, Rev. Cecelia Green Barr is more indicting in her narration of all the impediments put in her way by the male leadership of her home congregation in the Baptist church and later in the AME church. Under her pen, as in the cases of several other authors in the same volume, the spiritual narrative also becomes a space where discriminatory practices are denounced for what they are in sharp terms while the process of healing is brought about by the persistent effort to make sense out of the church politics pursued by male leaders, the fear of questioning embodied by the scathingly critical female believers, so that in the end a sense of forgiveness may be attained. Yet, while she is one of the most militant authors in the book, she, too, insists on the need for female preachers to feel listened to, encouraged, and ultimately endorsed by authority figures in the family sphere (father, grandparents) or the home church to allow themselves to believe in their calling and stop questioning the reality of their spiritual experience:

Today some refer to me as a trailblazer, but during those early revelations God described me as a pastor's pastor. I did not comprehend what it meant to be a pastor’s pastor, but I did know it would not be business as usual. …Everything in my social and spiritual context communicated that I had erred in discerning God’s call upon my life. … Against these odds I stepped out in obedience and faith to follow the path of ministry that God had ordained for my life. … Fortified with excitement, I searched within my congregational context for someone in spiritual authority to share this revelation and receive instruction on how to proceed, but all I found were disinterested leaders who discounted my testimony as the words of a zealous young female. … Lacking confidence in my supernatural encounters with God, and without a mentor modeled after Jesus’ example to help me navigate the waters of sexism in the church, I left that conversation confused and discouraged. … After that first experience it was ten years before I dared to tell another person in authority that God had called me to preach the Gospel. (36 and 37)

<15> Rev. Alyson Diane Browne’s testimony further highlights female preachers’ difficulty to challenge the notion that every calling has to be green lighted by a male figure (including the fiancé) to be allowed to express itself unhindered; the initial reflex is to comply with discriminatory requests and allow herself to challenge such methods only years later and in a non-confrontational manner within the public sphere of church hierarchy, although her style is much more direct in the sphere of her private life:

I was engaged to my childhood sweetheart, whom I met in the Woman’s National Evangelistic and Missionary Conference. He was Baptist and I told him emphatically that I would not join his church because women preachers were neither accepted nor ordained. He had not asked me to join his church, but I had answered the question nonetheless.

When I entered the ministerial process [in the AME church] the bishop asked if I were married. I told him I was engaged, and he asked how my fiancé felt about my being in the ministry. I answered, “My fiancé has no problem with my being in ministry.” Later it occurred to me that none of the men were asked how their spouses or fiancées felt about them being in ministry. In the 1980s when I served on the Board of Examiners and later became the first woman appointed Dean of the Newark-New Brunswick Ministerial Institute of the New Jersey Annual Conference, women were still being asked the same question by some of the older ministers, men of course. I took great delight in asking the same question of the men. On several occasions, one or two of the sisters and I would wink on the sly. (63)

Descriptions of the job interviews also allow the reader to assess the unabashed sexism and unsettling lack of propriety congregation officers may feel entitled to display when the applicant for the pastorate is an unmarried woman:

As I was completing seminary, I applied to a small Disciples of Christ church whose pastor had been there for over thirty years and had died. They were interested enough to invite me to preach and to be interviewed. The interview was interesting in that they asked a lot of questions about my personal life, who I was dating and the nature of the relationships. They were trying to see if I was sexually active. I wasn’t sure that this line of questioning was appropriate. I wondered if they asked these same questions of men. They interviewed me, but they didn’t hire me. They were honest with me. They didn’t want a woman, even though they loved my preaching and the fact I was seminary trained. Instead they chose a man who was a barber and was attending seminary on Saturdays. (Cynthia Hale qtd. in LaRue 153)

Here again, the situation of domination does not allow an open challenging of the assumptions and justifications buttressing the discriminatory practices of the decision-making bodies. Instead, the reader is left to ponder on the comforting belief that such obstacles are only signs that God has other, greater plans for the maverick female preacher, and also, significantly, on the mantra-like promise the narrator makes to herself: “I decided early in my life that no matter what I experienced in ministry, I would not be an angry black woman.” (Idem)

<16> A prevalent feature in all of these testimonies is the importance of each woman’s bonds to her home church and her need to elaborate strategies for acceptance and self-determination to survive the soul-tearing dilemma between conforming and fulfilling her destiny. The church is hence redefined based on its ability and willingness to be a spiritually nurturing space; preaching women redefine their ethos of loyalty to their community on the basis of the duty to empower themselves to fulfill their higher calling "from the pew to the pulpit." Cecelia Greene Barr gives a dramatic account of this experience of divided loyalty between church and God:

During these sessions the pastor [whose assistant was his wife] succinctly explained the denominational [AME] requirements for ordination and the overall atmosphere within our congregation. I attended the session once and departed with a clear understanding that I would not be able to live a life of ministry in this congregation. Surprisingly, I was not saddened by this new information. I knew I would gladly forego a life in ministry in order to remain a member of that congregation. … My resistance was based solely on a desire to remain with my current church family. My mind changed when the Lord said to me that my current pastors were doing what God had instructed them to do, but if I refused to comply with the instructions received that day I would no longer be following God, but I would from that point forward be following my pastors. (37-38)

The female preachers testifying in the book thus typically end up choosing nontraditional forms of ministry, often in the Army, which allows them to save their marriages in some cases, or by creating or joining interdenominational communities. The positions filled often have in common their absence of rootedness in one particular congregation: virtual congregations, prisons, the Navy, the university, where they are allowed to express the full range of their gifts while eschewing all forms of enclosure, like the foremothers.

<17> Alyson Diane Browne expresses this paradox of achieving official recognition and at the same time balking at the formidable obstacles entailed by a pastor’s job:

I was ordained an itinerant deacon in 1975 and an itinerant elder in 1977. Even after my last ordination I never envisioned myself in the pastorate. (63)

As a matter of fact, she communicates to the reader the violence of congregants threatening to “starve her out” after a disagreement over her way of running the church when she ultimately became a pastor. Although this particular story ends with a personal and collective triumph, as do others relating similar instances of verbal or psychological violence towards women pastors, it is hard not to feel the depth of the wound between the lines. The testimony of Rev. Carla Jones about her experience of sexual harassment by a man of the cloth (apparently a fellow student) while in seminary is similarly fraught with anger and disbelief at the difficulty to find a voice in the midst of her loneliness:

I had worked in many other settings where I would have been on guard against sexual harassment, but I never imagined that I would have to fight that battle in a church…. I never imagined that my status as a single woman would be considered fair game in a battle for authority…. I thought that we were to treat one another with love and respect, not as objects for review and rejection or as disposable objects of our own internalized self-hatred and insecurities. … One huge obstacle to my ministry was the sense that there was no one to help me out of this particular situation because no one seemed to listen. If the man who had been grossly inappropriate was supposed to be a man of God, then how was I supposed to pray? Who was supposed to pray with me? What was I to make of the fact that when I told one woman, she said that it was just one of those things that men do. When I told my male friends, they agreed that it was inappropriate, but that didn’t bring me closer to the healing that I expected to find. When I went to the designated campus resource, my reluctance to quickly and clearly name the experience as sexual harassment—for fear of being wrong—left me in the bind of having to honor a covenant agreement. I wondered why God would do this to me in the midst of my studies, my loneliness, my difficulties with a highly intellectual and attention-starved four-year-old girl. What was I supposed to say in prayer? How was I supposed to help broken people find the loving strength of a God who had left me in this position? How do we minister in the midst of mess? (Carla Jones qtd. in LaRue 167-168)

This particular experience finds its resolution in the narrator’s first finding the adequate words with which to formulate her predicament, thanks to a course on womanist/feminist theology, and then finding “support and solace in a sister who worked at Princeton University” who introduces her to the right figure of authority—“a seminary faculty member who graciously acknowledged the situation as sexual harassment without making me vomit up all the details of these events,” eventually freeing her from the bind of the covenant and allowing her to graduate in time.

Reconciling the Public and the Private Personas: A Quest for Wholeness

<18> Because her testimony also encompasses the challenges encountered after being successful in her efforts to open up top leadership positions in the hierarchy of the AME church through the 1990s and while she was herself the pastor of a church, Rev. Dr. Alyson Diane Browne is the most radical in defining tradition― in the realms of both dogma and gender roles―as stifling the female believer’s personal experience of, and relationship with, her God:

When I accompanied [my husband] to rehearsals and to the churches where he was employed, I felt like, and allowed myself to be treated as, an appendage. … I moved to New York for our third and final reconciliation, hoping our marriage would be stronger and last forever. I slipped back into my former ‘keep the rules’ mentality. If I were a good wife, God would turn our marriage around. This distorted perception of God led me to accept some things that no woman should have to live with.

I thank God for the day I realized that I was dying inside. … I had tried unsuccessfully to compartmentalize my pain. This slow death affected every area in my life: motherhood, relationships, and the pastorate. Even more important, it eroded the core of my being. On that day I also realized that I wanted to live. My present life was a far cry from God’s destiny for me. I understood that being the best me had nothing to do with keeping the rules but had everything to do with what God would do in and through me. I began to define my faith, my understanding of God apart from what I had been taught and told, apart from the church traditions and customs of my youth. Time and experience were the most profound of my instructors. Through them I received the grace of God and knew it. What I had been taught about God and how I experienced God were intensely distinct. My relationship with God is not predicated upon whether or not I ‘toe the line’ but on God’s unconditional, immeasurable love. (64-65)

Her definition of destiny extends much further than the “given” concepts of surrender and obedience evoked in other testimonies, to offer a holistic view of a female voice refusing any tension between the woman’s different needs and commitments, past, present, and future, conscious and subconscious; so that in her testimony, recovering her voice ultimately merges with making herself whole and empowered:

I was forty-two years old and there were times when I would cry for no apparent reason. Significant portions of my childhood were gone from my memory. I knew that something was radically wrong, and I had a suspicion as to what it was. The flashbacks were my final evidence that I had been molested as a child. The rage I felt is indescribable. At the same time, the reality of what happened to me answered so many questions about what had shaped me subconsciously. The experience accounted for my shyness, my inordinate self-consciousness, and my inability to trust. Further, it explained why my voice had been buried along with my childhood innocence. … Silence was my way of being in the world. My feelings, my opinions, and my voice shared a desolate grave.

I am convinced that God’s calling me to preach saved my life. God’s directive to preach resurrected my voice, saving it from an unwarranted grave. In the preaching moment, the Alyson who was forced into silence emerges. Preaching affords me the freedom of expression and movement stolen from me as a child. In the preaching space, I am neither shy nor self-conscious. I have something to say that people want to hear. I am clear that what I have to say is God inspired and no one can rob me of this gift. Preaching gave my life focus and meaning. When God said, “You will preach or die,” I believed God was saying that if I refused to preach God would take my life. I now understand that God was saying, “Preach; it will save your life.” When I preach I am keenly aware of my connection to God. The fusion of God’s divinity with my humanity is overwhelming. (66)

This testimony probably is the most powerful, uplifting, and empowering example of what it means to be made whole or centered, that is, to find one’s own voice in the midst of confusion, self-doubt, and uncertainty. Having trodden the whole path towards themselves and eventually acknowledged the gap between others’ desires and their innermost yearnings, the narrators’ testimonies finally reach their goal of giving a voice to the voiceless. They help the reader fathom the distance to be covered between the stage in our own stories when we are defined by our partly-imposed, partly-accepted comfort zones, and our own personal mountaintops, from which we can finally say that we feel entitled to being honest with our deepest desire of redefining ourselves. As Rev. Alison Gise Johnson forcefully claimed in her own testimony, “we overcome not only by the blood of the lamb but also by the words of our testimonies.” (137)

<19> As the narratives have consistently shown in their oscillation between solipsistic soul-searching and the sharing of an intimate sense of calling with female alter egoes or more or less closely-knit and accepting families and communities, finding a sense of entitlement and claiming the right to find one's voice and destiny are made possible by the essentially womanist consciousness that self-definition is literally a matter of life or death and the most urgent duty a woman has towards herself. The language and culture of African American traditional religion, even more than the specific theological tenets of the communities they were born into or ended up joining or leading, provides rich ground for the affirmation of such consciousness of personal calling, even in the face of societal resistance. The first female preachers belonging to this same tradition had documented this insight in a more oratorical form; the modern narratives imparted to us are more conversational in style, and hence more intimate, but no less forceful and inspirational to the feminist scholar as well as the student of religion.

Works Cited

Andrews, William L. Sisters of the Spirit, Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Print.

Baldwin, James. Everybody’s Protest Novel, in Gates, Henry Louis and McKay, Nellie Y. eds, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997. pp. 1654-1659. Print

Cummings Melbourne S. and Latta Judi Moore. “When They Honor the Voice: Centering African American Women’s Call Stories.” Journal of Black Studies Online First, 22 May 2008. 1-17. Electronic <http://jbs.sagepub.com> .

hooks, bell. Communion—The Female Search for Love, New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Print.

Larue, Cleophus J, Ed. This is My Story: Testimonies and Sermons of Black Women in Ministry. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005. Print.

Westerkamp, Marilyn J. Women and Religion in Early America, 1600-1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

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