Last But Not Least
The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture — WILLIS, “UNCLE” WALLACE AND “AUNT” MINERVA
“Stearns’s mesmerizing stare and loud, “holy whine” preaching (a nasal tone with a sing-song style, most likely mimicking Whitefield’s homiletics) attracted many curious visitors who later converted.” Shubal Stearns (1706 – 1771) https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/shubal-stearns-1706-1771/
“During the next hundred years of slavery in America, slave associations were a source of concern to most slave owners. But not all, a few moved to emancipate their black brethren whereever they could and form new church asociations where slavery of any kind would not be tolerated, in 1805, they called themselves “Friends of Humanity”.
Unfortunately for many members of white society, Black religious meetings symbolized the ultimate threat to their control, fearing spiritual freedom encouraged physical freedom. And that, cost them their way of life that they had grown accustom to.
Appalachia’s distinctive brand of Christianity has always been something of a puzzle to mainline American congregations. Often treated as pagan and unchurched, native Appalachian sects are labeled as ultraconservative, primitive, and fatalistic, and the actions of minority sub-groups such as “snake handlers” are associated with all worshippers in the region. Yet these churches that many regard as being outside the mainstream are living examples of America’s oldest indigenoius church heritage…”
In sermon notes from 1768, Woodmason believed that the Baptist preaching was having no effect on the morals of the “saved,” describing a typical worship service as a “society of Lunatics.” Woodmason suggested that Anglicans and Presbyterians would do well to support one another against three common enemies: Indians, African Slaves, and “New Light Baptists.” In Virginia and North Carolina, the tensions between the lower classes and the gentry were intensified by the Separate Baptist rejection of educated clergy, the Anglican Church, and the requirement to be licensed under state authority in order to preach. Authorities suspected Baptists of “carrying on a mutiny against the authority of the land.” Birthed in Revival: Shubal Stearns and the Remarkable Expansion of Baptists in the South
“This is true of Anglo-Pentecostal and Latin0-Pentecostal groups as well. To preach or to give a testimony is not to lecture to an audience. It is a group action.
There can be much wrong with this approach. It can result in cheerleading. It can lead to group think or the worst kind. But in reading Alexander’s take on the subject I feel a bit rebuked for sometimes being critical of it over against the more “refined” homilies seem in Catholic, mainline, or evangelical pulpits. Everyone has their liturgy. This is just another version.” The origins of call-and-response preaching.
“Walker’s sermons are now conversational, heavy on biblical teaching, light on fireworks. His new style did not initially go over well. Worse was one post-sermon comment he received after visiting one church. “That’s a real nice lecture,” a man told Walker. “When are you going to preach?” The absence of biblical emphasis is one of the chief criticism of hooping. Many people complain they could never learn the Bible in a hooping church because the pastor spent most of his sermon shouting, not teaching.
Henry Mitchell disagrees.
Mitchell, a theologian, has written seven books on black preaching. He said most hoopers combined sound biblical teaching and emotion in their sermons. But many black people dismiss hooping, he thinks, because they have been brainwashed by Western culture into believing that fervent emotion and religion do not mix.
“People come up with this white (stuff) that emotion is bad,” Mitchell said. “You know what it goes back to? It goes all the way back to the Stoics who saw a whole lot of bad religion and then decided that the flesh was evil. It messed the Christian faith up.”
The Rev. Tim McDonald, head of the Concerned Black Clergy, said the disdain for hooping has transformed black worship. “People look at you funny if you say amen,” he said. “Our churches are becoming much quieter and much whiter.”
McDonald said that hooping grew out of the African storytelling tradition —a storyteller and audience would engage in a call-and-response ritual. Others point toward slavery as the birth of the hoop. When slaves gathered for a worship service, they needed a release from despair. The hoop, the cathartic shouting between preacher and worshiper, provided that celebratory release.
Mitchell said that Word Preachers miss the value of catharsis in worship. Their sermons seldom reach people’s emotions, the region where faith is born. “The Word approach is all intellectual,” Mitchell said. “My problem isn’t intellectual. My problem is, in most cases, emotion and intuition are not reached by facts.”” Hooping it up: Traditional black preaching – a blend of poetry, parables and pyrotechnics – is on the wane
“…THE PREACHER
One of the remarkable aspects of black preaching is that form, content, and dialect change little or not all throughout the entire United States. There are several reasons for this, chief of which is the fact that as blacks migrated north, east, and west, they took their religion with them (5,21). Also, since new-generation preachers are taught through the oral tradition of radio evangelism and direct contact with their own pastors, the style has remained relatively closed to outside influence. Eddie Swain, a Bay Area-based faith healer, tends to put black preaching into two different classes: upon seeing the Rev. Carl Andersen’s Baptist sermon in Oakland, he remarked that he was “an old country preacher”, whose slow and deliberate delivery was not as “modern” as some of the more forceful Church of God and Christ preachers.
While the word “preacher” itself is a general term, we can be more specific in defining the differences between preachers, pastors, evangelists, and healers. The pastors run the local churches and tend to organizational and administrative matters. Preachers do not run a church, although they may be members of one, and may preach anywhere(5,21). Evangelists are Itinerant preachers who either travel from church to church to assist in gaining members for various pastors, or travel with their own tent, gaining advance publicity either through their own nationally broadcast radio programs (e.g. the white evangelist, R.W. Schambach) or through the cooperation of local churches, who often share in the tent ministry as well as the offering. The expense of travelling with a tent and all its related odd-and-ends (chairs, amplification equipment, etc.) is a great one, and I find it unfortunate that this descendant of the old camp meeting may be slowly coming to the end of the line. There is no telling how many evangelists were permanently waylaid by the great gasoline shortage of several years ago, and the next one may ground them all. One great difference I have noted in evangelists compared to pastors: while it is quite acceptable for the evangelist to be a reformed backslider who can recite lurid tales of his sinful past, a pastor in many cases is expected to come from a home (or at least have a background) Christian in nature, and have a relatively pre (or discreetly hidden)past. The late white evangelist A.A. Allen, whose interracial, interdenominational tent ministry was once one of the more prolific on the evangelism circuit, loved to tell of his life of crime, time in jail, and his ultimate conversion to a better way of life(1,39). I might add that Schambach traveled with Allen, and has continued his interracial, fully integrated ministry, a policy that, when instituted by Allen in the early 1950’s, was groundbreaking.
Pastors, preachers, and evangelists can also be Healers, and indeed most of the examples I have provided on the cassette contain some mention of the word (such as Rev. Louis Overstreet’s supplication “Heal the sick!” in example #5 ). Healers unanimously declare their power as a gift from God, and most refuse offerings of any kind unless their healing is part of a larger service. For this reason, many of them work at jobs other than preaching, and do their religious work on Sunday, or when the spirit moves them….” AN INTRODUCTION TO BLACK PREACHING STYLES
“And only in the church could all of the arts emerge, be on display, practiced and perfected, and expressed at one time and in one place, including music, dance, and song; rhetoric and oratory; poetry and prose; textual exegesis and interpretation; memorization, reading, and writing; the dramatic arts and scripting; call-and-response, signifying, and indirection; philosophizing and theorizing; and, of course, mastering all of “the flowers of speech.” We do the church a great disservice if we fail to recognize that it was the first formalized site within African American culture perhaps not exclusively for the fashioning of the Black aesthetic, but certainly for its performance, service to service, week by week, Sunday to Sunday.” Excerpted from “The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song” by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Penguin Press)
“Historians say the biblical story of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt provided a good deal of inspiration to the enslaved people. This was reflected in coded lyrics to some of their religious songs, or spirituals. In “Go Down, Moses,” for example, the lyrics plead with the Hebrew prophet to “tell old Pharaoh, let my people go.” Frederick Douglass wrote that when he was a child, before he had escaped slavery, “a keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of ‘O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan,’ something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the north, and the north was our Canaan.”25” 10. A brief overview of Black religious history in the U.S.
“New historical evidence documents the arrival of slaves in the English settlement in Jamestown, Va., in 1619. They came from the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo, in present-day Angola and the coastal Congo. In the 1500s, the Portuguese conquered both kingdoms and carried Catholicism to West Africa. It is likely that the slaves who arrived in Jamestown had been baptized Catholic and had Christian names. For the next 200 years, the slave trade exported slaves from Angola, Ghana, Senegal and other parts of West Africa to America’s South. Here they provided the hard manual labor that supported the South’s biggest crops: cotton and tobacco.
In the South, Anglican ministers sponsored by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, founded in England, made earnest attempts to teach Christianity by rote memorization; the approach had little appeal. Some white owners allowed the enslaved to worship in white churches, where they were segregated in the back of the building or in the balconies. Occasionally persons of African descent might hear a special sermon from white preachers, but these sermons tended to stress obedience and duty, and the message of the apostle Paul: “Slaves, obey your masters.”
Both Methodists and Baptists made active efforts to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity; the Methodists also licensed black men to preach. During the 1770s and 1780s, black ministers began to preach to their own people, drawing on the stories, people and events depicted in the Old and New Testaments. No story spoke more powerfully to slaves than the story of Exodus, with its themes of bondage and liberation brought by a righteous and powerful God who would one day set them free.
Remarkably, a few black preachers in the South succeeded in establishing independent black churches. In the 1780s, a slave named Andrew Bryan preached to a small group of slaves in Savannah, Ga. White citizens had Bryan arrested and whipped. Despite persecution and harassment, the church grew, and by 1790 it became the First African Baptist Church of Savannah. In time, a Second and a Third African Church were formed, also led by black pastors.
In the North, blacks had more authority over their religious affairs. Many worshipped in established, predominantly white congregations, but by the late 18th century, blacks had begun to congregate in self-help and benevolent associations called African Societies.”
“THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING AND “HUSH HARBORS”
In the late 18th and early 19th century, thousands of Americans, black and white, enslaved and free, were swept up in the revival known as the Second Great Awakening. In the South, the religious fervor of evangelical Christianity resonated easily with the emotive religious traditions brought from West Africa. Forging a unique synthesis, slaves gathered in “hush harbors” — woods, gullies, ravines, thickets and swamps — for heartfelt worship which stressed deliverance from the toil and troubles of the present world, and salvation in the heavenly life to come.” PBS The Black Church
“I had assumed, for instance, that Black enslaved people became Christians through the efforts of slaveholders, but this is almost completely false. Some of the enslaved were already Christians, as we see with the Stono Rebellion of Portuguese-speaking Catholics in South Carolina in 1739. Many southern planters were fairly unchurched Anglicans who knew just enough Bible to know that Christian slaves could make a compelling biblical case for their freedom based on various warnings to the Hebrews never to enslave one’s brothers and sisters. The planters were right about that, by the way; this is exactly what the enslaved argued after conversion! Rather than being evangelized by their slaveholders, some of the enslaved converted at the tent meetings of evangelical revivalists, and they went on to evangelize one another when they returned to the plantation. As a result, the historical Black church is Baptist and Methodist, as these groups made up the majority of revivalists. (Pentecostalism doesn’t arise until the early 20th century and began as an interracial movement.)”
“In contrast, their own secret, nighttime gatherings of worship in “hush harbors” elevated their status as children of God, their joy in the belief that Christ died for them, and their aspiration for the same freedom that the God of Israel had provided to the ancient Hebrews. It was from these early meetings of the Black church that the tradition of the spirituals emerged, with their explicit celebration of spiritual freedom hiding the implicit longing for physical freedom.”
“The Black Church as Cradle of Entrepreneurship…In Baptists in America, historians Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins claim that he probably had more influence in promoting Black dolls than the better known and more secular Marcus Garvey (who launched his own efforts a decade later). Surely Boyd’s influence on the rise of the new dolls as a point of Black pride in households across America depended heavily on his influence within the church, typified by the 1908 National Baptist Convention resolution to remove Caucasian dolls from the homes of every “self-respecting Negro.” The Black Church: A World Within a World
“Black people have deep histories in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The common narrative of the Appalachian region is too often limited to that of Anglo European settlers, but in fact the region’s history is much more diverse. In addition to the many Native American tribes for whom the Appalachian Mountains are part of their current and ancestral homelands, early non-native settlers included both free and enslaved black people.” African American History on the Parkway
“No number of age-old stereotypes can erase the fact that, Appalachia, distinctive as it is, has never been a region that is lily white. History reveals that Appalachia has always had a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been significant and influential.” Featured Essay – African Americans in Appalachia
“Through a Racial Equity and Justice Conservation Cooperative Agreement with the Natural Resource & Conservation Service, Black in Appalachia is working to make sure Black producers and landowners in Claiborne, Cocke, Hamblen, Hancock, Hawkins, Jefferson, Sevier counties in Tennessee, as well as Lee, Russell, Scott, and Washington counties of Virginia, have access to available opportunities & resources.” https://www.blackinappalachia.org/community-outreach