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5 Family The Church is “family.” The notion of family that undergirds this chapter draws on African American usages of the term to refer to relationships of mutual obligation, responsibility, compassion, duty, and loyalty between persons who may, or may not, be connected through conventional ties of descent and marriage. The Church is “family,” then, not only because so many of the saints are actual “blood relations” or marriage partners but also because the saints relate to each other in terms of who brought whom to “the truth.” In many African American churches, members call one another “brother” and “sister,” but in The Church, many saints are siblings. The Church also grew by saints bringing friends and neighbors into the fold. Growth has occurred through recruitment both of conventional kin who belong to extended families and of spiritual kin, who are absorbed through “spiritual adoption.” At its founding, the head of The-Church-as-family was Mother Brown, whose role combined the kin-based position of parent with divinely legitimated authority as God’s mouthpiece. The role of spiritual parent has persisted in the male and female elders, who take their stand at the head of this church family today. This chapter focuses on emergence of the beliefs, practices, and organizational processes of The Church and on how they changed over time. It falls into three major sections. I begin with the life and vision of its pastor -founder. As the major church figures were women, this section also addresses gender as an organizing element in this emerging institution. The next section analyzes the organizing theme of family, tracing how connections based on conventional kinship and spiritual adoption inform recruitment and, in turn, are informed by boundaries between the Church and the world. The last section focuses on continuities and change in The Church after the founder’s demise in 1984 and until the present. 140 · Saved and Sanctified A Voice, a Vision, a Church The voice came when she was down on her knees in a rented room above a horse stable. It was not the first time Mother Brown had heard this voice. She had been listening to, and for, it ever since her “call” as a young woman in Mecklenburg, Virginia, where she was born in 1879. The leaders of her Baptist church responded to her report of being called with the words, “God never called a woman to preach.” Nevertheless, on arriving in Philadelphia in 1914, she started preaching on the city’s “highways and byways” and held services in saints’ homes. She also preached in some of the “big churches” where they wanted “to put her up” because of her gifts of preaching and “getting a prayer through” for the sick and suffering. She said that she did not stay with these more established churches because she “got tired of their fornication and lies.” She criticized clever, self-serving male ministers who seduced women by posing such rhetorical questions as “How can two clean sheets dirty each other?” Mother Brown was determined that her church would be “a clean church,” free of “fornication.” She was in a little upper room that she had rented above a horse stable, praying fervently for divine direction, when the voice came. “You will never be saved doing what the world is doing,” the voice said. She replied, “Lord, what must I do?” The voice said, “Follow me and my Word.” She looked up and saw wild goats on hilltops, and then they ran down the slopes to sit at her feet. At this point, she knew that God would “send me a church” and she would lead the saints into the kingdom by teaching them the Word as long as she lived. Mother Brown was nearly sixty when she had this vision and was approaching one hundred years of age when she related these events to me in the late 1970s for a paper that I was writing for a class at divinity school, before I had studied ethnographic interviewing methods. That interview, combined with the saints’ recollections, obituaries, and other printed matter, constitute the basis of this biography. Mecklenburg Call, Philadelphia Ministry Mother Brown was born in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, near the North Carolina border, in 1879, just sixteen years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. According to the 1860 census, 6,778 Whites, 898 “free colored,” and 12,420 slaves resided in the county. Mecklenburg was a center of the Great Awakening, and the first recorded Black...

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