ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a pastoral reflection on what the church can learn from a Black womanist pneumatology that privileges the body as a primary agent of the Holy Spirit in order to more honestly align church praxis with God’s purpose for the universal church. Black womanist consideration of the Holy Spirit and the Black Church tradition begins with an ethico-pneumatological claim. The human body is a primary conduit of the Holy Spirit whose sacred visitation is disclosed in the church’s social witness against injustice. Slave narratives, African American religious history, and Black Church studies, however, reveal a counter-narrative. The religious practices of the enslaved while in attendance at white churches as enjoined by their owners were also engaged with other enslaved and free Blacks in secret devotion beyond the gaze of white authority. For the prophetic Black Church the redemption of the world involves salvation from the racialized faith of white supremacy.
