ABSTRACT
The African-American church in America has stood between individuals and the larger society for blacks for over two hundred years. In so doing it has been a source of empowerment and mutual assistance and a center for considerable social change. An historical review of the church's development from its early form as an invisible institution during slavery to its present diverse and formal structures reveals the significant role of the church in the black community. This chapter calls attention to the function that the church played as a setting in which shared needs and hopes could be expressed and the contribution it made in forging an identity for a people removed from their homeland. In the early 1900s the church was a familiar setting for migrants making a new life in the urban industrial north. The implications of the church for human service workers are that it is a resource site for studying empowerment, mutual assistance, and social change for African-Americans and how they have mobilized for community building.
