Lecture at the Sankofa Institute for African American Pastoral Leadership
Oblate School of Theology
January 11, 2014
Dwight N. Hopkins
CONTEXT
Today we face both a challenge and an opportunity. Or to put it another way: What is the context for developing African American pastoral leadership?
The challenge can be seen both on the domestic level and in the global arena. Domestically, the majority of the black community is worse off than it was before the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. We are especially talking about various indicators for what constitutes a healthy community or a healthy race of people. We point to the specific areas of health, education, housing, jobs, family structure, social mobility, land ownership, the amount of crime, the rates of incarceration, and the growing class divide between wealthy and poor blacks. One of the clearest indicators of advancement since the Civil Rights Movement has been the fact that wealthy black families and black professionals have integrated and benefitted from the struggles of the Martin Luther King, Jr., generation; and this is a good thing. No one wants social relations in America to be based on racial segregation. But the majority of black poor and working class families have sunk deeper into the pit of being human in an unhealthy way. The National Urban League puts out an annual report on the state of black America. African American political economists such as the late Manning Marable of Columbia University and Julianne Malveaux have written books on this topic. Black political scientists such as the late Ronald Waters of the University of Maryland and J. Phillip Thompson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have published articles and other works on the same subject. The comparative data between the times before the Civil Rights Movement and after it are striking and alarming.
These are the hard and cold facts found in the scholarly research of some of the nation’s prominent thinkers or thought leaders. In addition, wehave our own personal stories and those of our parents about how we got over. There was a time when members of our community made sure the elderly and young folk on our blocks had food to eat. Many of us can remember how we ate dinner at one of our friends’ house if we happened to be playing there around 6:00 P.M., and the same occurred if they were playing at our house during that time of the day. Many of us can recall how little children in the neighborhood would go to the store for older folk who sat on their front porches. The children would bring back the groceries and the correct change to their elders. Many of us can remember when the church and the property around the church were seen as sacred space for everyone in the community, the believer and the nonbeliever. Many of us recall when we saw black fathers who lived at home with their wives and children, fathers who worked, whether as professionals or laborers. Many of us remember when our children could walk home from school by themselves without deep fear of being harmed. Many of us can recall, if we were from the north, our parents’ sending us south during the summer so we could have a sense of our family heritage and so we could see our grandfathers and grandmothers. This is why Emmett Till left Chicago to spend the summer of 1955 in Money, Mississippi. If we already lived in the south, our parents would send us to spend the summers on our grandparents’ farms in the countryside to help us connect with where our families came from and to learn what was expected of the younger generation.
However, today the cold statistics of a larger dysfunctional society have negatively impacted our families and communities, and our personal stories of memory and legacy have begun to change. What does African American pastoral leadership have to say about this crisis situation?
Internationally, the world has been altered in a major way since the 1950s and 1960s. No longer is there a Cold War between two world superpowers, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and the USSR began to disintegrate shortly thereafter. Now we are citizens of one world superpower. Similarly, profound changes have taken place on the continent of Africa. If we look back to the 1950s, the majority of African countries were personally owned as colonies by the western European nations. The leaders of the various African liberation movements – Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, Robert Mugabe, Eduardo Mondlane, Steve Biko, and Nelson Mandela – had a clear platform: to own the land (with its oil, coal, copper, diamonds, and iron) and to use these resources for the betterment of the families and children of their nations. When Nelson Mandela became the first black president of South Africa in 1994, we witnessed the end of white Europeans controlling the entire African continent as private property. For decades, African Americans were part of a worldwide movement to support African liberation. We marched and prayed that one day white colonialism would end for the entire continent of our ancestors and that one day all of the earth’s material resources there would be owned once again by African peoples.
However, it seems as if the creation of a free South Africa in the 1990s stopped black Americans’ deep concern for their historical homeland, the African continent. It appears as if we have forgotten about the fundamental thrust of the entire effort against slavery and European colonialism and for African independence.
These losses of memory and legacy remain a challenge for black Christians in the current moment. From the early 1500s, and from 1619 until 1994, the black American community always had nationwide connections with the Continent. During slavery time, Africans were constantly brought from the West Coast of the Continent as slaves to the thirteen colonies and to the United States of America as it was being invented. These enslaved Africans had memories of and ties to their countries of birth. Similarly, enslaved black Americans fought from the beginning against the slavery that brought them and their families from Africa to the United States of America. Slavery made it clear: there was a direct connection between the fate of Africa and the fate of black people enslaved in North America.
Even after 1865, various movements sprang up to solidify that relationship. For example at the start of the 1900s, we note the global Pan-African movement which involved black leaders from the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois played a role in this struggle. Recall the mobilization of African Americans against fascist Italy’s attempt to invade Ethiopia in 1935. Ethiopia was the only country in Africa that had never been a European colony. How can we forget Marcus Garvey and his worldwide campaign to go back to Africa? In the 1940s and 1950s, black Americans supported African independence. Martin Luther King attended the independence ceremony of Ghana in 1957 and that of Nigeria in the 1960s. After he left the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X made two extended tours of the African continent, and he made this famous comment about the inextricable relationship between Africa and African Americans. He stated bluntly: We can’t understand what is happening in Mississippi if we don’t understand what is happening in the Congo. During the 1960s and 1970s, large parts of black America waged campaigns against Portuguese colonialism in southwest Africa. The 1980s and 1990s saw the intensification of black folks’ boycotting apartheid South Africa. Due to the liberation movement inside of South Africa and the movement’s many supporters around the world, especially black Americans and people of African descent living in other countries, Nelson Mandela was set free in 1990 after twenty-seven years behind bars under apartheid.
However, today we are experiencing the first time in black American history that African Americans, as a community, have no national connections with the African continent. Is it possible to develop African American pastoral leadership without intimate relations with the land of our origins and with other nations who are our allies in the global arena?
VOCATION
To take on the challenge of the domestic situation — that is, the growing amount of poor and working class blacks — and the international situation — meaning the first time black people have not had a national movement with connections with Africa — we need a definite understanding of today’s complexities. Yes, it requires us to sophisticatedly analyze economics, politics, globalization, and a host of other experiences and practices; but as African American pastoral leadership, our key focus is primarily a theological one. Our response is squarely a theological one. Because the answer is linked to God’s calling to us, it is theological. What has God called each of us to think, believe, preach, and do? These are the key parts of a theological vocation. These are the basic aspects of the God-and-human interaction. Theology is precisely the experience, information, and practice that answer the question: Are we being faithful to what God has called us to think, believe, preach, and do? In this sense, theology is a discipline of self-criticism. Theology criticizes each of us directly with this one question: are we being faithful to the faith?
One important moral value of African American pastoral leadership is the ability to critique itself in relation to its obligation to God’s calling. What has God called us to think? What has God called us to believe? What has God called us to preach? What has God called us to do? Again, theology is a self-critical discipline. It challenges our faith. It questions our faith. Are we doing what God wants us to do?
The theological focus on vocation is not new. In fact, we have a long tradition of struggling with this question and trying to discern its meaning for each generation. Our enslaved ancestors wrestled with their theological and vocational clarity from the early 1500s and from 1619 to 1865. They understood that God would make a way out of no way, and they also understood their personal vocation was to be one of liberation of the entire enslaved community. They saw and felt their personal vocation to be working every day to bring freedom to each family in the enslaved community, especially poor people and workers in the community. Yes, God will make a way out of no way; at the same time, God helps those who help themselves. We see our ancestors emphasizing the struggle to obtain resources when they finally became free. In 1865, after the end of the Civil War, our families had three major goals: (1) to reunite with family members who had been sold during slavery; (2) to learn to read and write; and (3) to own land. This drive to stabilize our families, provide education for our children, and accumulate resources for a better life also can be found in the journey of black women in America and throughout the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement.
Major scholars, such as Paula Giddings, Jacqueline Jones, Angela Davis, and Darlene Clark Hine, have documented the leadership of African American women such as Annie Louise Burton, Anna Julia Cooper, Fanny Jackson Coppin, Mrs. Cornelia Ellen Craft, Silvia Dubois, Elleanor Eldredge, Old Elizabeth, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Elizabeth Keckley, Lucy Craft Laney, Jarena Lee, Louisa Picquet, Ann Plato, Nancy Prince, Sarah Parker Remond, Amanda Berry Smith, Maria Stewart, Susie King Taylor, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells-Barnett, Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie Burroughs, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and a host of unnamed mothers and grandmothers who provided prophetic, priestly, and practical leadership in our legacy.
The demands of the more recent Civil Rights Movement were pretty clear. For instance, the slogan of the 1963 March on Washington was “Jobs and Freedom” for the poor and the unemployed. The work of Fannie Lou Hamer touched on the life of southern black sharecroppers. When Stokely Carmichael shouted “Black Power!” in Greenwood, Mississippi in June 1966, he was referring specifically to the need for poor southern black sharecroppers and workers to own the land they worked and to have political power. When Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, he was organizing two major campaigns. One was in support of black workers – their jobs and incomes. King’s second struggle was the second march on Washington, which he called the Poor People’s Campaign. The focus of that spring 1968 second march on Washington was “Jobs and Income for the Poor.” Even when we turn to the most explicit black nationalist wing of the civil rights movement, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, similar themes emerge. The Nation of Islam sought to create a black nation that provided jobs, businesses, land ownership, stable families, and a proper education anchored in reading, writing, arithmetic, and African culture. At one point they were engaged in economic trade with Japan. The Black Panther Party began as a way to provide jobs, land ownership, free food, free health clinics, and free education for black children starting at the kindergarten level and moving up. In the 1970s, black parents in Boston, Mass., protested extreme segregation in the educational system. Most historical accounts indicate that these working-class parents demanded forced busing into white neighborhoods. Actually, these mothers and fathers fought the city to give them the proper resources so that the African American community could educate their own children.
We see this vocation, this prophetic and practical calling from God, shown in the story of an “Uncle Silas” who lived during the time of slavery. As one of our enslaved ancestors, he exemplifies a clear and direct appreciation for what the vocation of Christianity is. A white minister had been sent to the plantation on which Uncle Silas was enslaved. As the white preacher delivered his sermon on “Slaves, obey your masters,” Uncle Silas, a 100-year old slave, hobbled up to the front row and challenged the white preacher with a pointed question. Uncle Silas demanded: “Is us slaves gonna be free in heaven?” The white preacher abruptly halted his religious instructions and eyed Uncle Silas with vile contempt. However, Uncle Silas did not budge, and this time resumed the debate with a yell: “Is God gonna free us slaves when we git to heaven?” The white preacher withdrew a handkerchief, mopped the sweat from his pale white forehead, and replied, “Jesus says come unto Me ye who are free fum sin an’ I will give you salvation.” Undaunted, Uncle Silas rebutted: “Gonna give us freedom ‘long wid salvation?” The preacher continued his sermon, and Uncle Silas remained standing up front during the rest of the service.
Uncle Silas epitomizes the millions of blacks under slavery who refused to believe in a faith that told them to be servants and workers for other people’s benefits. They knew in their minds, hearts, and faith that God had called them to enjoy the resources that God had created for all of humankind. They knew that they had a responsibility, like every other American, to provide for their families, ensure the education of their children, and accumulate material resources for the collective betterment of their communities. For Uncle Silas, Christianity wasn’t worth anything if salvation did not also mean freedom. A 100-year old slave used his everyday common-sense folk wisdom and concluded that we don’t need Jesus’ salvation unless it gives us freedom.
Uncle Silas teaches us to discern how God has called our ancestors in the past and how God is calling us at this moment in history to renew and regenerate African American pastoral leadership; but still the question remains: What exactly is the content of this vocation? What exactly are we called to think, believe, preach, and do? What is the faith in which God has called us to have faith? The nature of this faith is key to the regeneration and renewal of African American pastoral leadership. To explore this answer, we turn to the Jesus stories in the Bible.
In my reading of the sacred text, at least three major stories emerge. First, when we step back and frame the story line of the entire Old Testament, we can make a good argument that the theological glue of the Old Testament is that Yahweh God liberated enslaved workers from material poverty and slavery. We see this in Exodus 3: 7-8 (NIV): “The LORD said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to deliver them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” Subsequently, Yahweh created a covenant with these formerly enslaved workers. Yahweh said he would deliver them from earthly poverty and deliver them into concrete material resources. The freed slaves, according to the covenant, would own and control their own material resources. The book of Exodus talks about the God-workers-slaves covenant. The Book of Numbers tells the story about scouts’ going into Canaan and bringing back food; and it gives us an eyewitness account of the fertility and abundance of the earth. In other words, the content of the Yahweh-workers-slave covenant is for workers and the oppressed to own their own land and resources for their families and for their future offspring. That way the lamb and lion can be together. That way every family and community can live under its own vine and fig tree. The Old Testament answers the question: What is the theological content, what is the theological vocation, for African American pastoral leadership?
The New Testament picks up on this Old Testament covenant theme and thereby further clarifies the content of our theological vocation. For example, the first public speech of Jesus had a specific and unique spiritual agenda which was to declare to the community the sole reason why the Spirit had anointed him to be incarnated on earth. This first public address is eschatologically significant; that is to say, it teaches the ultimate goal of Jesus. When God through Jesus explicitly tells us why God decided to reveal Godself in the decisive revelation of Jesus on earth, such a public declaration is like a presidential State of the Union address. What is the sole reason God incarnated Godself in Jesus? To find our vocational answer to this question, we turn to Luke 4:16-20 (NIV).
In these words, Jesus tells us why he came to earth, and, consequently, he tells us the substance of African American pastoral leadership as it is written in this Lukan passage:
16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him.”
Now this is how the Savior and Liberator describes the criteria of his mission on earth.
Not only does Jesus unambiguously elaborate his criteria for success, but Jesus also enunciates plainly the criteria for human success. To be a Christian is to want to go to heaven ultimately. Whether you believe heaven exists after death where we will eventually be rejoined with our fathers, grandfathers, mothers, and grandmothers, or whether heaven means a better life on earth, the primary reward of being a Christian is to get to heaven. There we will meet Jesus. Whatever it looks like, heaven is a new life with Jesus. Jesus has already told us in Luke his sole purpose and where we can find him; that is to say, with the poor, the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed. It is no accident that these are the same criteria for Christians. To my knowledge, there is only one place in the Bible where Jesus explicitly gives the criteria for Christians to get into heaven. Those criteria – our vocational criteria for African American pastoral leadership – are found in Mt: 25:31-40 (NIV) where it reads:
31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ 40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”
The clarity of these criteria rings true with three specific types of African American pastoral leadership. We are called by our vocation to be practical, pastoral, and prophetic leaders. The practical vocation calls us to accumulate as many material resources and as much wealth to build a material reality so the poor, the workers, and the oppressed can live life abundantly. The Old Testament provided material resources for the ancient Hebrew people in the land of Canaan. In Luke, Jesus said today he is the fulfillment of the liberation year of jubilee; that is to say, the oppressed become materially free. Jesus’ criteria for entering heaven explicitly states giving water, food, clothing, health, shelter, etc. to the poor, the workers, and the oppressed in every nation on earth. The pastoral vocation commands us to bind up the wounds of the physically broken and the emotionally wounded. The prophetic vocation commands us to speak truth to power. The Old Testament Yahweh called Moses to tell Pharaoh to let his people go. Similarly, Luke 4 and Mt. 25 tell stories about fighting structures that keep workers, the poor, and the oppressed in chains; that is to say, so that they might have life and have it abundantly.
BLACK THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION
Beginning with black theology of liberation in the 1960s, we have examples of how Jesus’ mission in Luke and Jesus’ criteria in Matthew were found in African American pastoral leadership. In fact, most people who study black religion agree that black theology of liberation is the only indigenous American theology that was created by African American pastoral leadership and the only American theology that grew out of the church and not out of graduate schools or from professors in higher education. We can actually pinpoint the seeds of black theology of liberation or black liberation theology. On July 31, 1966, a group of African American pastoral leaders published a full-page article in the New York Times newspaper. The article was titled “Black Power: Statement by the National Committee of Negro Churchmen.” It was a black theological response to Stokely Carmichael’s cry for black power shouted earlier in Greenwood, Miss., in June 1966. Forty-eight African American pastoral leaders signed the New York Times statement – forty-seven men and one woman. The listed consisted of: one AME bishop, four AME clergy, two clergy from two state national councils of churches, one Episcopal bishop, five Episcopal clergy, one Congregational clergyperson, three UCC clergypersons, two from the CME clergy, one officer from the National Baptist Convention of America, ten Baptist clergypersons, seven from the Presbyterian clergy, three Methodist Church bishops, one Methodist Church clergyperson, two clergypersons from the National Council of Churches, three independent clergypersons, one bishop from the AMEZ Church, and one AMEZ clergyperson.
Not only do we note the seeds of black liberation theology sprouting from the churches and not the academy, but we also underscore the fact that these were from young religious leadership. For us today, therefore, we must be intentional, deliberate, and strategic to theologically educate the vocation of young African American pastoral leadership. The future of African American pastoral leadership depends on training, educating, and clarifying the theological vocation of the next generation.
Black clergy published their July 31, 1966, black power statement to articulate a basic theological position. They felt that God had given the United States of America abundant material resources, and this country had failed to utilize this wealth for the well-being of its own citizens and for people in other countries. In particular, they put forth goals for jobs, income, education, rebuilding the urban areas, and equal material opportunity; and they opposed United States wars abroad. Basically, from a theological perspective, they wrote about the need for economic and political strength. As the following quote from the 1966 statement makes clear, they offered a theological foundation. “Too often the Negro church has stirred its members away from the reign of God in this world to a distorted and complacent view of an otherworldly conception of God’s power. We commit ourselves as churchmen to make more meaningful in the life of our institution our conviction that Jesus Christ reigns in the ‘here and now’ as well as in the future he brings in upon us. We shall, therefore, use more of the resources of our churches in working for human justice in the places of social changes and upheaval where our Master is already at work.”
THE SANKOFA INSTITUTE FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN PASTORAL LEADERSHIP: OUR OPPORTUNITY
So far, we have pointed to domestic and international challenges facing African American pastoral leaders. Along the way, we indicated some sources to help us overcome the challenge. For example, we underscored the vocational heritage from slavery. We revisited the unbroken legacy of African Americans supporting the freedom efforts in Africa. We analyzed the Bible and found three stories from Exodus, Luke, and Matthew; and, with the origin of black theology of liberation, we heard the words from the most recent instance of God’s vocational call to black pastoral leaders.
Challenges always bring opportunities, and here is where the Sankofa Institute for African American Pastoral Leadership (located at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas) enters. The Sankofa Institute is precisely what we need today. It offers us theological training for the current and next generations of pastoral leaders. It is connected with African values and, at the same time, moves us forward into the future. The Institute is ecumenical, meaning that all human beings are open to the new life that Jesus offers in Matthew 25. The Institute is interdisciplinary by supplementing theological vocational training with any experiences or practices that will forge new life for our people. The Institute embraces all sectors of the church – pastors, lay people, and professors. It combines the intellectual, professional and inspirational dimensions of pastoral leadership. Finally, the Institute offers various degree programs to meet the specific and diverse needs of African American pastors.
Let me close by imagining what our vocational goals might be.
One, I urge each of our churches to develop a black theological statement based on Jesus’ criteria which he laid out for himself in Luke 4 and which he offers to us in Matthew 25.
Two, identify the concrete material needs of the communities that surround our local churches.
Three, meet with all churches within a one-mile radius of our churches and discuss how we might pool our resources to stabilize and enhance the well-being of our families and our communities.
Four, develop ongoing relations with countries in Africa.
Five, prioritize church ministry around practical ways to educate the leadership of black people for the 21st century.
I still believe in the best of that old ship of Zion that we call the black church in America. Let us work together in the Sankofa Institute for African American Pastoral Leadership in order for us to be faithful to the faith of our ancestors and to the One who came so that all of creation can have new life.
Rev. Dwight N. Hopkins is a professor of theology at The University of Chicago Divinity School.