Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Dr. Crumbley, talk to me about northern storefront urban churches in the context of their connection
to the great migration.
There is no way to talk about the store front church and it's emergence in development without
talking about the great migration because in fact it happens in the context of people
moving from the south to the urban north. And I believe wanting to have a place where
they can recreate some of their southern experiences. And at the same time, recreate their spiritual
homes. Now but what is interesting about it is that in the store front church people recreate
the experience of being together in faith, but they do it with a little bit of courage
shall we say. Because for example, most of the people in the church that I'm in, that
I write about are from traditional black independent churches, Baptist, AME and the like. But when
they come into this new urban setting they seem to be willing to look into something
a little bit different. To have a different emotional experience and so they're really
experimenting with this thing called Pentecostalism, holiness. This is not to say the churches
in the south weren't full of spirit, they were. But they didn't have the kind of breadth
and emphasis on revelation and spirit that Pentecostalism and holiness did in these urban
settings. And so, it happens as part of the great migration, it happens as an experience
in experimenting with one's spirituality and I think also experimenting with leadership
because maybe back home they were just members of their hometown Baptist church, but here
in this northern city of Philadelphia they get to be founding members, they begin to
take on roles that they may never have taken back home. So it is a growing experience and
it's experimentation.
Now, often these storefront churches are mis-cast and misrepresented by larger society. Tell
me, talk with me about the importance of self-definition in terms of wanting to find their own humanity
and spirituality and the relationship or the interpretation of these churches from outside
sources.
This very issue of the representation of storefront churches is why I wrote the book. Having grown
up in one, I was also keenly aware of how we were written about. Not just by everyday
people who called us holy rollers, but also scholars who should know better in my opinion
but who reduced us to basically people who had a lot of stress because we were poor or
we were oppressed and all we could really do is get into these little store fronts and
holler and scream and roll on the floor. And I knew there was more to us than that and
I guess somewhere early on in my life I had decided that I would have to provide an alternative
understanding. I believe that the scholarship that I do is innately driven by a desire to
give voice to those that are often silenced. So that the people in the church I grew up
in were like my parents, were working poor people. They didn't have time to represent
themselves to get to write, research, to publish their books about themselves. Others did that
for them, and I don't think that they did it well, so I felt like I had to do something
about that. And to the degree that self-representation informs self-determination that has been my
concern as a scholar.
In the book, you write about how mainstream, larger, urban black churches are often geared
towards or focused towards engaging the larger society, but you also say that often, these
small storefront Pentecostal churches are more insular and they are more geared towards
their own self-improvement and their own self-development and in doing so that has an impact on a larger
society. Talk to me about that. See I was listening to you, I learned something.
Yes, you certainly did, thank you. Generally, there has been a dichotomy, I think it is
a false binary opposition that's made towards the established, mainstream, black independent
churches and the little storefronts. The storefronts are thought of as being insular, otherworldly,
self-serving-only. And the established churches have been institutionalized enough that they
can be part of the larger world and issues in the larger society. I believe that that
dichotomy is a false one. I say that because the local is always part of something large
even in a church as insular as mine, intentionally as insular as mine was. Because you don't
teach young people, for example, that education is important without affecting their lives,
the lives of their community, the lives of the children that they are going to produce,
the people they interact with. The kind of affect that these larger churches wanted to
have on the black community was what we were doing on a day to day basis. Not through policy,
not by programs but by the way we reformulated and transformed our lives. We were doing it
on the ground, as opposed to with some kind of social program, so I don't think the two
are mutually exclusive activities at all.
Now, for anyone who has ever attended or passed by one of these storefront churches, you can't
help but be moved by the music. So, talk to me about the role of music in these Pentecostal
or storefront churches.
Music in the storefront church experiences, I've tried to explore it in my book as part
of a larger story. It's part of a spirituality that I believe has at least two sources. One
is African spirituality and the other is revivalism in the Euro-American religion. Let me try
to break that down. If we look at spirituality in West Africa we are looking at the embodiment
of spirit, spirit is not an abstract notion. It is something that fills you; you are possessed
by the Gods. And you feel that and that's part of your understanding of divinity. I
know it is a bit of a generalization, but that describes what is common to West African
spirituality. That I believe was reinforced selectively by Euro-American revivalism. So
I'm not saying this is just African culture that has survived all this time, I'm saying
it has been reinforced by what was met here. And what it met here was very interesting
timing, around the time we were here, that we came here, let's see about 1619, we'll
use it arbitrarily as the time that we arrived, was around the time, the next hundred, two
hundred years was the time of the Great Awakenings. And that was a time in which Protestantism
was infused with this enthusiasm, this revitalism, this emphasis on the personal experience,
on personal piety and on feeling the spirit and there was an expression of the spirit.
These were Europeans who came with this. And so you have this conflation of European spirituality,
emphasis on spirit, let's call it spirit privlidging, intersecting with African spirit privlidging
and I believe coming together in a very rich mix of embodied faith. Music is that which
bolsters and promotes and continues and keeps that experience sustained over time. That
is through individual experience of the Holy Spirit or the entire congregation being taken
over by the spirit. The music does that and it did that in Africa, it did that in little
camp meetings in the south. It is I believe an inherited, ritual support from both of
those streams of religious culture.
Now, this is a new question that grows out of the response that you just gave me. Tell
me more about this concept or process of being inherited or having the spirit be within you.
The reason I ask the question is because for people outside of this religious practice
or experience, when they see people who obviously are feeling the spirit within them, they don't
understand it and they think of it as sort of abstract and what not. Talk to me about
that and help people understand what that really is.
The experience of embodied spirit or spirit privlidging may seem foreign to many Americans.
To people of African decent who know African religion, they know it through that medium
but it didn't just begin in Africa, it is not just limited to Africa it is not just
limited to Pentecostals or holiness in the last hundred or so years. There was this thing
called the Pentecost that happened at the beginning of Christianity. It's in the Bible.
It's when these people are in the room, these disciplines of Christ, waiting for Christ
to come. And they're filled with the Holy Ghost, so there is a tradition in Christianity
of being filled with spirit. That didn't just stop after the church was institutionalized
and became part of the Roman Empire. It was then called Caraismata, the gifts of the spirit.
It was institutionalized and by time you get to medieval Europe it was even domesticated.
But there is this woman called Hilda Brand of Bergen and she was in a monestary and this
is Germany in the Middle Ages and she spoke in what was called lingua-ignota, unknown
tongues. So my point is that there is this tradition in Christianity that got domesticated
over time but was always present and it was one that there was spirit, that spirit was
an aspect of divinity and that people could experience it, it could fill them, it could
is not just something that has happened recently with a popular Pentecostalism, it's always
been part of Christianity. So, people may have a difficult time understanding it but
it really is not alien to Christianity. To understand it is something more current, something
that is part of current everyday society. I think that we can look at the kind of mega-churches
that are emerging. They're emerging in part because they are touching something in human
beings. They are touching something in people that exists on the level that takes into account
our bodies. We are more than just our minds, we are more than just notions, we are more
than just what society tells us to be. We live in this body and religions that take
that into account incorporate all of us in a way that actually can make faith very appealing.
Now, talk to me about the role that gender played and continues to play in terms of another
level of self-definition in terms of gender within a context of these churches.
When we think about gender in storefront churches, particularly storefront holiness Pentecostal
churches or sanctified churches. We need to keep in mind that these are churches in which
spirit trumps everything. Revelation is a major, not the only, but a major source of
knowledge. If a woman in the early 1900s wanted to be a minister in many established Black
churches, she was kidding herself. There was no space for her to be institutionally made
a minister. The clergy was not for her. However, in a sanctified Pentecostal holiness tradition
she can have a call to the ministry. Let me give you an example, the founder of my church
grew up Baptist in Mecklenberg, Virginia and she told me that she had a call and she went
to the men of her church, and this is back in Virginia and told them that she had been
called to preach and they told her God never called a woman to preach. Now, perhaps if
she stayed there and this is the importance of migration too, it provides all these opportunities,
perhaps if she had stayed there she'd have to have complied to be part of the religious
community she was comfortable in. But she goes to Philadelphia, and it is a place of
many things, including animinity. When there is animinity there is the possibility of doing
all kinds of things because that sort of constraining gays of people who know you and always knew
you is gone. And she began to move with people who were Pentecostal holiness people, sanctified
people who understood that the call really did not have gender dimensions, that the call
was the call. Now some of these churches had their limitations in terms of gender but you
were much more likely to be able to be a female and to be a minister and to head a church
if you in a Pentecostal holiness tradition sanctified church in which your call was given
validity, not by education, not by the vestery board but by your relationship with God and
by revelation, of a very personal nature.
You touched on it a little bit, but give me a little more on how these churches are places
where people outside of the cordents of power in mainstream society, and generally people
with limited or minimal education can come to these institutions and assume leadership
roles and be standard bearers in the context of those institutions.
In the church that I write about, people were able to define themselves in ways that went
beyond the way society did. Society described most of them as poor, Black, uneducated people
because that's the way society does that and those are the characteristics that society
tends to focus on particularly looking at Black people at that time. But in the church,
well the founder of the church was a domestic worker. My mother and most of the other woman
who were founding members were also domestic workers. The men were blue collar workers,
they did a lot of the physical labor. They negotiated great deal of the structural racisim
in the marketplace, in employment, and in housing. They knew themselves to be expendable
in the larger society, but in the church they were children of God, they were ministers
of the Word. They were those who spoke in tongues. God fills you with God's spirit,
that's pretty high; you know that's a pretty high level of existence when you contain divinity.
So, society may define you one way but you know yourself another. And so I grew up with
this profound appreciation for my value. Part of that was spiritual, but it also translated
into everyday life, I was the head and not the tail, I was above only and not beneath
The constant of the church in the life of African-Americans I believe has to do with
the fact that it is both spiritual and it is also institutional. One is able to determine
one's spirituality in terms of the traditions that have been passed on to you, because it
is your church, because you're the one that sets the program, you're the one that determines
the beliefs and the values, it's not coming from the outside, you control the institution's
structure, processes, its beliefs and practices, its content. It's good change, nothing stays
static, but it's in your own terms, according to your own terms. I don't know of any other
institution in which Black people have that kind of control of an institutional nature,
I simply don't. Which will not always be the case, but that is what we are dealing with
now. Now, this is not to say that the church should always say well, sort of lay back on
it's laws and say well, we're the spokesperson for Black people, we are the only institution
through which they can get anything done, and so we can do whatever we want to, no I
think that requires those who are heads of churches to be terribly responsible, because
it is in many cases the only game in town in which we have the final say. I hope that
it's practices, and it's organization. In other words, I hope it will keep up; it will
stay current so it can continue to provide this institutional shall we say, power unit,
both spiritual power and political social power, that we need.
Good, now I was going to ask you, the final question was going to be in regard to the
role of these churches in contemporary society, but I think you just answered that.