The Gathering, A Womanist Church. Irie Lynne Session

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СКАЧАТЬ womanist ecclesial community that would have longevity, Irie applied for a Pastoral Study Project grant from the Louisville Institute.28 In 2019 she received a $15,000 grant to work on a research project titled “Womanist Ecclesiologies: Black Clergywomen Resisting White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy.” Then she embarked on a journey of discovery—a fact-finding mission. She set out to explore and find answers to questions that have arisen out of her ministry with The Gathering, A Womanist Church: (1) What is a womanist ecclesiology? (2) How can a womanist ecclesiology empower Black clergywomen to partner in shaping communities that resist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and liberate the oppressed? (3) What denominational and/or funding support is needed for womanist ecclesial communities to thrive? She studied five Black clergywomen-led ministries: Middle Collegiate Church in New York City; Lewa Farabale, A Womanist Gathering in St. Louis, Missouri; Pink Robe Chronicles, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; City of Refuge in Los Angeles, California, and Rize Community Church in Atlanta, Georgia.

      To gain clarity for her research, Irie developed working definitions for key terms: “ecclesiology,” “womanist ecclesiology,” and “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

She defines “ecclesiology” as “the theological interpretation of what it means to be church,” highlighting the work of Natalie K. Watson in Introducing Feminist Ecclesiology. Because the theological meaning of church has been subject to patriarchal interpretations, Watson argues for an ecclesiology over against a discussion of women in the church or women and the church. She maintains, women are church.29

Until she began her research, Irie had never read a book or article that referenced “womanist ecclesiology.” She discovered a YouTube video featuring Bishop Yvette Flunder, preaching a sermon titled “A Womanist Ecclesiology.”30 While Bishop Flunder doesn’t provide a formal definition of a womanist ecclesiology, she does describe its manifestation. Flunder envisions a womanist ecclesiology in response to what she calls, “unbridled patriarchy.”31 She explains: “There needs to be an ecclesiology or a way in which we see God and ecclesia—the community of the faithful, from a womanist perspective. That means, home and heart are important; it means all our children matter; it means health is everyone’s right; it means there is no group of people upon whom everyone else can step up from at that group of people’s expense.”32 Mining Bishop Flunder’s sermon “A Womanist Ecclesiology” for wisdom, Irie defines a womanist ecclesiology as “ways of thinking theologically about doing and being church that take into account the norms, practices, ethics, wisdom, survival strategies, and lived experiences of Black women which lead to the liberation and thriving of all people.”

      The work of bell hooks informs the definition and application of the phrase “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to capture all the ways in which Black women experience the intersections of oppression. In “bell hooks: Cultural Criticism & Transformation,” we gain clarity for her rationale in using the phrase:

I began to use the phrase in my work “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” because I wanted to have some language that would actually remind us continually of the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality and not to just have one thing be like, you know, gender is the important issue, race is the important issue, but for me the use of that particular jargonistic phrase was a way, a sort of short cut way of saying all of these things actually are functioning simultaneously at all times in our lives and that if I really want to understand what’s happening to me, right now at this moment in my life, as a black female of a certain age group, I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking through the lens of race. I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking through the lens of gender. I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking at how white people see me.33

      White supremacist capitalist patriarchy speaks to the ways in which Black women, on a daily basis, experience life. All aspects of Black women’s lives, even those parts that are positive and nurturing, are negotiated with resistance through the prism of white supremacist capitalistic patriarchy—the interlocking systems of race, gender, class, and age discrimination.

      In her research, Irie found no academic or scholarly resources specifically addressing a theological constructive framework for a womanist ecclesiology. While there are, in fact, numerous books and articles on Black women in the Black Church, none highlight the formation of church vis-à-vis a womanist theoretical lens.

Although there is indeed a dearth of academic material relative to a womanist ecclesiology, she discovered scores of Black clergywomen currently engaged in what Lyn Norris Hayes coins as “practical womanism”34 or what Irie refers to as “practical womanist ecclesiology.”35 She found myriad ways and platforms in and through which Black clergywomen are engaged in practical womanist ecclesiology. In other words, there are Black clergywomen living out a womanist ecclesiology in their respective congregations, digi-church ministries, Cyber Assemblies,36 and womanist gatherings even though they do not identify their community as “church,” or ekklesia. Building upon Hayes’s definition and articulation of “practical womanism,” Irie defines “practical womanist ecclesiology” as the “performance of a womanist hermeneutic in the everyday lived experiences of Black women in order to resist oppression in its myriad manifestations and facilitate communal flourishing and wholeness.” A womanist hermeneutic is embodied and articulated in the thinking, being, and doing of Black women. Because womanists learn to work around systems of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, a practical womanist ecclesiology of necessity is wide and broad enough not to be confined to a building that requires maintenance or a mortgage. As God’s Spirit “blows wherever it wishes” (John 3:8 CEB), so are the creative contours of a practical womanist ecclesiology.

Irie’s research project revealed in very practical ways that, like God’s Spirit, the articulation and implementation of a practical womanist ecclesiology cannot be contained, confined, or controlled by denominational, judicatory, or economic systems, or by institutional structures or ideological frameworks that undermine its premise. Her interviews with womanist clergywomen clarified this reality. For example, the co-conveners of Lewa Farabale: A Womanist Gathering in St. Louis realized they had “to do something different.” Rev. Lorren Buck, one of the founders of Lewa, remembered sharing with her colleagues: “We can’t continue to repeat what has been placed before us and think that is going to be sufficient in liberating women, specifically, not Black women. Because the church is full of Black women who don’t have the equal voice and say of their male leadership that believes that their role is really to support the vision of a man with their labor and with their money . . . everything. And that Black women should gladly do it without question.” The three Black clergywomen who founded Lewa had an epiphany born of the Spirit: “What if there was a church that had three pastors, one that resisted hierarchical arrangements?” They had no location, limited financial resources, and no denominational support. What they did possess was a prophetic knowing, that is, an organic way of knowing the deepest needs of a certain segment of society and strategies to meet those needs. In her book Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon, womanist ethicist Eboni Marshall Turman describes this prophetic knowing as a womanist epistemology. A womanist epistemology emerges from a posture of radical subjectivity that “resists notions of black women as passive subjects and rather determines that their distinctive consciousness empowers them to proactively engage and shape their own vindication.” Turman argues that Black women are not “broken subjects.” On the contrary, “radical subjectivity allows for a revaluation of the white racist, patriarchal, capitalist system of values that subjugate black women by privileging black women’s embodied experiences rather than oppressive ideologies, theologies, and practices.”37

      A Constructive Framework

      From onsite interviews and participant observations, Irie discovered a constructive framework for a womanist ecclesiology, consisting of at least six components. A womanist ecclesiology is artistically expressive, social justice-oriented, informed by a communal Christology, organically trauma-informed, maintains God is Universal, and situates womanist preachers as primary proclaimers.

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