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Hymns Ancient & Modern - Carol Tomlin

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98 pages

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Studies of preaching and preaching style have up to this point focused almost exclusively on a western eurocentric understanding of good preaching. Preach It encourages students, both vocational and scholarly, to look beyond these approaches and to learn from traditions with which they are less familiar. The distinctive style and techniques that African Caribbean Pentecostal preachers have inherited has been shaped by historical, political and socio-economic factors impacting on black Caribbean people (including clergy). Using a variety of socio-linguistic and theological approaches, Preach It reflects on these techniques, and outlines how preachers across church traditions might learn from them and use them in their own contexts.

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Publié par	Hymns Ancient & Modern
Date de parution	28 février 2018
Nombre de lectures	4
EAN13	9780334057390
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0057€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Preach it! Understanding African Caribbean Preaching Carol Tomlin

© Carol Tomlin, 2019 First published in 2019 by the SCM Press Norwich Editorial office 3rd Floor, Invicta House 108–114 Golden Lane London EC1Y 0TG, UK www.scmpress.co.uk SCM Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity)

Hymns Ancient & Modern® is a registered trademark of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd 13A Hellesdon Park Road, Norwich, Norfolk NR6 5DR, UK All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press. The Author has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work. British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library 978 0 334 05737 6 Typeset by Regent Typesetting Ltd Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd

Acknowledgements Preface

Introduction

Contents

Part 1 Backgrounds 1. Development of Modern Pentecostalism: Its Origins, African Roots and the role of William Joseph Seymour 2. African Caribbean Pentecostalism in Britain: Theologies, Liturgy and the Preaching Event 3. The Genesis and Development of Jamaican Creole: Speaking Jamaican, British Black Talk and Code-switching in Preaching 4. The Hermeneutics of African Caribbean Homiletics Part 2 Tools 5. Artistic Oratory in African Caribbean Pentecostal Preaching 6. Intertwining the Preaching Act: Call and Response 7. Restating the Claim: Repetition in Preaching 8. Conclusion Appendix A: Sermon Notes: ‘Grace the Gift of SalvationandYour Identity’ by Pastor Esther Bonsu Appendix B: Sermon Transcript: ‘Grace the Gift of Salvationand Your Identity’ by PastorEsther Bonsu Appendix C: Sermon Transcript: ‘Elevated by the PowerofGod’ by Pastor Nathan Turner Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Iwould like to express my thanks and acknowledge the many African Caribbean Pentecostal preachers whose sermons inform this book and who are a constant source of inspiration. I am especially grateful for the sermons of Pastor Nathan Turner and Pastor Esther Bonsu that are printed in the Appendix, and to Pastor Mark Liburd whose comments have been invaluable. I wish to thank my family, Sylvie (my mother), Beryl, Tony and cousin Donna for their love, support and encouragement. I would like to thank my co-pastor Prophetess Tamika and her daughter Kirai for being my extended family and my dear friends Sharon, Funke, Sylvie, Pamela, Joy, Moureen and Dr Prophet Oscar. Thank you to my church family, Restoration Fellowship Ministries. I have welcomed your prayers throughout this project. My appreciation extends to my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who gave me the ideas for this book.

Preface

The royal wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle on Saturday 1U May 2018 gave the worldwide audience a glimpse of the preaching of Bishop Michael Curry, the presiding Episcopal bishop who ‘stole the show’. He demonstrated a presentation of preaching that I have observed throughout my life. Although the bishop is certainly not Pentecostal, his style of preaching on that wonderful day is reminiscent of African Caribbean Pentecostal preaching, the subject of this book. My fascination with African Caribbean preaching began when I was ten, as far as I can recall. I attended and subsequently became a member of the New Testament Church of God in Leeds, West Yorkshire. I vividly remember the ‘mothers’ of the church and that one dared not move but had to sit still in ‘big people’ church, especially during the ‘Word’. Amazingly, I was able to sit unmoved for an hour or more and listen to the most dynamically stylized preaching. I was spellbound by the sermons of Pastor Terence Caine and others, who preached at the district conventions and building programmes (a fundraising event). I can still remember when I was 15 years old, the title and some of the content of a sermon by Pastor Grey entitled: ‘What time is it? [long pause] End time’. In those days much of the preaching along with the songs were eschatological in nature. Oh how times have changed! Thankfully, the style remains the same. To this day I am mesmerized by what I have referred to in my earlier research as ‘black preaching style’. I believe that God had planted the seed of interest in this art of preaching in my soul and mind. It is not coincidental that my parents were from the Windrush generation, the Caribbean migrants who settled in Britain during the post-war period. It is not accidental that I was captivated by the sounds, vibrancy and eloquence of my parents and older relatives. Coming from Clarendon, Jamaica they retained in their speech much of the basilect features, the Jamaican language/dialect furthest removed from Standard English. When they communicated with each other, I would at times roll around in peals of laughter at their incredible sense of humour and even when my mother reprimanded me her words sounded almost like poetry. Back to the African Caribbean Pentecostal preaching which is contextual and reflects the language of the community. I have observed in the twenty-first century that the style of preaching among African diasporans from the Pentecostal/Charismatic tradition is similar in diverse geographical locations. I have had the privilege of attending at various points in my life the following types of churches with varied cultural compositions. These include Pentecostal churches with predominantly African Caribbean people; one whose congregants are primarily West African; an evangelical church with an ethnically mixed congregation, and a Charismatic-type African Episcopal church where the congregants are mainly African American. Much of the material for this book is not only based on extensive in-depth research conducted over 35 years, but also my own lived-in experience of preaching for almost two decades. I am an insider, not gazing through the window as a stranger; my heart and passion intertwined with discovering more about the preached word of my heritage. I am a minister who co-founded an independent non-denominational church, Restoration Fellowship Ministries, which presently has two branches, one in Birmingham and the other in Leeds. Part of the journey to this book took place during my undergraduate days as a student teacher working with Professor Viv Edwards, and subsequent postgraduate and postdoctoral studies. As previously mentioned, God had planted the seed, and it had germinated in my first book,Black Language Style in Sacred and Secular Contexts. The seed has further grown in the form of this present book, which I hope will be of interest to clergy across Christian denominations and to those in the fields of homiletics, linguistics, communication and anthropology. It should benefit anyone interested in the spoken art of preaching.

Introduction

Theaim of this book is to examine the discursive practices of African Caribbean Pentecostal preaching in Britain. It explores the origins of modern Pentecostalism emanating from North America and its African roots. The North American narrative provides a context for the transportation of Pentecostalism from the Caribbean to Britain and discussion of the theologies and liturgy of African Caribbean Pentecostalism. The linguistic components of sermons or homilies reflecting the communicative patterns of African diasporans are documented. The book proposes a hermeneutical frame for African Caribbean preaching resonating with aspects of global Pentecostalism but with distinguishing features. The ideas discussed throughout this book lend support to the notion that African Caribbean Pentecostals have inherited underlying elements of West African languages and religious practices, still very much in evidence in contemporary diasporic communities such as Britain. It is recognized, as Ackah (2017) suggests, that African and diasporic communities are dynamic and diverse and a number of forces such as enslavement, colonialism and globalisation have shaped the religious expressions of the people; however, an African ontology remains. Therefore, as a point of reference, the termblackas a prefix will be used generically to refer to the cultures, languages and more specifically to the preaching of people of African descent in diverse geographical locations, despite objections to the term by some scholars (for instance, see Olofinjana, 2017, p. xvi).

African Caribbean churches and preaching It is relevant at this point to briefly explain that African Caribbean churches are a part of what are currently referred to in Britain as black majority churches (BMCs). These churches tend to be Pentecostal or Charismatic and delineated by two groups: the first comprises congregants predominantly from an African background, the second, Caribbean, also referred to as African Caribbean. Though similar in some respects, the latter generally has a longer history in Britain both ecclesiastically and in academic texts. Recent scholarly writing in the field of African Caribbean Pentecostal churches can be seen, for instance, in the work of Beckford (2000, 2013); Aldred (2005, 2010); Adedibu (2012); Reddie (2014) and Muir (2015). However, the hermeneutical framework for preaching in these churches are relatively under-researched (Mullings, 2007, 2010). The literature on ‘black preaching’ tends to emanate from North America where the cultural context and the denominational affiliations are rather different though there are some similarities in the style of preaching (see for instance, Mitchell 1970, 1990; LaRue 2011, 2016 and Thomas 2016). Academic writing on the strategies for preaching in African Caribbean Pentecostal churches is extremely sparse, drawing primarily on early studies by Sutcliff and Tomlin (1986) and research conducted by Tomlin (1988, 1999, 2014). There are generalist books dealing with preaching, advocating a somewhat narrow Eurocentric homiletic tradition (Gilbert, 2011; Stevenson, 2017). Yet Christianity, especially Pentecostalism, is growing rapidly in the global South, and reports of the decline in church attendance in several mainline British churches is parallel in recent decades to an upsurge in church planting among leaders of black majority, Asian and Latin American churches (Goodhew 2012; Olofinjana 2017). The act of preaching has been pivotal to their expansion, and theories in homiletics should inculcate the multi-identities of the carriers of Christianity. African Caribbean Pentecostal preaching is well placed as a starting point to traverse this terrain. It is first necessary to provide the context for this preaching by focusing on the origins of the African diaspora and the worldview.

The origins of the African diaspora: African worldview and orality The origins of the common linguistic cultural heritage of African diasporan communities lie in the system of slavery, the institution responsible for the spread of Africans in the New World. During the enslavement period from the nineteenth century, the slaves were systematically separated from their respective linguistic and ethnic groups. Hundreds of years saw the evolution of several different societies with many political organizations, cultures and different languages (Zeleza 2006). The marked differences in African societies have been cited to demonstrate the obstacles African slaves in the New World faced in maintaining aspects of their traditional cultures and languages. Despite these differences, there appear to be some underlying similarities, certainly in West Africa, the landmass

from which many of the slaves came. Redfield (1953 cited in Levine 1977, p. 4) chooses to discuss these fundamental commonalities under the umbrella ‘style of life’. As Levine (1977, p. 4) further comments: Though they varied widely in language, institutions, gods, and familial patterns, they shared a fundamental outlook toward the past, present, and future and common means of cultural expression, which could well have constituted a basis of a sense of common identity and worldview capable of withstanding the impact of slavery. We must be sensitive to the ways in which the African worldview interacted with that of the Euro-American world into which it was carried. Mbiti (1990) draws attention to the African worldview by discussing African indigenous religions throughout the African continent. In the traditional African ontological system, the hierarchical view of the universe with a supreme being, the Great Spirit or holy God, takes centre stage followed by lesser deities and spirits. At the core of the African worldview is the accessibility and control of the power of the Spirit or spirits in every aspect of human life. The spirits and also lesser deities possess human beings, which is expressed in people performing physical movements ritualistically. Accordingly, this ideology combines the sacred and secular or the spiritual and natural world into a holistic and harmonious system where individuals interact with each other, the supernatural and their ancestors. Community solidarity rather than excessive individualism is also an important feature of the African worldview. Inevitably, slavery transformed the cultures of the Africans especially in the United States, which demonstrated the least degree of African retentions of all the slaves imported into the New World, certainly in comparison to those found in Caribbean islands such as Haiti. Yet, enslavement did not completely eliminate African sensibilities, albeit reconfigured under conditions of extreme brutality. In particular it is maintained that religious life in the diaspora is one of the strongest areas of African retention despite the systematic acculturation of West African slaves (Herskovits 1958). Scholarly research suggests the slaves retained some practices of their African indigenous religion and reinterpreted European Christianity in the hidden swamps and unsafe terrain of the ‘invisible institution’, the name given to the secret times and places where Africans worshipped God during the days of slavery (Raboteau 1978). The religiosity of the slaves was a syncretism of the Christianity given to them by their European slave masters in the new environment, a point that will be developed further in Chapter 1. Writing of the Jamaican situation, for example, Hewitt (2016, p. 3) explains that:

In spite of all the efforts by the religious and political apparatus of the colonial system that were geared at de-Africanising the Jamaicans of African descent their retention of the religio-cultural resources of their homeland went deeper into their sub-consciousness. Even when missionary Christianity was employed as a tool to de-culturalise Africans of their religious worldview, the umbilical cord with the Motherland of Africa was too strong to be broken.

I argue that aspects of the African worldview or ‘Africanisms’ prevalent in the Caribbean can also be discerned among black Caribbean people in Britain. The challenge in studying the retentive embers of Africanism is that African religious practices are embedded in the song, narrative and riddle tradition, and African societies tend to be skewed to orality. The ways in which the slaves translated Christianity was through the spoken word, more so as they were forbidden to read and write. The prominence of orality in Pentecostal preaching, arising from the African American context, has remained one of its most notable characteristics, and it would be useful to briefly contextualize oral literacy in Africa as a point of reference for analysing this preaching tradition.

Oral versus written literacy in preaching Oral and written literacy are often seen as two binary poles, with orality considered the lesser of the two in spite of its bourgeoning contours. Finnegan (2012) presents a stalwart argument for oral literature to be accorded the same status as written literature, explaining that their differences are in degree rather than in kind. She rightly confirms that both oral and written literary genres are centred on words. It is also apparent that cultures have different emphasis on literacy, and the use of oral media varies at different times and geographical settings. The continued function of the oral tradition does not rely on the lack of writing nor disappear because of the transcription of oral texts. Given globalization and the rapid pace of technology the notion of an oral–literate continuum would be more befitting to describe literacy in many societies rather than ascribing a purely discrete oral literate state.

Several African societies are marked by written as well as oral literacy (Draper and Mtata 2009), pointing to an oral–literate continuum. As Zeleza (2006, p. 17) argues: There were African societies that were literate long before the imposition of European colonial rule. Moreover, the two, orality and literacy, do not necessary mark sequential stages; as several scholars have amply demonstrated there has always been a dialogic interaction between them. However, in several African societies, there is a rich oral tradition manifested in the transmission of knowledge, attitudes and ideas (Okpewho 1992). Oral literature by its definition depends on a performer who formulates words for specific occasions and it is also communal. Preaching in African Caribbean Pentecostal spaces is primarily dependent on oral literacy even when homilies depend on the written form, though it is possibly more accurate to describe contemporary preaching as reliant on an oral–written tradition. The performative and communal aspects of oral literature, inherited by Pentecostal ministers who actualize verbal literacy in preaching, are mediated through a range of linguistic components. This preaching also matches well with a traditional category of rhetoric known as epideictic, where in some definitions the main purpose of language is to showcase the orator’s verbal abilities. Thus, African Caribbean Pentecostal preaching can be interpreted as an oral literary genre in its own right.

Communicating texts in preaching It is paramount to focus on how preachers communicate texts, as preaching does not function in a cultural or linguistic space and the ethnography of speaking offered by Hymes (1972) focuses on language in the social context. He explains: ‘such an approach cannot take linguistic form, a given code, or speech itself as a frame of reference. It must take as context a community, investigating its communicative habits as a whole’ (p. 2). His perspective can be applied as a framework for analysing the language of preaching as a part of the African communication system (ACS) used by diasporans. Therefore the study of preaching has two dimensions: the linguistic which centres on areas such as lexis, phonology, syntax and semantics, and the stylistic which outlines the ways in which these different elements are combined to create a variety of effects. The two will be separated for the purposes of analysis although there are points of overlap. This book first describes the linguistic characteristics of speech in the diaspora, and second identifies the range of stylistic features found in Africa that have been retained by diasporans, particularly in Britain. It is especially in the area of stylistics where the African persistence in the diaspora remains constant, not only in sacred but also in secular domains (Tomlin 1988, 1999). An analysis of African Caribbean preaching includes the ‘text’, that is the Bible, and the process of its interpretation by both preachers and congregants. Sermons reveal the exegesis of biblical texts by these Pentecostals. Generally, preaching does not merely focus on hermeneutics or written, verbal and non-verbal communication, but also on how the underlying beliefs influence the reading of biblical texts. Consequently, the process of interpretation of the Bible by African Caribbean Pentecostals should be seen in light of their inherited African worldview and oral culture, integrated with their religious practices formed out of slavery, colonialism and contemporary life in Britain.

Structure of the book The book comprises eight chapters and falls into two main parts. Part 1 provides the historical and language background and discusses the theology of preaching. Chapter 1 summarizes the historiography of Pentecostalism and follows the retention theme by focusing on the African roots of Bishop William Joseph Seymour and the Azusa Street revival. This chapter alludes to the transportation of Pentecostalism from North America to the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica. Chapter 2 presents the Windrush migrant population during the post-war period, as a backlight for the development of African Caribbean Pentecostal churches in Britain, and outlines the theologies of these churches. In addition, it examines the liturgical praxis including prayers and singing, music, dancing and hand clapping as a setting for the act of preaching. Chapter 3 discusses the linguistic aspects of communication as a backdrop to the homiletic practices, artistry and style of preaching. As Jamaicans are the largest Caribbean population in Britain, the history and development of their language is the focal point for preaching in this book. The preaching event for