{"id":22190,"date":"2021-03-04T11:12:21","date_gmt":"2021-03-04T16:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.worldcatholicnews.com\/historically-black-raleigh-church-emphasizes-african-american-and-african-culture-at-its-essence-episcopal-news-service\/"},"modified":"2021-03-04T11:12:21","modified_gmt":"2021-03-04T16:12:21","slug":"historically-black-raleigh-church-emphasizes-african-american-and-african-culture-at-its-essence-episcopal-news-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.worldcatholicnews.com\/historically-black-raleigh-church-emphasizes-african-american-and-african-culture-at-its-essence-episcopal-news-service\/","title":{"rendered":"Historically Black Raleigh church emphasizes African American and African culture at its essence \u2013 Episcopal News Service"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Members of St. Ambrose Episcopal Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, celebrate Palm Sunday in 2019. Photo: Courtesy of St. Ambrose<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

[Episcopal News Service]<\/span> One of the great moments in 11-year-old Arri Davila\u2019s life was hearing prayers of thanksgiving for the beauty of dreadlocks \u2013 hair like hers \u2013 at St. Ambrose Episcopal Church in Raleigh, North Carolina.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey were talking about blessing people with locks, and me and my sister were really happy. It was very comforting because when we are at my mom\u2019s church, we are the only two brown-skinned people there,\u201d Davila told Episcopal News Service recently.<\/span><\/p>\n

St. Ambrose, a historically Black congregation founded in 1868 on the city\u2019s southeast side, intentionally incorporates Afrocentric icons and art, lively jazz-inspired music and inclusive prayers. The church also gives permanent recognition \u2013 even on needlepoint kneelers \u2013 to Raleigh native Anna Julia Cooper, the Rev. Pauli Murray, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and other Black Americans who are commemorated in The Episcopal Church\u2019s calendar of saints, as a way to \u201cdisrupt,\u201d or separate, Christianity from a legacy of white supremacy, said the Rev. Jemonde Taylor, rector.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is challenging to become what you cannot see,\u201d said Taylor, who recalled his own youth in a historically Black Episcopal congregation in his hometown Louisburg, North Carolina, where European images, formational materials, clergy, teaching and preaching created liturgies that did \u201cmore to reinscribe racism than disrupt it. Worship is central to who we are as Episcopalians, and that worship tends to replicate the very thing that we teach against, racism and white supremacy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Taylor said the legacy of white supremacy \u201ccontinues to do excruciating damage, distorting the divine image in people.\u201d While an engineering student at North Carolina State University, he took a course on intertestamental literature \u2013 the two-century period between the composition of the Old Testament and the first book of the New Testament \u2013 and discovered Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. \u201cThe professor said Europeans thought the Book of Enoch was a myth until the Portuguese encountered the Ethiopians and found it in their canon. That blew up several paradigms I had. I didn\u2019t know Ethiopians were Christians. I didn\u2019t know anyone could educate any Europeans on anything Christian, since Christianity is a \u2018white\u2019 religion.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI went to the residence hall and did an internet search on Ethiopia and Enoch, and the website for St. Mary of Zion Church in Washington, D.C., came up. There was an image of Mary and the Christ child. I stared at that image for 10 minutes because it was the first time I saw a truly authentic African representation of the Holy Family. Everything before that looked like the [Leonardo] da Vinci paintings with brown skin. And here, I saw people who looked like me.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI did some more research and found that Christianity came to the horn in North Africa, not through European slave traders and colonialists, but through Jerusalem. I began using the term \u2018indigenous African Christianity.\u2019 It liberated me, as someone who grew up in the church, coming of age and wrestling with what it meant to be a Black Christian,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

After seeing Ethiopian Orthodox imagery, Taylor adopted Ethiopia as a spiritual home, as opposed to Canterbury, though he stayed with The Episcopal Church.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSome people would say, how can Black people adopt the religion of the enslaver, but it liberated me,\u201d he said. \u201cI had Ethiopia as my spiritual home, a Christianity to some extent untainted by white supremacy and colonialism.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That experience in 2000 helped shift Taylor\u2019s vocation to the Episcopal priesthood. That same year, Taylor witnessed two examples of Black leadership in the church that further inspired him. The first was seeing a Black man celebrate at the altar of the church of his youth.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the first time in my life I had seen a Black man stand at the altar. I said, \u2018Wow, I can actually see myself doing that.\u2019 I was discerning a call back then even though I would not have articulated it as such,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

The second experience happened Feb. 11, when Presiding Bishop Michael Curry was elected the 11th bishop of North Carolina. Taylor recalled, \u201cIt blew my mind.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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An icon depicting Jesus\u2019 death on the cross is part of an Ethiopian-inspired Stations of the Cross at St. Ambrose Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. The icon was created by Christopher Gosey, of Holy Images Icons. Photo: Courtesy of St. Ambrose<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Images of God often determine self-image and even perceptions of leadership qualities, says Steven O. Roberts, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University who studies race and racism.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up in almost an exclusively Black church, led by a Black female ministry, and in that church, there was imagery of a white male God that always stood out to me; an entity that didn\u2019t really look like anyone in the church, and I always wondered how that affected us psychologically,\u201d Roberts said in an interview posted on YouTube. In the interview, he discussed the findings from his studies, which show that how people visualize God predicts who they think is fit for leadership.<\/span><\/p>\n

Roberts led researchers in a series of studies focused on U.S. Christians. In one case, they conducted a Google search of the word \u201cGod.\u201d \u201cWe just typed \u2018God\u2019 into Google images to see how often God is portrayed as a white male,\u201d Roberts said. \u201cWe found that about 72% of all the images that came up, that presented God in some kind of humanized form, did in fact, present God as a white male.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The research also indicated \u201cthat the stronger a person\u2019s belief, the more convinced that God was a white man, the more likely they were to perceive white men as worthy of leadership positions and the less likely they were to see Black people and women as worthy of those positions,\u201d Roberts said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Taylor\u2019s quest to reflect the beauty of Blackness through prayer and worship led to a three-year search to commission Ethiopian iconography from Holy Images Icons for St. Ambrose as another tool to incorporate a more biblical view of Christ, a more diverse imagination of God and to \u201cun-suture\u201d or \u201cdecouple\u201d white supremacy from Christianity.<\/span><\/p>\n

He cited the work of J. Kameron Carter, professor of religious studies at Indiana University Bloomington, who believes \u201cthat Christianity midwifed the racial world \u2026 and must break with what it did.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Jesus \u201cbecame the slave to blow up the structure itself,\u201d Carter said in a 2019 interview with \u201cThe Table Podcast,\u201d a publication of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, located in La Mirada, California. The episode, titled \u201cUnshackling the Imagination,\u201d focused on Christianity\u2019s structural injustice and need for more culturally sensitive images.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSt. Ambrose is committed to the un-suturing of white supremacy from Christianity through worship and educational practices,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cThe hope is to ensure all see themselves as beloved children of God. Worship spaces should be uplifting and community-centered, where one feels connected to the divine.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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St. Ambrose Episcopal Church, a historically Black congregation founded in 1868 on the Raleigh\u2019s southeast side, intentionally incorporates Afrocentric icons and art, lively jazz-inspired music and inclusive prayers. This photo was taking during the church\u2019s 2019 Palm Sunday celebration. Photo: Courtesy of St. Ambrose<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

For Mellisa Smith, 48, who grew up in the Anglican church in Trinidad, a post-colonial nation rich in cultural and religious diversity with strong East Indian and African ties, attending St. Ambrose awakened awareness.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAfter you have been here (in the United States) for a while, you feel like you don\u2019t matter,\u201d said Smith, who moved to the U.S. in 2000. \u201cYou are not represented, and representation matters. I never felt that before. I want to matter.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And yet, \u201cwhen Fr. Jemonde started to introduce the whole notion of representation, of Jesus looking like us, at first it felt like it was sacrilegious,\u201d Smith recalled. Even in Trinidad, where approximately 35% of the population is of African descent, and 35% of South Asian descent and 25% of mixed races, \u201cthere were always stock images of a European Jesus.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

At St. Ambrose, church bulletins depict Black art and its social media posts feature Black saints. \u201cTo hear about Black people being saints, I didn\u2019t even know that was possible,\u201d she said. \u201cI know that sounds really bad, but growing up, the saints were always European folks.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The awareness has \u201craised my curiosity in my faith,\u201d Smith said. \u201cIt gave me a deeper connection to God, a deeper knowledge that God cares about me because God can look like me.\u201d Of critical importance, she said, St. Ambrose has created a space where her daughter, Maya, 13, feels that pride in Black culture \u201cis normal.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, \u201cI feel part of the service, part of worship, part of nourishing my soul,\u201d Smith added. \u201cThe words we say are about me, about my experiences. I can see me in the songs. I can see me in the images. The more you can add to that, the more you help somebody have a closer relationship to God.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For Thomas Johnson, 56, St. Ambrose is the first church that feels like home, like family. Growing up in Ohio, he felt unwelcome in the Catholic church his family attended, often wondering, \u201cDoes God look like me?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Years later, even at another historically Black Episcopal church, Johnson said, \u201cthere were white images, even though it\u2019s a Black church in a Black community. It\u2019s fascinating that you don\u2019t question it. You\u2019ve been surrounded by these images your entire life.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Images that \u201chave made me recognize white supremacy,\u201d he said. \u201cIt made me realize how these images were intentional, a way of keeping you in your place and making you feel inferior. It was white supremacy at the highest level. \u2026 No matter what the depiction of Jesus is in the Bible or other spiritual texts, and what they say about Jesus\u2019 hair or skin tone, it is not lived out in most churches.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But at St. Ambrose, there is plenty of room for questions and no more wondering. \u201cWhen you see an image of God or God\u2019s son and it looks like you, it makes you feel good,\u201d Johnson said.<\/span><\/p>\n

He recalled his son, Jackson, several years ago, pointing out that the image of Jesus at St. Ambrose \u201clooked like his good friend Eli, who\u2019s Ethiopian.\u201d His son, Johnson said, didn\u2019t question his friend\u2019s resemblance to Jesus because he wasn\u2019t exposed only to the more Eurocentric images.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re both 14 years old now, and it makes you realize how those other images made you feel like you weren\u2019t a member in God\u2019s family,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cI always hoped it would feel like this, but I never got to experience it till now. It was a profound moment in the context of the larger world, but in the context of St. Ambrose, it was just another family experience.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s similar for Arri Davila, the 11-year-old who wears her hair in dreadlocks, St. Ambrose is \u201ca cool place. It\u2019s very diverse. It\u2019s a very beautiful place \u2026 where Jesus is like life,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her adoptive mother, the Rev. Mary Davila, who is white, recalled the moment when her daughters heard the blessing for the people with dreadlocks: \u201cBoth of our girls have locks, and their little faces just lit up. To have their tradition and their beauty called forth and blessed in church, I can\u2019t tell you what a gift that is.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Davila, a priest, serves part-time at Christ Church, another Raleigh congregation, but has attended St. Ambrose with her adopted daughters twice monthly on her Sundays off. Elsewhere, her daughters\u2019 hair has evoked uncomfortable responses, she said.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOut in the world, more commonly, they have people reach for their hair and touch it and ask questions about it, and they don\u2019t always stand tall in their hairstyle. But, to hear that God sees you as beautiful, I can\u2019t tell you the value of that.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTo have visual representations of Jesus at St. Ambrose, whose skin color is much darker than what we\u2019re used to seeing in the literally white-washed Bible,\u201d is a blessing and a gift to the entire family, Davila said.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013 The Rev. Pat McCaughan is a correspondent for Episcopal News Service. She is based in Los Angeles, California. <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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