Notes of a Native Daughter

Testifying in Theological Education

Keri Day

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467462594
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Formation religieuse

Bearing witness to more liberating futures in theological education

In Notes of a Native Daughter, Keri Day testifies to structural inequalities and broken promises of inclusion through the eyes of a black woman who experiences herself as both stranger and friend to prevailing models of theological education. Inviting the reader into her religious world—a world that is African American and, more specifically, Afro-Pentecostal—she not only uncovers the colonial impulses of theological education in the United States but also proposes that the lived religious practices and commitments of progressive Afro-Pentecostal communities can help the theological academy decolonize and reenvision multiple futures.

Deliberately speaking in the testimonial form—rather than the more conventional mode of philosophical argument—Day bears witness to the truth revealed in her and others' lived experience in a voice that is unapologetically visceral, emotive, demonstrative, and, ultimately, communal. With prophetic insight, she addresses this moment when the fastest-growing group of students and teachers are charismatic and neo-Pentecostal people of color for whom theological education is currently a site of both hope and harm. Calling for repentance, she provides a redemptive narrative for moving forward into a diverse future that can be truly liberating only when it allows itself to be formed by its people and the Spirit moving in them.

1

Hanging New Ornaments

A small gray church sits on a corner lot on Brown Street in my hometown. This small church is a sturdy building of gray bricks, black-paned windows, and two small entrance doors. It sits surrounded by deep luscious green grass, a place where we played many touch-tag games and ran marathons as children. To the east of the church once lay a gravel parking lot where families would get out of cars three to four times a week to participate in worship services and many kinds of rehearsals.

As a child, I would often stand on the porch of the church and look out into the neighborhood. Town residents called this neighborhood the “east side,” which was the code phrase for the black community in Springfield, Illinois. But not just any black community: the ghetto. This phrase evoked the side of town that was rough, uncultured, and poor. It was a place middle-class people avoided if they could, an area of town where few white people congregated or fellowshiped. But this was our home, our spiritual mecca, the place where we came to experience a different kind of wealth, the wealth of love and joy cultivated within the deep bonds of community. We were joyful and lived inside of this joy. Our little gray church was where God was found and where we found God in each other.

This modest building reflected the people that it held. We were a congregation of sixty to one hundred people who entered the double doors leading into the sanctuary to beat our tambourines, to sing long songs that were marked by a call-and-response format, and to respond to the preached word with loud “Hallelujahs” and “Amens.” Our time together in the sanctuary was loud, sensual, and unapologetically frenzied. That sacred time together was found not only in the sanctuary; it was found especially in the basement. The basement of the church is where we broke bread and laughed at the top of our lungs. The basement encouraged us to find God in the elements of bread and water, fried chicken and punch. Despite the austere look of the basement, we always took the time to decorate the tables with flowers, colorful paper plates, and plastic cups. This infusion of care into our eating together communicated the importance and sacredness of the body. Hunger was sinful if we could meet this need. And for those members who struggled to put food on the table, these meals marked their experience of salvation, a movable feast and eucharistic celebration. The saving grace of being fed a wonderful meal when uncertain where the next meal was coming from was a pure gift and another form of worship.

A place that birthed dozens of pastors, this small church house was the beginning of my memories of God, of stories, of community, of church mothers robed in white. The mothers’ board had its own section of the church, perched right by the organ. These women were fierce and demanding. Clutching their purses in one hand and their Bibles in the other, these women knew struggle. As young black women in the 1930s and 1940s, they had experienced social and economic obstacles, even in the North, that can be difficult to imagine now. Although Illinois was not a part of the Jim Crow South, there was certainly informal segregation, disclosed in silent covenants and exclusive white-only eating clubs sustained by the whispered agreements of the white gentry. These women were no strangers to racial prejudice and discrimination. Many of them served as nurses and domestics. While broader white society may not have cherished them, our church gave them seats of honor at the front of the church, where everyone viewed them as God’s daughters and mothers of Zion on whom the community depended.

The elders of the church may have occupied the pulpit (which was seen as a privileged space that could only be occupied by men), but these men depended on the wisdom and authority of the church mothers. I remember numerous occasions on which the church mothers openly rebuked an elder for disrespect or other infractions. These women were far from subjects to patriarchy, although later in this chapter I will nuance and complexify how the patriarchal structures of my childhood tradition impeded women who desired to be in ministry in unorthodox ways. Taking their cue from the church mothers, these elders were bold and claimed with exuberance and urgency that the Lord was with us, that God was on our side. I especially remember the elders inviting us as children to read the lesson books for Sunday school and midweek Bible study. I was truly excited to have such a central place in the worship service by reading aloud to the entire congregation. I felt special. It was only later that I discovered that some of the elders and church mothers were not literate (or could not read well). Yet many of them knew the Bible better than those members who could read.

My community had a powerful oral tradition of passing on both stories from the Bible and stories of how our ancestors trusted in the God of those stories. This oral tradition created church leaders who painted on the canvas of our hearts a hopeful picture of God’s loving, compassionate nature. We learned a knowledge of the heart, of being with and for each other on this journey we call life. We knew it was the quality of our relationships within this community that bound us to practicing God’s nature of love and care. We were not alone: we had each other.

With my community, my experience of crying out in ecstatic utterance invoked in me a desire to inch toward divine mysteries. Yet, this search for divine mystery and presence was one we carried in our bodies, not in rigid and abstract philosophical precepts. Our bodies and not only our minds were sites of divine knowledge. From the first moment we walked through the church doors, our experience was a deeply embodied experience. We met the first song with exuberant clapping and stomping. Sometimes, depending on how many of us were in the church, we could feel the church floor shaking as we danced and expressed God’s ongoing movement and power in and through our bodies. When the choir sang, most people were on their feet, moving and swaying to the music.

There was a time for dancing or what we called “shouting,” or what W. E. B. Du Bois referred to as “the frenzy.” This time of dancing would often go on longer than the actual sermon. Sometimes, dancing could end up being the sermon. We rarely had printed programs as I was growing up, but if we did, the program would always have an asterisk at the top with this statement: “Program subject to change through the leading of the Spirit.” We believed that the dance was indeed a primary vehicle through which to experience God’s power, deliverance, intervention, and providence. The body was not just a bystander while the mind contemplated God. Rather, the body was active and often led the mind to an experience of God.

And if we made it to the sermon, the sermon was likewise a highly embodied activity. As the pastor forcefully preached the sermon, the congregation responded not only through verbal cues of affirmation such as “Amen!” Some congregants stood up on their feet and talked back to the pastor. Some congregants waved their hands in the air over and over, only to bring their hands back into a body hug and groan. Some congregants walked the aisles, shaking their heads, before returning to their seats. Most interestingly, some congregants could be so touched by the sermon that they disrupted the entire preached message, flowing into the aisles in order to dance and shout—but only when the music began.

Ah, the music! The music was legendary in our church. It is often said that the organ preaches the sermon with the black preacher. Certainly the organ holds a sacred place in the black church, particularly within the black Pentecostal worship experience. The music can often upstage the preacher, and one sensed a fight behind closed doors between pastor and organist. Often in the middle or at the end of a preacher’s message, the organ begins to croon as background to the preacher’s words, offering a dramatic, staccato-like flair to the preacher’s words and statements. “God will pick you up” (organ plays dramatically), “turn you around” (organ plays even more dramatically), “place your feet on solid ground!” (organ shifts to high-pitched sounds and is loud and dramatic as if to punctuate the ending of an exclamatory sentence). In that moment, the presence and power of God sweep us away. Our bodies tremble. We experience God.

When I entered junior high, I became more aware of the importance of stories. My spiritual journey began with biblical stories that I heard my grandmother talk about in her living room or with her friends at Hardee’s Restaurant. I would lean in to the stories told in Sunday school class or stories recounted by my pastor, Claude Farlow, who was a master storyteller. These stories were about biblical characters who were always “counted out,” persons perpetually underestimated. Yet these characters had something stronger than societal expectations: they had God.

Exodus was a dominant narrative retold in my church, and a teacher or preacher would often belt out in a loud voice, “If God can deliver the children of Israel from bondage out of Egypt, God can deliver you from any of your issues!” In part, the fabled “Egyptland” described a state of spiritual bondage and existential hardship, a place where one sought to be delivered from spiritual wandering and restlessness. Those in my congregation often testified about their restless wanderings as pilgrims on the road of life seeking spiritual refuge. During testimony service, each of us would speak about our own personal spiritual wandering and how we overcame. Each week presented a new wilderness, a new opportunity to find communion and spiritual rest through our wrestlings with God. We supported each other through corporate prayer, whether we were gathered at the church or at someone’s home.

For us, prayer was warfare. It was warfare until we took our last breath. Such prayer was about communicating our longings, actual attitudes, and convictions while facing down the finitude of our existence. Prayer was about the presence of God. And moving into the presence of God was hard work. It involved daily facing both our human possibilities and our limitations, those inclinations that inhibited us from actualizing ourselves as joyful, loving, and compassionate beings. Prayer allowed the tides of life to wash over our pain and sorrow, as we stretched our eyes toward the shores of joy and peace. This was a collective quest, a corporate pilgrimage to attain with our hearts what even money cannot buy.

Yet Egyptland also entailed the material persecutions that people within my congregation endured. Because my congregation struggled with underemployment and unemployment, one would constantly hear people refer to this nation as less than an “American dream.” It wasn’t that my community uncritically dismissed a number of benefits associated with this country; my community simply endured experiences that demonstrated a constant denial of these benefits to black people. We were Leah’s children, not the preferred children of Jacob’s beloved Rachel. Historically, black people have been dehumanized, despised, and simply unloved within a society that never meant to value such lives above mere commoditization. This history has material consequences. I could see it etched in the faces of many in our congregation. I heard feelings of material uncertainty reinforced by institutions that did little to remedy past and present racial injustices and aggressions. They lamented being systematically locked out of simply having enough.

While I lived a middle-class existence, the economic suffering of others within our congregation left an indelible imprint on my psyche. They needed social respect. They needed to be heard and seen truly. Despite these hardships, my community was resilient. In fact, part of our pilgrimage was to embody resilience in the face of uncertainty and material insecurity. My community at Brown Street moved and inspired me to reflect on how my faith illuminated the dark places of society.

Given those persistent dark places, we were always cultivating experiences of communal joy and hope. Another of my absolute favorite biblical stories was that of Pentecost in the book of Acts, and it was always the most dramatically staged story in our church. The first announcement that we were entering the sacred terrain of retelling Pentecost often began with the words “And they were gathered together in one accord.” This is a verse right out of the Acts narrative, a line that signals what was held as sacred within our community: our joyful togetherness, our unbreakable bond of living and loving each other. We were of one accord.

Pentecost was of ultimate importance to my community because the Acts community spoke with tongues of fire. Fire was an important metaphor to my community, and no wonder: God appears to Moses in a burning bush. God led the children of Israel in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to give them light. John the Baptist says of Jesus that he will come to baptize us with the Holy Spirit and fire. The writer of Hebrews talks of God as a consuming fire. We danced, shouted, and cried out to God with passion that was consuming like fire. We understood fire not just as destructive but as a source for heat, protection, light, and purification. It was this fire we talked about, searched for, and, once experienced, testified about in celebration of new life. I too wanted to experience God as fire.

Pentecost was also about the miraculous for my community. The miraculous was a necessary experience that defies the status quo and its logic, breaking open impossible spiritual possibilities for flourishing together. The miraculous is highly disruptive of the order of things, the logic of this order. Just imagine: the disciples gather in the upper room in Jerusalem, waiting, as instructed by the resurrected Christ, to receive the Holy Spirit. Then something happens that they do not expect or even desire. They speak in tongues, in the native languages of Jews gathered from around the world. This must have been shocking and unexpected. It was certainly disruptive. The gathered Jews hear the disciples in their own native languages and are stupefied. They ask, “What does this mean?” They are lost for words and quite confused. Clearly, the impossible is transpiring. But they cannot deny what they hear: something that was impossible is now possible. None of the disciples in the upper room could have known the mother languages of Jews living in Asia, Egypt, and other places. For the disciples to have known these mother tongues, they would have had to travel to these places, study these languages with natives of the area in a slow and meticulous way, and learn the culture and politics out of which the language emerges. The disciples had not done that. So, again, the gathered crowds are left wondering how this is possible. As theologian Willie Jennings concludes, this event is purely an act of the Spirit.¹ Pentecost is grounded in the language of miracles. The impossible becomes possible through the work of the Spirit.

Jennings most importantly names the true miracle of Pentecost as described in the book of Acts: the miracle of revolutionary intimacy.² Language is about identity, community, and intimacy. To know and speak someone’s language, particularly when that person is from far away, is to create an intimacy in the encounter between you and the native speaker. The power of Pentecost is the Spirit’s announcement of revolutionary intimacy: this is what the Spirit would create in this new community after Pentecost. In a world that did not desire intimacy across differences, this new community of Jesus’s followers would constitute a community marked by revolutionary intimacy. This revolutionary intimacy would not be intimacy according to tribal or nationalistic boundaries. This community would disrupt these boundaries, uniting unlikely people through desires for intimacy and belonging. This kind of community could only be the work of the Spirit.

My Pentecostal community spoke in the language of miracles. Although early Pentecostalism as seen in the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 briefly exemplified this revolutionary intimacy across differences, much of contemporary Pentecostalism has focused less on this practice. Nevertheless, Pentecost was important for my religious community, as it disrupted the logics and orders of this world, a world often driven by gross inequities of power.

I was a believer in the miraculous. And I wanted this fire. From a young age, I would climb the steps of our small gray church in order to kneel down at the altar. I was on a quest. When I was not at the church altar, I was in front of the altar I had constructed in my room, right on top of my hamper. Decorating this altar with books and cloth was my way to reach divine presence, a way to communicate my longings and my desires to experience this consuming, disruptive presence.

Like all testimonies, mine also contains pain, trauma, and loss. A few turning points reshaped my spiritual journey and eventually my theological quest. The first was more of a gradual experience, an awakening from a deep slumber. It was my unfolding awareness of how racism is covertly exercised in my hometown, a town that ironically prides itself on being the home of Abe Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. That awareness came chiefly through the predominantly white private academy where I was educated. If only the halls could speak! So many black students talked to each other about the micro-aggressions they experienced within this school context. For all the virtues of this private academy (and there are many), the white community associated with this academy fundamentally saw itself as color-blind, even as postracial, which created a deep frustration in many students of color who attended.

It is for such reasons that I have a complex relationship with this academy. While I was deeply affirmed there, many other students of color felt differently and have a hard time returning to the school. Conversations about how structural racism sits inside such institutions have been nonexistent. In fact, to suggest that racial problems are present is to be seen as a troublemaker in such communities. I remember that as a student I desperately wanted to ask school authorities: Have you ever sat down with black students and guaranteed them freedom to speak without fear of reprimand? Have you ever asked such questions of them—and listened?

I do remember being asked about the problem of racism, but it was after I had graduated high school. I visited my hometown over Christmas break during my first year of college and decided to drop by my former school. While I was chatting with a white male administrator, he asked me a question about black history and racism. He mentioned that some African American parents wanted the school to be more invested in teaching the history of racism in the United States. These parents felt that part of the spiritual and moral formation of their children (and all the children in the school) involved understanding the black history and moral entanglements of this country. Understandably, these parents believed that their children needed this kind of moral support from the academy. After offering this background, the male administrator looked me in the eyes and asked, “Should we talk about the history of racism here?” We stood there in complete silence. I s...