STUDENTS of the black Christian church today tend to emphasize its long and honorable associa-tion with the cause of black liberation, its tradition of protest, whether overt or covert, against white racism." The Black Revolution was born in the'invisible'Black Church of the slave era."" The independent Black Church emerged as a protest-a protest against the racist theology and the racist ecclesiology of the church in America."'This emphasis, as Vincent Harding has pointed out, serves as a necessary counterbalance to" classic" interpreta-tions of the black church, by such schol-ars as Benjamin Mays and E. Franklin Frazier, as passive, other-worldly, not inclined to struggle for racial justice. Any definite judgment on the black church will undoubtedly have to give some weight to both these interpretations, thereby recognizing what Harding terms" the ambiguity, the doubleness, of black religious experience, indeed of all religious experience." 2 Yet even recognition of this" double-ness"-this polarity between religion as an opiate and religion as a stimulus to protest--does not constitute a full appreciation of the contribution the black church has made to the earthly liberation of its people. That contribution goes beyond the simple either/or of passive submission and active resistance to encompass the realm of communal nurture in which a people develops and symbolizes its answer (s) to the question, What does it mean to be a man? Every human community de-fines and authenticates those models of manhood that serve to guide its members in their growth toward mature humanity, and within the black com-munity the church has played a key role in this process.