African-American Liturgical Traditions
2004 New York, New York
2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002
Convener 2004
Scott Haldeman (assistant professor of Worship, Chicago Theological Seminary)
Seminar Participants 2004
Barbara Berry-Bailey, Carol Cook, Melva Costen, Joseph Donnella, Scott Haldeman, Mary McGann, and J-Glenn Murray
Seminar Report 2004
In New York, the work of the group revolved around four major foci:
- the forthcoming book by Mary McGann, A Precious Fountain: Music in the Worship of an African American Catholic Community;
- the forthcoming book by Melva Costen, Sounds of Faith for a New Millennium: Music in African American Worship;
- Joseph Donnella’s research on Lutherans in the Caribbean; and
- Carol Cook’s research on worship in churches in Newark, New Jersey in relation to the “uprising” of 1967.
The seminar is developing a tradition of spending our first morning reporting to one another about what each of us has written, read, or otherwise done over the past year. In addition to supporting one another in our various vocations, the conversations also help us to gauge the field and to identify areas that still need to be explored. Noteworthy this year were J-Glenn Murray’s efforts in liturgical catechesis as a response to the implementation of the new GIRM in the Diocese of Cleveland and continuing progress on his D.Min. thesis that evaluates the extent to which African American spiritual values influence the liturgical life of one particular parish, and the work of Barbara Berry-Bailey as a member of the staff of the national worship office of the ELCA, both generally and as a part of the Renewing Worship effort.
Mary McGann has spent ten years living, worshiping, and inquiring into the worship life of the community of The Our Lady of Lourdes parish in the Hunter’s Point neighborhood of San Francisco. All that she has learned “through, in, and with” this community will soon appear as A Precious Fountain: Music in the Worship of an African American Catholic Community. In fifteen descriptive chapters punctuated by five reflective “intermezzos” and framed by introductory and concluding materials that focus on method and theological implications, she both demonstrates and reflects upon what she calls “liturgical ethnography”—sharing with a wider audience a “thick” description of the worship in this place and its meanings for these people in this time.
In Sounds of Faith for a New Millennium: Music in African American Worship, Melva provides her readers with a distillation of what she “has seen and heard” over the course of her long dual-career as musician and scholar. Her book traces the roots of the music of worship in African American Protestant churches to Africa and through four hundred years of history on the shores of North America. She discusses the major genres: spirituals, hymns, and gospel songs. She reflects on diverse performance styles and the various instruments that have been employed in different traditions. She also considers the relationship of music to the worship event as a whole and the role of musician as minister in African American churches. Appendices will include an annotated timeline of the publication of all known African American hymnals. We look forward to the final form of this major work as we will all benefit from having these resources collected in one volume.
Joseph Donnella continues work on his dissertation in which he is attempting to recover and analyze the liturgical practices of Afro-Caribbean Lutherans as an example of liturgical inculturation among African Americans and among Lutherans. While the application of and challenges to current theories of inculturation are the central concern of the dissertation, other questions about common assumptions regarding the appropriateness of traditional liturgical worship among Africans in diaspora, the relative severity of control of slave religiosity among Dutch and English colonists, and methods of reconstructing historical examples of liturgy are also arising.
Carol Cook is attempting to reconstruct and analyze “what was done” liturgically during and in response to Newark “uprisings” of the summer of 1967. Surveying the records and speaking to clergy and lay members of white, black, and integrated churches, she hopes to learn something about how worship (and especially forms of Methodist worship), on the one hand, empowers people to protest injustice and to cope with a strong military response when they do so, while, on the other hand, justifying resistance to change in others. A key theoretical question is how to cope with contradictory memories of participants in a variety of worship services as people discuss what they did and what it meant to them long ago. The project is also likely to shed more light on the relational dynamics between various Methodist bodies—the African Methodists and those churches that are majority white.
For next year we hope to read and respond to final drafts or published versions of all the projects mentioned above and anticipate the completion of D.Min. theses by J-Glenn Murray and Kathleen Dorsey Bellow that will continue to enrich our knowledge of the liturgical traditions of various African American Christian communities.