The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness

Acknowledgments

xi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Writing is at root a solitary undertaking. But it is greatly aided by the support, honest input, and constructive criticisms of colleagues, family , and friends. That is why I am so very grateful for the many people who have helped to make this a stronger project and with small and sometimes random acts of kindness and grace transformed even the tedious side of writing into a labor of love. First, I am grateful for my parents, the late Jonathan Warnock and Verlene Warnock, my first pastors and teachers, from whose mouths I first heard the gospel of liberation and through whose example my siblings and I were inspired to embody its implications in personal conduct and communal commitment. Their fervor for the gospel was significantly deepened by my introduction to rigorous inquiry into the content and meaning of the church’s proclamation. This occurred first during my years as a student at Morehouse College, under the tutelage of great teachers like Lawrence Edward Carter, Sr., dean of the Martin Luther King, Jr., International Chapel, Aaron Parker, Duane Jackson, and Roswell Jackson. Then at Union Theological Seminary, I met James H. Cone, whose text For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church, I first encountered while working on a paper during my senior year in high school. Little did I know then that he would become my academic adviser and mentor. Cone taught me much about the rigor of intellectual inquiry, both as an act of faith and as a gift of “tough love” for the church. Still xii Acknowledgments other professors teaching during my matriculation, including Christopher Morse, Emilie Townes, Delores Williams, Gary Dorrien, Vincent Wimbush, and the late church historian James Melvin Washington , affirmed and challenged my bivocational commitment as scholar and preacher and helped to create, at Union, a critical context for my growth. But that context was expanded and continually tested in the laboratory of my active and simultaneous ministry on the staff of Birmingham ’s Sixth Avenue Baptist Church and Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. I thank those congregations and their respective pastors, the late John Porter and Calvin O. Butts III, for their deep investment in me across the years. This work began as my dissertation while serving as pastor of Baltimore’s Douglas Memorial Community Church, and by the time of my graduation, I was also beginning my pastorate at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. I thank the people of those congregations for giving me time and space to think and write. That time and space was greatly facilitated by the work of pastoral and administrative staff members at Douglas and Ebenezer, assisting and attending to the daily operations and pastoral concerns of congregational life. I offer my heartfelt thanks to Calvin Mitchell, Catherine Luckett, Rhonda Boozer, Vernard Caples, Mark Wainwright, Darryl Roberts, Shanan Jones, Michael Wortham, Frank Brown, Selina Smith, Walter Hughes, Natosha Rice, Wilbur Willis, Bobbie James, Clevette Ingram, and Jason Myers for their faithful service as associate pastors and to Glenda Boone, Esther Harris, Marvel Leverett, Mary Kay Williams, Rosalyn Barnes, Andrea Darden, Susan White, Atiba Nkrumah, Willie Lyons, Evelyn Prettyman, and April Lopez for their attention to the daily administrative operations of church life. It was Peter Paris of Princeton University who suggested that the dissertation should become a book. I am proud that this work is a part of the Religion, Race, and Ethnicity series of which he serves as series editor, and I thank him and my editor, Jennifer Hammer, for their encouragement and advice through this process. Finally, I want to thank a host of colleagues and friends, whom I met during my matriculation through three degrees at Union Theological Seminary and whose sharp questions and challenges, across the years, have made Acknowledgments xiii me a better scholar, pastor, and person. Among them are JoAnne Terrell , Mark Chapman, Leslie Callahan, Joy Bostic, Diane Stewart, Clarence Hardy, Sylvester Jones, Jonathan Cutler, Adam Clark, Kanyere Eaton, Lorena Parrish, Mark Kellar, and Adolphus Lacey. Additionally , Gayraud Wilmore, Obery Hendricks, Randall Bailey, Dennis and Christine Wiley, Monica Coleman, and J. Alfred Smith provided more encouragement, support, and insight than they know. To them and so many others, I owe my sincere thanks and gratitude. All errors and limitations are mine alone. All glory belongs to God. This page intentionally left blank ...