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BLOGS 2023 Jan - Job's Wife Feb - Cast Away Feb - Don't! Feb - Stand May - 'Pay" Yourself June - For By One Man's Obedience June - Mary Sat. Jesus Let Her. July - TPM It's Not Dead (aired 2006) July - MOVE! (2002) July - In The Presence of My Enemies August - Broken. Humble. Stewardship of Your Gift. Don't Be A Haman. Sept - Who's Doing The Talking? October - Do We Really Want An Apology? October - Two Faces. October- Come Here October- God Can Make Your Situation So Unique October- It's Not A Miracle, We Just Decided... November - Move To The Front Of The Line November - Glad to Have Nerves November - Prayer December - We've Discussed This Before. December - Healed! December - My Testimony. The End. Last and First Dreams of 2023/24. Dreams & Vascillating on How I Feel About the Issues. 2022 July - Boundaries 2021 June - Resumes' 2020 Jan - Bits N Pieces 2018 Nov - Links to TPM Wearables for purchase. Oct - Mistaken for the side piece. July - I Cor 7:34 - An Observation, not a Command. May - Women, we change the atmosphere. March - Women's History: Black Women Preachers; No More Smallin' Up of Me; Our Greatest Fear. February - Valentines...daily! January - Random thoughts. 2017 Dec - Christmas...don't get too deep. Nov - Happy Thanksgiving! October - That's not worship. August - The devil is a liar! July - Where do you f-i-t? Be Consistent. June - "No" instead of "Go". April - Let them "kill" you. March -Woman, You are good enough. February - What ministry is calling you? January - Woman, Go! 2016 November - Don't be a Jonah. October - It's Time for a new season. September - Youth, here is something you can conquer. Aug - July - Passive/Aggressive Leaders. June - It's hard to leave. June - YOU ARE STILL RESPONSIBLE. (aka How Women Might Miss God.) May - Woman, why are you still there? April - Passive/Aggressive people. March - God will give you His own special pulpit Feb - Rejection can be a blessing. January - Snakes in your life. 2010 Inclusion or Not? Which one are you? 2000 August - Move!/Sometimes You Gotta Leave Home To Be Blessed 1996 January - So what? August - But I Wrought For My Names Sake |
Woman, do you ever feel like a dead tree, even though you know God has filled you with living water and knowledge/wisdom that needs to be shared? Well, be encouraged. Do what's necessary to go from feeling like a dead tree to BEing/sharing the fruitful, flowering tree that God has made you and wants to contiue to make you. Isaiah 61"For the Spirit of the Lord God is upon me;.." https://www.biblegateway.com/audio/mclean/kjv/Isa.61 Products: www.etsy.com/shop/becmin |
BLOGS
2024 Dec -Tell It or Not? Dec - Wait! Dec - Letting Go Helps Others. Nov - Let Me In. Better Yet, Don't. Nov - LOUD. Nov - The Line Oct - First, the Eye Roll. Then, the Lesson. Oct - Monster! Sept - (Off the cuff)... Sept - Who Will You Be? Sept. - From Sugar to ... Sept - September Notes... Aug - It's Your Fault. Aug - Bricks Without Straw Aug - Ckean Houses Jul - Stop the Meanness Jul - Why Aren't You Helping People? Jul - Distraction? Jul - Reactions To The Light Jul - Set and Enforce Your Boundaries. Jul - We'll Use It On You, Too. Jul - Too Many Transitions June My Plug-Ins for The Formula Jun - My One-Word Prayers Jun - What's Next? May - Numbers 25. Homework. May - 3 Books Down. 3 To Go. May - The Promised Land For Your Teen. May - Perception or Perspective? April - Then You Win. April - You Made Your Bed. April - God Will Encourage Us To Get It Done. March - Women March - Hosea March - We Don't Have to Prop Up God March - God Will Encourage Us To Get It Done Feb - Peebles Hurt! Feb - The Lion of the Tribe of Judah Within Us Feb - The Road Feb - Keep Your Teeth Feb - Where Does It Come From? Feb - Stuff I Have To Work On. Feb - Dummy Down Jan - Start Right. Jan - Foundations Matter. Jan - Gnats and Camels. Jan - A Rat! Jan - Punishment? Jan - Right? Wrong? Both? Jan - Dreams & Vascillating on My Feelings About the Issues. (edited) Jan - Now, I Know Why. Jan - Leave Joe Alone! Jan - What Would You Title This? Last and First Dreams of 2023/24. Dreams & Vascillating on How I Feel About the Issues. |
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![]() https://theconversation.com/hidden-figures-how-black-women-preachers-spoke-truth-to-power-73185 Hidden figures: How Black Women preachers spoke truth to power February 23, 2017 9.06pm EST Sojourner Truth Memorial in Florence, MA. Lynne Graves, CC BY-ND Author Kenyatta R. Gilbert Associate Professor of Homiletics, Howard University Each semester I greet the students who file into my preaching class at Howard University with a standard talk. The talk is not an overview of the basics – techniques of sermon preparation or sermon delivery, as one might expect. Outlining the basics is not particularly difficult. The greatest challenge, in fact, is helping learners to stretch their theology: namely, how they perceive who God is and convey what God is like in their sermons. This becomes particularly important for African-American preachers, especially African-American women preachers, because most come from church contexts that overuse exclusively masculine language for God and humanity. African-American women comprise more than 70 percent of the active membership of generally any African-American congregation one might attend today. According to one Pew study, African-American women are among the most religiously committed of the Protestant demographic – eight in 10 say that religion is important to them. Yet, America’s Christian pulpits, especially African-American pulpits, remain male-dominated spaces. Still today, eyebrows raise, churches split, pews empty and recommendation letters get lost at a woman’s mention that God has called her to preach. The deciding factor for women desiring to pastor and be accorded respect equal to their male counterparts generally whittles down to one question: Can she preach? The fact is that African-American women have preached, formed congregations and confronted many racial injustices since the slavery era. Here’s the historyThe earliest black female preacher was a Methodist woman simply known as Elizabeth. She held her first prayer meeting in Baltimore in 1808 and preached for about 50 years before retiring to Philadelphia to live among the Quakers. First African-American church, founded by Rev. Richard Allen. D Smith, CC BY-NCAn unbroken legacy of African-American women preachers persisted even long after Elizabeth. Reverend Jarena Leebecame the first African-American woman to preach at the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. She had started even before the church was officially formed in the city of Philadelphia in 1816. But, she faced considerable opposition. AME Bishop Richard Allen, who founded the AME Church, had initially refused Lee’s request to preach. It was only upon hearing her speak, presumably, from the floor, during a worship service, that he permitted her to give a sermon. Lee reported that Bishop Allen, “rose up in the assembly, and related that [she] had called upon him eight years before, asking to be permitted to preach, and that he had put [her] off; but that he now as much believed that [she] was called to that work, as any of the preachers present. Lee was much like her Colonial-era contemporary, the famed women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth. Truth had escaped John Dumont’s slave plantation in 1828 and landed in New York City, where she became an itinerant preacher active in the abolition and woman’s suffrage movements. Fighting the gender narratives for centuries now, the Holy Bible has been used to suppress women’s voices. These early female black preachers reinterpreted the Bible to liberate women. Truth, for example, is most remembered for her captivating topical sermon "Ar’nt I A Woman?,” delivered at the Woman’s Rights National Convention on May 29, 1851 in Akron, Ohio. In a skillful historical interpretation of the scriptures, in her convention address, Truth used the Bible to liberate and set the record straight about women’s rights. She professed: “Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, because Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.” Jarena Lee. TradingCardsNPS, CC BY Like Truth, Jarena Lee spoke truth to power and paved the way for other mid- to late 19th-century black female preachers to achieve validation as pulpit leaders, although neither she nor Truth received official clerical appointments.The first woman to achieve this validation was Julia A. J. Foote. In 1884, she became the first woman ordained a deacon in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion AMEZ Church. Shortly after followed the ordinations of AME evangelist Harriet A. Baker, who in 1889 was perhaps the first black woman to receive a pastoral appointment. Mary J. Small became the first woman to achieve “elder ordination” status, which permitted her to preach, teach and administer the sacraments and Holy Communion.Historian Bettye Collier-Thomas maintains that the goal for most black women seeking ordination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was simply a matter of gender inclusion, not necessarily pursuing the need to transform the patriarchal church. Preaching justiceAn important voice was that of Rev. Florence Spearing Randolph. In her role as reformer, suffragist, evangelist and pastor, she daringly advanced the cause of freedom and justice within the churches she served and even beyond during the period of the Great Migration of 20th century. In my recent book, “A Pursued Justice: Black Preaching from the Great Migration to Civil Rights,” I trace the clerical legacy of Rev. Randolph and describe how her prophetic sermons spoke to the spiritual, social and industrial conditions of her African-American listeners before and during the largest internal migration in the United States. In her sermons she brought criticism to the broken promises of American democracy, the deceptive ideology of black inferiority and other chronic injustices. Randolph’s sermon “If I Were White,” preached on Race Relations Sunday, Feb. 1, 1941, reminded her listeners of their self-worth. It emphasized that America’s whites who claim to be defending democracy in wartime have an obligation to all American citizens. Randolph spoke in concrete language. She argued that the refusal of whites to act justly toward blacks, domestically and abroad, embraced sin rather than Christ. That, she said, revealed a realistic picture of America’s race problem. She also spoke about gender discrimination. Randolph’s carefully crafted sermon in 1909 “Antipathy to Women Preachers,” for example, highlights several heroic women in the Bible. From her interpretation of their scriptural legacy, she argued that gender discrimination in Christian pulpits illustrated a misreading of scripture. Randolph used her position as preacher to effect social change. She was a member and organizer for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union(WCTU), which led in the work to pass the 18th Amendment, which made prohibition of the production, sale and transport of alcoholic beverages illegal in the United States. Her affiliation with the WCTU earned her the title “militant herald of temperance and righteousness.” Today, several respected African-American women preachers and teachers of preachers proudly stand on Lee’s, Small’s and Randolph’s shoulders raising their prophetic voices.
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