The Journey: Forty Days of Promise, Day One

The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity

Day One: The Journey Begins—From Victims to Victors

Join me on a forty-day intercultural journey of promise. I will be blogging, Lord willing, during the forty days from Martin Luther King Day on January 19, 2009, to the end of Black History Month on February 28, 2009. Our focus will be: The Journey: Forty Days of Promise—Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity.

I know, technically, that is forty-one days. February 28 will be a day of reflection on the previous forty-day journey. Each day I will highlight a stirring narrative from Black Church history. Then I will ponder application of this legacy to all of our lives today—regardless of our ethnicity, nationality, race, or cultural background. I will also include discussion questions so that you can individually, in your family, or corporately in your church ponder the implications for your life and ministry.

Day One: The Journey Begins—From Victims to Victors[1]

Free born Africans were ripped away from spouses, parents, children, village, and culture by capture. Stripped of everything, overnight they were transformed from farmers, merchants, scholars, artisans, or warriors into possessions. Without family, without status, they were treated as merchandise, as things—a mere extension of their captors’ will.

James Bradley portrays the dehumanization of capture in all its horror in a letter that he wrote in 1834 while a student at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati. “I think I was between two and three years old when the soul-destroyers tore me from my mother’s arms, somewhere in Africa, far back from the sea. They carried me a long distance to a ship; all the way I looked back and cried.”

Without a doubt, free-born Africans were victims of an inhumane institution. Yet, they were also victors wrestling to maintain their humanity and personhood. But how? In the midst of soul-destroyers, where did they find soul-deliverance? Their “Capture Narratives” tell their tale and provide our answer.

Born Free

“I . . . acknowledge the mercies of Providence in every occurrence of my life.” These words from the pen of the Christian Olaudah Equiano might seem trite until we realize that they introduce the narrative of his harrowing kidnapping and enslavement.

Equiano was born free in 1745 in the kingdom of Benin on the coast of Africa, then known as Guinea. The youngest of seven children, his loving parents gave him the name Olaudah, signifying favored one. Indeed, he lived a favored life in his idyllic upbringing in a simple and quiet village where his father served as the “chief man” who decided disputes and punished crimes, and where his mother adored him dearly.

Bathed in Tears: Weeping with Those Who Weep

At age ten, it all came crashing down. “One day, when all our people were gone out to their works as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both; and, without giving us time to cry out, or make resistance, they stopped our mouths, tied our hands, and ran off with us into the nearest wood: and continued to carry us as far as they could, till night came on, when we reached a small house, where the robbers halted for refreshment, and spent the night.”

His kidnappers then unbound Equiano and his sister. Overpowered by fatigue and grief, they had just one source of relief. “The only comfort we had was in being in one another’s arms all that night, and bathing each other with our tears.”

Equiano and his sister model a foundational principle of sustaining empathy: weeping with those who weep. Far too often we rush in with words, and far too often those words are words of rescue. Our hurting friends need our silence, not our speeches. The shed tear and the silent voice provide great enrichment for our spiritual friends.

Learning Together from Our Great Cloud of Witnesses

1. How could your people ministry grow if you empathetically bathed others in your tears?

2. How could your people ministry grow if you applied the truth that your hurting friends need your silence, not your speeches?

[1]Excerpted, modified from, and quoted from Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Purchase your copy at 40% off for only $10.00 at www.rpmministries.org.