I preached my initial sermon 40 years ago this month (I think it was the 4th Sunday) at Saint Philip AME Church under the leadership of “master” Pastor George Moore, Sr. The text was Luke 4 and the sermon was titled “Release to the Captives.”
God is faithful. In those 40 years God has used me to serve in congregations from seven members to over 20,000, in very rural areas and in urban centers. During these years God’s anointing has empowered me to minister in ways that have given me great joy. Too, God has given me sufficient grace to live through and learn from my colossal failures.
While there are several persons who have been key to my formation as a Christian, preacher, and minister, most notable among them is Pastor George Moore, Sr., my father in the ministry. Today, however, I want to share a bit about my mother in the ministry, Rev. Dr. Renita Weems. She has recently published an essay, “What Kind of Doctor Are You?” that has garnered due attention and thought. It is fitting that my reflections today include my love and appreciation for her, for her influence on my life and ministry has been life-changing.
My brother, Henry, introduced me to Renita in the late 80s when she was his professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School. We became friends and she mentored me through long conversations on the phone filled with laughter and correction, grace and challenges. I’d learned the International Phonetic Alphabet as an English major at Morehouse and its use became essential in those conversations once I tired of asking her to further explain or define words she’d used. I’d write what I heard and its context and then call Henry or talk to a professor later so I could know the language for myself and own the vocabulary.
It was she who first gave me the language and the permission to ask questions. During those days, I made regular trips to the Christian bookstore on Cleveland Avenue in Atlanta, seeking to prepare myself not only for ministry but also for Christian living. I was still learning much from my parents and grandmother, but I wanted more. One day, as I was reading a book I had purchased there, its content did not sit right with me. When I tried to discuss it with Renita, she asked, sounding surprised, if not a smidgen perturbed, “What makes you think a middle-aged white woman in the Midwest is writing for you?”
I stood straight up in my room that night. That one question opened up years and years of questions:
Who are we reading? What are we reading? To whom do we give authority? What books and other writings do we scripturalize? How do they shape our thought and behavior?
It was she who trained me to put pen to paper and in so doing to “complete a thought.” Forming letters, forming words, forming thoughts.
It was she who compelled me to get email and I have ever since been an early adopter of new, relevant technologies as they were made available to the public.
It was she who first challenged me to press through what biblical texts said to question why they said what they said and what communities needed such and why.
It was she who taught me to honor God as God met me in the academy and as God met me in the utter messiness and pain of my life.
It was she who opened a resonance chamber within me to hear the sound of pure worship.
It was she who sanctioned my eschewing of lazy thinking and lazy thinkers.
Because I owe so much to her, when I saw the question she posed in her essay, I did not immediately click the link for I wanted to sit undisturbed to savor every delicious morsel.
After reading it, I’m like… why this brouhaha??? Y’all know she’s telling the truth! When I was in seminary, there were folk there who weren’t even pretending to be interested in the expansion of their minds. They were looking for preaching material and remained disengaged until something they deemed quotable fell from the lips of the lecturer. “That’ll preach!” Duty and denominational requirements and resume boosters seemed to be the motivation, not expansiveness or transformation.
We were challenged to translate the language and learnings of seminary to the work of ministry in the local congregation. Certainly, just as what I read from the Christian bookstore was not “for” me, there were assigned readings and even courses that were not “for” me. But to have the tools, the language, the research methods, the discipline, and the nerve to question, to interrogate is the gift.
I mean, seriously, there is a difference between a PhD and a DMin. Does this need to be said? I am an AME. E-VE-RY-body was called Doctor when I was growing up. And the question followed, “are they a doctor doctor or an AME Doctor?” I remember my parents making the distinction in this way, “O No, Sister So and So has a legitimate, EARNED PhD!” That meant something. It means something.
Folk with earned PhDs have been part of my life as long as I can remember: Drs. Jamye and MacDonald Williams, Dr. Mary Harris, Dr. Bill DeVeaux (Bishop William P. DeVeaux), Dr. Lou M. Beasley… They were different. They comported themselves differently. They spoke differently. No, they were not haughty nor did they pepper their conversations with unnecessary polysyllabic words. I came to learn that, when done right, the discipline required to have certain mastery of a field of study shapes and contours persons and their approach to life in ways of which others rarely have an intimation. Reading and writing change you. Reading and writing a lot change you a lot.
What Dr. Weems names in her essay about the commercialization of DMins is certainly akin to “The Great Master’s Degree Swindle” reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which schools structure and market degree programs to maximize enrollment and increase revenue. It was often so said of Columbia University’s Master’s program when I was in those environs while at Union Theological Seminary.
All degrees are not created equal nor earned/attained equally. Ça suffit!
Now, I want to move beyond what she has written to the “invisible ink” to which she points me in particular:
Lack of rigor and disciplined engagement in theological education reflects in weakness and lack of spiritual and theological depth in the pew. My love and passion has always been in the congregational setting. I absolutely love ministering with God’s people. There is nothing more challenging and more fulfilling. So, I must call us to attend to the calamitous reality in which the church has largely abandoned catechesis and essentially contracted out discipleship to gospel singers and social media influencers. Christ, ever desiring a relationship with us, has become to many like a green can of Tony Chacheres they want a “sprinkle” of or “just a little more [of]… to help them along the way.” There is no surrender. No dying to self. No washing of Christ’s feet with tears and hair. Jesus is no longer our source and finish but the casual means to a prosperous end we’ve manifested through affirmations. This Americanized Christianity of the individual is hardly recognizable to the early Jesus communities we see in the biblical text. We are not humbling ourselves before God that we might be sanctified and made more like Christ but we are remaking ourselves into the image of the world that we might curry their favor, appeal to their tastes, druthers, and preferences, and earn a share in their prosperity.
So, yes, the hero-worship which is destroying the church necessarily manifests in theological education as it seeks to survive. These institutions want to capitalize on the names of celebrity preachers while the celebrities want whatever money and notoriety the institution can afford.
But the great and damnable tragedy is the practice of Black churches who promulgate White evangelicalism and White Nationalist “Christianity” in black face. It is in the Sunday School lessons, daily devotional readings, and the lyrics of various genres of popular Christian music which are the sources for the theology of too many in our pews. Uninterrogated and unhindered theological death ravages our churches and communities through the preaching and ministries of preachers and congregations who have been bought with a capitalistic price.
This is a crisis of theological education and the practice of Christian ministry in local congregations. Neither education nor grace are cheap. Living the life of Christ costs.
40 years after preaching my first sermon, I am aggrieved by what I am witness to in the church. And, by that to which I have been wittingly and unwittingly party.
It was Dr. Renita Jean Weems who told me as a 20 year old that It takes courage to say what needs to be said. In the 90s, at the invitation of Mrs. Margaret Fields, I preached at the Lay Convention in Rochester New York with the courage to say what I prayerfully believed needed to be said. Invitations which were plentiful prior were drastically fewer after. So, I learned humility. I learned to pray. I never devoted myself to self-promotion, never treated preaching like a sport, and never asked for a preaching opportunity. I have lived according to Proverbs 18:16 which Rev. Dr. Elaine Flake paraphrased often, “your gifts will make room for you.” I remember everyday that the question is the gift. Forty years in, I am still living into this gift: asking, seeking, wrestling, and serving. And for that, I give God thanks.
More anon.
In the meantime, I am still learning. Tell me: What questions are you asking? What gifts is God still shaping in you?