Sterling’s Call to Charisma: Revealing Weber’s Spirit in Contemporary Black Ministry

In this article, I reflect on a series of interviews I conducted with Rev. Rod Sterling, an African American minister with whom I have been in contact for over a decade, to consider Max Weber’s conceptualization of charisma. Instead of relying on Weber’s writings that explicitly outline the meaning of charisma, I focus on a passage in Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where he positions Richard Baxter, the seventeenth-century Presbyterian pastor, as a ministerial figure beyond the bounds of modernity’s time. Locating Baxter in a different temporality presents for Weber a means of mapping how Baxter’s theology becomes secularized into the infamous “Protestant work ethic.” Likewise, Reverend Sterling’s experiences of racism in the Presbyterian Church push him out of time and make him a figure of charisma.