Part 1 of 3

We are Black and we are Nazarene... two heritages which are valued and deeply honored! Some may feel that either of these could compromise or negate the other. In reality they complement and nourish one another. Spread the word! 

Today we see and are responding to a great need for "informed preaching" in the African American community; the need to both inform and affirm our cultural heritage and history, and the need to show the complimentarity of the faith with Black contexts. 

"Beware of anyone who presumes to have the final word on how to prepare a sermon. We should also beware of anyone who thinks that preaching cannot be discussed, cannot be criticized, or cannot be improved. Any exercise that is engaged in so widely and for so long among such diverse circumstances and with such varied levels of approval, appreciation, and effectiveness begs to be examined. We should be able, in some sense, to say that preaching is done well or done poorly and to comment on how it could be improved^{1 i}."

What is the image of the preacher that the community sees?

1. The comfort dispenser whose primary task is like that of Tylenol: to stop the pain. Every service should minister to our fretfulness and anxiety, our bruises and our bleeding - but we need more to cope with life's pain.

2. The pedantic dilettante, the "scholar" who wishes to be known as bright and well-informed. The preacher who sets out primarily to display erudition does a disservice and leaves the sheep hungry.

3. The social prophet looks at the failures of the institutions of society and the unraveling of the social fabric. Someone needs to stand on the wall and cry "Woe!"

4. The Bible repository seeks to be an expert on the content of the Bible. These sermons are loyal representations of biblical scenes and doctrines that sustain real living through interpretation, application, and celebration.

5. The faithful pastor who recognizes those needs described above and adds one more. God's special agent to lead people into a relationship with Jesus Christ is the ultimate objective.

Preaching is Different
· Preaching is a uniquely religious event, dealing with subject matter that relates to things ultimate. It defies triviality. It is a summons to reflect on God and human destiny in a relevant fashion, given the constraints of time and the context of the audience.
· In preaching, the preacher honors God's truth both in the Scriptures, as well as God's truth found in logic, history, biology, mathematics, biography, poetry, drama, for Jesus promised that the Comforter would lead us into new truth.
· The sermon is different from any other "staged event" because it seeks to tilt life God ward, to encourage us to answer as we are addressed by God. It is perpendicular, but it must lift the horizontal, mundane, pedestrian issues of living toward the face of God.

· Preaching helps us find answers to the mystery of human suffering and misfortune. The preacher has the burden of interpreting life's annoying vicissitudes and relating them to the larger purposes of God in creation.
· Preaching has the audacity to ask us to live as though we had to face God at any time. It reminds us of our tentative state and the transience of life. 

Four Quivers in the Preacher's Arrow

1. God is still present and active in human affairs and intervenes in our behalf.
2. Spiritual renewal and moral wholeness are available to us all.
3. Genuine community is a realizable goal for the human family.
4. Eternity moves through time, and immortality is an ever-present potential. We have already passed from death unto life when we love.

Is Black Preaching Necessary?

Culture
Preaching is carried out in the idiom, imagery, style, and worldview of a particular people. Without Black culture, there could be no Black preaching. Culture is the accumulation over time of all the wisdom and methods of a given cultural group, for the purpose of ensuring its survival. Each group has a menu of acceptable foods, a collection of proper hairstyles and attire, a way to greet people, ways to sing music and tell stories, and ways to build homes and rear children. In addition to language, and included in the language, is a way to view the world². 

African Americans were not stripped of their culture. The great strength of the Black church is not due to any missionary activity, but to independent, clandestine meetings, which adapted their African Traditional Religion (ATR) into a creatively authentic Christian faith. The preacher should never fight a war against the culture, it is often too well entrenched.

The Significance of the Black Homiletic

Alan Geyer, editor of Christian Century, wrote in 1969:
Systematic theology, by and large, remains in a state of Teutonic captivity. The Aryan bias of Christian doctrine is perhaps the most serious intellectual obstacle to full ecumenical fellowship with the younger churches, to their own theological creativity and to Christian evangelism in Asia, Africa and Latin America…; the tragedy is that because of the confinement of even non-Western theologians in Teutonic captivity very few indigenous theologies have emerged³. 

A good way to be sure that any theologically informed person understands the folk-patterns of interpretation in Black culture is to call attention to the ways in which these patterns parallel the New Hermeneutic. "The word of God must be left free to assert itself in an unflinchingly critical manner against distortions and fixations. But … theology and preaching should be free to make a translation into whatever language is required at the moment and to refuse to be satisfied with correct, archaizing repetition of 'pure doctrine'⁴." 

For Black people to keep their faith they had to do so in their own relevant ways, and the proclamation of the Black pulpit survives because it spoke and speaks to the needs of Blacks. The New Hermeneutic proffers:

· One must declare the gospel in the language and culture of the people.
· The gospel must speak to a person's current needs.

The History of Black Preaching

Black preaching developed over a long and often quite disconnected series of contacts between the Christian gospel and Black people caught up in the experience of slavery and oppression.

The earliest record of the "conversion" of Blacks in the colonies is that of "Anthony, Negro; Isabell, Negro; William, their child, baptized" on February 16, 1623, in Elizabeth City County in Virginia. In 1674, John Elliot of New England was inviting masters to send their slaves to him for religious instruction. Anglicans in Goose Creek, SC, started one of the earliest records of large-scale instruction and conversion, in 1695.

Many Black preachers preached to more Whites than Blacks:

1. In the early days of slavery, the number of Blacks who were permitted to hear Christian preaching was relatively limited. Even Thomas Jefferson, an enlightened architect of American democracy, raised serious objections to the human qualities of Black people.

2.  From the very beginning of slavery, many slaveholders had serious misgivings about how unchristian the slave system was. So, when the masters finally did permit the unfortunate Blacks to hear the Word, the portions selected for them were distorted passages from Paul intended to sell slavery to the slaves as "the will of God" rather than the avarice of Whites.

3. The denial of the day of rest was a factor in the gatherings of Black preachers to communicate the Word.

4. Black preachers preached to White audiences because they offered not only novelty, but also real talent and power, thus Whites heard Blacks gladly. Harry Hoosier was the most traveled Black preacher, preaching from 1784 to his death in 1810.

The Evolution of the Black Homiletic.

1.  DuBois said in 1903 that the first church was "not by any means Christian" but "gradually, after two centuries, the church became Christian." He added, "It is this historic fact that the Negro church of today bases itself upon the sole surviving social institution of the African Fatherland that accounts for its extraordinary growth and vitality⁵." 

2. The languages of Africa are manifestly tonal, and all speaking includes such linguistic features.

3. Black preaching is inherently dependent on call and response, music and oral communication characterized by considerable audience participation.

The contribution of George Whitefield to the Black preaching tradition cannot be overstated. William H. Pipes contends that the preaching of George Whitefield was the bridge between the Black preaching style and White preaching. Whitefield preached up and down the Atlantic seaboard, starting in Savannah, where he both preached and founded an orphanage.

Style in Black Preaching

The Black congregation is very permissive allowing preachers to be themselves.

TONE
Among Black preachers the style most prevalently used is known as "moaning," "tuning," "whooping," "zooning," or any one of several localized terms. Some folks get excited just to hear the tonal aspect of the religious mother tongue. The history of Black Africa was preserved in song, as were its laws, customs, and traditional folk stories and hero tales.

RHYTHM
Organ music is often used to ignite a sermonic celebration in the direction of rhythmic meter.

CALL AND RESPONSE
Black people express themselves or unburden their hearts with a "Have Mercy!" or "Truly!" or "Early!" "Praise the Lord!" "Well!" When a point is especially new or needed, one may hear, "Stay right there!" One may even hear "Hush!" when the ecstasy is too great to bear. A preacher who preaches too long may be advised to "Come on in!" Or dead silence might signal that the nourishment of the Word has already ceased. 

ROLE PLAYING AND STORYTELLING

As they went up to the temple to pray, a certain man --- don't know this man's name, but the next few words tell us somewhat of his condition --- a certain man that was lame from his mother's womb. When it is said "lame man," that made me feel sorry for him, because it is a pitiful thing when a man has been useful and now has lost usefulness. He had become lame and not able to get around.
But when I got to thinking about this man who was lame, and I remember that the writer said he was lame from his mother's womb, that made it more pitiful to me. For not only was he a lame man, but he had been lame all his life. And I can't think of nothing more pitiful than a lame baby --- one who was born into the world and whose parents have ever hoped some day he will be strong and healthy. I can see those parents watching him day in and day out, but he never had any use of his limbs. He grew old in age, but still lame.
I think it was last fall, or some time recently, a teenager was told that one his legs would have to be amputated. He just hated the idea. "Here I am a teenager, where all the other children my age are active in getting around, doing this and that; and conditions are such that I will have to lose one of my limbs and be a cripple for the rest of my life." You remember he tried to run away from home because he didn't want his leg amputated.
Well, it is a pitiful thing to see a teenager lame. But, here, this man had never been able to use his limbs, and had been lame from his mother's womb. This man had to be carried. You know, we can understand this man's condition…. I know a lot of people in the church that are healthy and strong, but they still want to be carried… They had to carry this man and they carried him daily and laid him at the gate called Beautiful. Now they carried him daily, it means that he must have been receiving something that kept him coming back… Look at that man was made by the hand of God. That man is lame and twisted, and had to be carried.
Well, when he saw Peter and John going into the temple, he got glad because, you know, he had begged so long until he could just look at a person as he approached and he could tell what kind of gift he was going to get. I can understand somehow how he felt. At one time I used to hop bells at the hotel. And, you know, after a few years I could look at a guest when he pulled up in front of the door, and I could pretty well tell you what kind of tip I was going to get. Oh, I could look at his bags… I could look at the way he was dressed, and I could tell the type, the size of tip I was going to get.
Well, this man had been in the business so long until he could look and size up the kind of gift he was going to get. But this time he underestimated. Yes, he did! He knew that he could get a good gift from Peter and John, but he was looking for alms. He was looking for something he could exchange at the supermarket. Oh, but Peter and John said, "Look on us." And every one of us who is the representative of the Lord ought to be able to tell the world to "look on us." 

SUBJECTIVITY AND RHETORICAL FLAIR

Black preachers have to let go. They feel what they are preaching about: freedom, sorrow, fear, rage, and joy. You can't be objective when God lays hands on you. You "preach what the Spirit say preach, and you do what the Spirit say do!" real soul preaching demands rhetorical flair. This is not to imply that good Black preaching uses rhetoric for a crutch.


SLOW DELIVERY

Black preachers take their time. The significance of the slow delivery is its impact on the whole person: cognitive, intuitive, and emotive consciousness.. No matter how quick the mind the Black hearer needs time for the essence to sink into all sectors of the psyche.

[Part 2]