The Blessings and Burdens

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on all of us. I not only reveal failings of theological and church contexts but also reveal my own shortcomings as I have searched for firmer grounding within these spaces. If we are to be made whole, we must speak the truth as we have experienced it, being transparent about our collective pain even as we await the Spirit’s resurrecting power.

Testifying was also prophecy. People would stand up and speak what God revealed to them about the community in terms of its present and future. The testifier reminded us not only to wait on the Spirit but also to work toward the building of beloved communities. This involved vulnerability and openness. We had to be open to what we were getting wrong and repent. Repentance was not simply a verbal apology. It was metanoia, conversion. One turned from one’s ways when one’s actions broke covenant with community.

In this book, I call theological education to repentance by being truthful about the racist character of the theological enterprise even in the midst of its growing racially diverse landscape. Frank Yamada, executive director of the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), notes that the number of black, Latinx, Asian, and Asian North American students in its schools has increased dramatically. By 2040, there will be no majority white (or any) population but a diversity of different sizable populations in the United States. This demographic shift is already becoming a reality for ATS schools. The average seminary student is no longer a young white or European male who is a full-time, residential student. Student populations at ATS schools are increasingly diverse, as students of color “have increased collectively from 30 to 45 percent of the total of ATS students over the past twenty years.” Moreover, 20 percent of ATS schools already have a majority of racial ethnic presence in student populations. Yet this increased racial diversity doesn’t mean that structural racism has ended. It has merely morphed into new, more subtle forms. For instance, faculty diversity has grown, but at a much slower pace than student diversity, which means that structural racism does

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not cease to exist simply because of growing diversity, a major point to which I return in chapter 2.1 Theological schools must wrestle continually with the emotional carnage left in the wake of institutional racial disenfranchisement.

This changing racial/ethnic landscape means that the experiences of marginalized ethnic groups are not peripheral to the present and future of theological education but are central to such conversations. These groups continue to experience real racial harm and trauma. Yet people of color (such as black faculty and students) also are creating and fashioning new theological discourses and practices within the academy itself. This is the tension: the theological academy is a site of both harm and hope for such groups. I give voice to these contradictory realities that often go unacknowledged by institutions that are led and funded by professional white America.

I testify to how I, a native daughter, an African American and Pentecostal scholar, have experienced theological education. I invoke James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son in order to remind the reader that African Americans often experience themselves as native sons and daughters, as both kin and strangers, insiders and outsiders in the theological academy. Exploring the complex condition of being black in America in the 1940s and ’50s, Baldwin speaks as a native son, as one who can rightly claim himself as a citizen and inheritor of the American tradition, yet is treated as invisible and insignificant. Similarly, African Americans are nurtured inside of and contribute to theological contexts that nevertheless treat them as marginal and peripheral, pointing to the perpetual contradictions experienced by blacks in theological institutions. I testify about my experiences of being a native daughter as a way not only to illuminate the forms of structural racism that continue to plague the theological academy but also to demonstrate how persons like me continue to make theological spaces creative, dynamic, and life-giving. The theological contributions and persistent experiences of structural injustice among native sons and daughters must be acknowledged for

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theological education to be released into more liberative futures. I hope readers will explore how the complex experiences of African Americans in the academy invite them to ponder what their moral investments will be in envisioning theological futures in ways that are not captive to old racist institutional hierarchies and theological systems, especially when those ideologies and practices engender structural harm.

As a way to highlight the struggles and contributions of native daughters and sons, I foreground important voices such as Zora Neale Hurtson, Lorraine Hansberry, Yvette Flunder, Mattie Moss Clark, Emilie Townes, Delores Williams, Katie Cannon, and others. I offer narratives about my own theological formation and how it has shaped what I believe theological education is and can be. Chapter 1 offers the reader a glimpse into how the Afro-Pentecostal tradition shaped me in my early years and how I engaged important theological questions during my twenties within primarily white theological contexts. Chapters 2 and 3 look at white and black theological contexts respectively and explore the problems of structural racism and hetero-patriarchy that plague black women and black queer persons who are students and professors within theological education. My goal is not only to present the plight of black people within these structures (especially black women and black queer folk) but also to show how such spaces repress and affirm the gifts and talents of native daughters like myself within the academy. It is this insider/ outsider experience that I hope to capture in talking about the complex experiences of black persons in the academy.

The final chapter proposes one way to look toward the future of theological education by taking the experiences and contributions of native daughters and sons seriously. Here I attempt to prophesy, to offer a word about the future of theological education. I believe that we must be witnesses to a different theological formation by considering the contributions of progressive black Pentecostal communities and broader radical social movements, which are envisioning otherwise communities of intimacy and

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belonging. We must work not only for just structures and institutions; we must also imagine new ecologies of theological formation in which desires for caring and compassionate communities are truly possible. Without a desire to forge patterns of intimacy and belonging within community, we are lost.

A final comment about this book. I recognize that I am offering “notes” on what is fundamentally an oral tradition. Testifying is spoken word, uttered with and for community. This text might feel like a performative contradiction, forcing an oral tradition and collective mode of speech into a potentially closed form such as writing. Writing, unlike communal speech, is a largely solitary enterprise and endeavor, which risks distorting the power of testifying as a collective practice. This is a fair criticism. However, there is another way of viewing my intention: to foreground this oral tradition as central to theological education’s transformation. Writing about this oral tradition honors this practice and my church community, presenting this mode of speech as a powerful form of knowledge in transforming the purposes and ends of theological education.

To capture my intention, I write in a loose form, in the form of meditations, stories, prayers, and lamentations to capture the fluid, dynamic nature of testifying. I capture all this not in the form of philosophical argumentation but in the form of “notes,” a genre open to fluidity and diversity. Notes can come in many genres of writing, such as lists, jottings, lyrics to songs, favorite phrases, drawings, and so much more. Similar to notes, testifying does not adhere to some predetermined rational structure but makes pronouncements in ways that are creative, unpredictable, and deeply unconfined by conventional methods. Notes invite democratic ways of being. I offer an imperfect way of capturing this oral tradition of testifying in hopes that it will be used as a resource in thinking creatively about the present and futures of theological education.

In the following pages, the testimonies I offer may shock and surprise, offend and encourage, incite and inspire. From the emotional burdens black students and faculty endure by working

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under the duress of structural racism to rethinking how creative transformation can happen in theological education, I insist that we must linger with the words and testimonies of African Americans within theological education. I pray that my words call African Americans to testify and the broader theological academy to listen.