In contrast to an approach that ties relevance to socio-political context, Anyabwile insists that “expositional preaching is relevant because it expounds the always-relevant Word of God… Ezra preaches to exiles – the poor and the oppressed. And yet, He does not preach liberation, politics, social justice or mercy ministries. He preaches the Word clearly and that clear preaching reforms the lives and outlook of the Bible” (p. 60). It is this same attitude that Black preachers (and all preachers) need to adopt today.
Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile’s 2015 book Reviving the Black Church feels like a follow-up to his excellent The Decline of African American Theology, published just 8 years earlier. In Reviving…, he expands on the final chapter of the previous volume, offering a prescription for reversing the theological liberalism found within large segments of the historic Black Church. However, his focus in the present work is not merely on orthodoxy, but on orthopraxy as well. He organizes his recommendations under three headings: “Revive by the Word,” “Revive with Godly Leadership,” and “Revive Through Membership and Mission.”
Anyabwile opens with the question: “is the Black Church dead or dying?” Theologians vary, both in the answers they give and in the reasons they provide for those answers. While Anyabwile acknowledges that “‘The Black Church’ really exists as multiple black churches across denominational, theological, and regional lines” (p. 5-6), he recognizes that there are broad patterns of disease and spiritual deadness that need to be addressed, even if doing so will require him to transgress “cultural rules forbidding public critique of the Black Church” (p. 12).
In the first part of the book, he traces the declining centrality of the Bible to the Black Church. African Americans initially adopted an “evangelical hermeneutic [i.e. approach to interpreting the Bible]” which recognized that “the Bible’s main theme is spiritual salvation, culminating in the Person and work of Jesus Christ” and that the “primary matter [of the Bible is] spiritual life” (p. 21). Black Liberation theology and the prosperity gospel later obscured this great truth. Yet all three schools of interpretation have “contributed to the de-centering of the Bible” either by “neglect[ing it],” by “rebell[ing] against it,” or by “misusing it and misquoting it” (p. 25).
The solution to this decay is to re-assert the centrality of the Bible, primarily through expositional preaching, in which a sermon is grounded in the correct interpretation of a particular biblical text and its application to doctrine and Christian living: “When the main point of the text becomes the main point of the sermon, then you have expositional preaching” (p. 41).
The main argument against expositional preaching in the Black Church is that it is not relevant to the black experience. Cleophus J. LaRue states that “[P]owerful black preaching has at its center a biblical hermeneutic that views God as a powerful sovereign acting mightily on behalf of dispossessed and marginalized people” (p. 33) and that “the starting point for the traditional black sermon is … the concrete life experiences of those who make up the listening congregation’ (p. 38). Yet Anyabwile insists that this approach is “needs-based and man-centered rather than text-driven” (p. 38).
In particular, Anyabwile challenges the idea that black preaching is only ‘relevant’ if it focuses on the monolithic ‘black experience’ of oppression. I’ll quote him at length on this issue:
The continuing assumption of universal marginalization across every era of African-American history actually flattens the African-American experience and contributes to the increasing irrelevance of black preaching. What do I mean? The experience of African-Americans in 1830 could be fairly characteristic as near universal enslavement, oppression, and marginalization. Few would deny that. But how should we describe African-Americans in 1930?… Moreover, the 1930s seem like a lifetime ago for African-Americans born around 1980. The experience of 1980s-generation African-Americans is so different from previous generations that a burgeoning number of books dare to argue for a ‘post-Black’ self-understanding… Any monolithic understanding of black experience crumbled long ago under the shifting weight of African-American progress and hard-earned victories…Yet most books published on black preaching continue to argue that the black preacher should assume a context of social and political marginalization similar to that of the 1800s and early 1900s as the starting point for the preaching task. Little wonder that black preaching might be seen as entirely irrelevant to black life today.(p.39-40)
In contrast to an approach that ties relevance to socio-political context, Anyabwile insists that “expositional preaching is relevant because it expounds the always-relevant Word of God… Ezra preaches to exiles – the poor and the oppressed. And yet, He does not preach liberation, politics, social justice or mercy ministries. He preaches the Word clearly and that clear preaching reforms the lives and outlook of the Bible” (p. 60). It is this same attitude that Black preachers (and all preachers) need to adopt today.
