ABSTRACT
Ballard’s observation about black churches in eighteenth-century Philadelphia also applies to the church in this study. It was founded 200 years later in the same city by a woman born just sixteen years after the Emancipation Proclamation; she would head the church until her death at 105 years. This chapter explores the importance of this inner-city storefront-sanctified church for founding members, who arrived in the city during the Great Migration (1915-1960), and for their offspring. It focuses on religious socialization related to personal spiritual formation, larger societal structures, and cultural traditions. Its
purpose is to identify implications for strength-based interventions that promote the resiliency of black families and communities. This chapter contains four parts: methodology, interpretive frameworks, and central concepts; the next section is an overview of the case study church; the third is a “thick” ethnographic description of its intergenerational knowledge transfer processes; and the final part ends with interventions for culturally competent social work.
