The Voices of African-American Worship

The issue of Liturgy entitled “Renewals in Retrospect: Fifty Years of Worship Scholarship amidst the Changing Worlds of Worship,” was co-edited by Andrew Wymer, vice-president of the Liturgical Conference board and professor of worship at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and me.

We solicited essays from a range of members of the North American Academy of Liturgy (NAAL) looking at what has changed in liturgical scholarship and liturgical practice in the years since NAAL was founded in response to the Second Vatican Council.

Here is an excerpt from an essay by Joseph Donnella II who looks at the history of African-American Christians in light of the extent to which its riches have been ignored and recently rejuvenated. –– Melinda Quivik

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Willie James Jennings, in a May 2020 issue of Christian Century, speaks of his life journey in the academy as a journey that begins with “questioning ’whiteness’ in the presence of blackness and questioning ‘blackness’ in the presence of whiteness.” Jennings also speaks of the resistance encountered when utilizing this methodology as a “captivity”—indeed, “a racial captivity”—likened in mind to the Babylonian captivity to which Luther asserted the western Christian church had fallen prey. Theological and eschatological difficulties when teaching about matters of race and faith led Jennings to share how his understanding of theology grew, was modified, and adapted over the years. Reading Jennings has led me to similarly acknowledge that I’ve been thinking about matters of worship, liturgy, and culture since I was a high school student and members of the Spiritan community introduced the question of inculturation by asking: “Do you think it is possible to share the Christian gospel without imposing western Eurocentric patterns and cultural forms?” . . .

In the 1970s and 1980s, local communities sought to redefine the meaning of catholicism for themselves by developing new African-American forms of worship, theology, and ministry, and reclaiming Black Catholic history. In some predominantly Black parishes, African music, drumming, and dance, as well as gospel music, were added to the Mass in an attempt to create a worship service more attuned to traditional forms of Black cultural expression.

. . . African American hymnals and ritual books were created anew to help nearly every tradition: Episcopalian, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, UCC, etc. The produced materials and adopted ritual practices were fashioned to foster expression of what it is to be “Black and Episcopalian, Black and Lutheran, Black and Methodist, Black and Presbyterian, etc.” The genius of “Black culture(s)” within mainline north American traditions was at last gaining fuller recognition. . .

Melva W. Costen, in what has now become a classic work, African American Christian Worship, reminds African Americans that whatever denominational group we belong to, Black Americans share kinship and experiences of “marginalization.” The regenerative nature of worship in the African American community, even with geographical and denominational distinctions, allows freer forms of expression often alternating between fixed and evolving idioms of music, ritual, and communal prayer practices. She further reminds us that there needs to be a more inclusive understanding about who belongs to the “Black Church.”

Paul VI’s call for an “authentic African Christianity” resonated especially among African Americans who, no matter what ecclesial body they belonged to, yearned for familiar experiences of worship where voice could be given to what was known of God’s power, mercy, and liberation; where black people could express their spirituality and celebrate Exodus and Resurrection, freed from the distortions of racist rationalization and justification; with healing and anointing, singing and dancing, and shouts of both lamentation and praise.

Worship in the Black community is where people can be free from what demeans and humiliates. Worship sustains life. In her liturgical ethnography, A Precious Fountain, Mary McGann shares how she learned that worship and music in Black churches, “took twisted versions of Christianity and retwisted them,” giving expression to the deeper roots of liberation, healing, and release underlying what was received from hearing the redemptive acts of God rooted in Israel and Jesus.

The full essay is available now in the digital and print editions of Liturgy. All of the essays in Liturgy 37, no. 4 are available by personal subscription and through many libraries.

Joseph Donnella II is an adjunct professor of worship and liturgy at the Ecumenical Institute of St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, MD, and pastor of St. Paul’s Utica Lutheran Church in Utica, MD, after retiring as chaplain and adjunct associate professor of religion at Gettysburg College.

Joseph Donnella II, “Let the Blessings Flow: Liturgy and Race in the Last Fifty Years,” Liturgy 37, no. 4 (2022): 22-27.