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The Mission of the Center for African American Worship Studies is to train and equip worship leaders to disciple and nurture local church ministries into thriving, healthy congregations. In the process, we seek to help develop local church assemblies into Christ-honoring, thriving, biblical, community-sensitive congregations. This center is designed to support congregations through the equipping of dynamic, gifted and talented students for spiritual leadership and service in church congregations within multiple denominational contexts around the world.

The Center for African American Worship Studies at Trevecca is the only college, university, seminary or divinity school offering worship studies workshops, boot camps and degree programs exclusively focusing on equipping leadership for church congregations.

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Broad objectives for the Center portray and represent the value of African American congregational worship as a viable and imperative equipping resource for the local church, building bridges for racial reconciliation, social justice, discipleship and spiritual formation. Core values of the Center include developing a culture and environment committed to teaching fellow believers how to:

Dr. Stephen Newby is director of the Center for African American Worship Studies at Trevecca and chairperson of the Center's Advisory Council. He serves as a worship leader/composer and professor of music at Seattle Pacific University.

The Master of Arts in African American worship studies combines ministry training with thoughtful and practical ways to serve the Black church. This pioneering program equips students to serve in a variety of worship-related ministry roles through its focus on spiritual formation, discipleship, ministry application, team building, personal disciplines, theology and leadership principles.

The Master of Arts in African American worship and leadership studies combines ministry training with thoughtful and practical ways to serve the Black church. The curriculum spans worship, theology, biblical studies, the history of African American worship and contemporary leadership dynamics. Through robust training, students learn how to create and cultivate a thriving community culture that encourages authentic worship and effective leadership. Other focal points include time management; team building; the pastor/worship pastor relationship; and leadership issues confronting Black churches.

This degree is offered through Trevecca's Center for African American Worship Studies, led by Dr. Stephen Newby, an accomplished composer, worship leader and musician with more than 20 years of experience in the Black church community.

The purpose of this program is to equip worship practitioners already serving as musicians in African American churches in the areas of spiritual formation, discipleship, ministry application, team building, personal disciplines, theology and leadership principles. We seek to prepare students to engage in the following ways upon graduation:

Editorial Note: While the varied cultures of the Christian world each have their beautiful and distinctive ways of worshiping, there is something uniquely enriching about African-American Christian worship. We believe it embodies under lying patterns of thought and experience that do much to commend it to Christians everywhere.

Anybody who has observed or participated in an African- American Christian worship service will admit that there is an undeniable difference between the way American Blacks worship and the worship of other racial and ethnic groups. Rooted in their unique social history in America, the difference is more one of function and experience than proof that one style is superior to another.

In this reflection I shall explore contemporary African-American Christian worship, beginning with an examination of the religious heritage African slaves brought with them to the New World. Next, I shall investigate the theology of African-American worship, following with a focus on its characteristics and elements.I will end with a brief outline of some of the challenges facing Black worship.

An Africanism, for instance, that survived the "Middle Passage" and had a powerful impact on early African-American spirituality is the African understanding of life. Because Africans tend to view life holistically, the secular and the sacred are not mutually exclusive realities that exist in antagonistic tension but interconnected phenomena. Slaves held on to this understanding of life, and the result was that their worship was restricted to neither time nor place.

Because people of African descent in North America tend to view life as a single system, their worship is integrative, holistic, and experiential. Traditionally, it has been inextricably woven into the stuff of their life. Born in slavery, weaned under Jim Crow segregation, and reared in discrimination, African-American worship is inseparably linked with Black life.

Community is a grounding principle of Black worship, understood by African-Americans as an encounter involving God, the worshiper, and the broader community.6 For them worship is not primarily the expression of one's private devotion to God, but is rather a community event. It is the "eschatological invasion of God into the gathered community of victims, empowering them with the divine Spirit from on high to keep on keeping on even though the odds might appear to be against them."7

Martin Luther King, Jr. asserted that at its core, and best, Black worship is a social experience in which people from all walks of life affirm their unity and oneness in God.8 Always a divine experiment and dynamic happening, it is experienced as a response to the Holy Spirit's call to the believer to cast off his or her coat of cares and enter the divine presence. As God's presence is experienced anew, praise, adoration, thanksgiving, submission, and commitment are offered by the celebrant.

In African-American Christian worship God is known and understood as the One who sides with the weak and oppressed. For Blacks, a God who does not care does not count, and they believe that the sovereign God continues to intervene in history in very concrete ways on their behalf. This God possesses absolute, unlimited power and delights in saving.9

God's Son, Jesus Christ, whose incarnational commitment to the poor was evidenced in His suffering, death, and resurrection, holds out hope for the personal and corporate transformation of humankind. There are no metaphysical distinctions between God and Jesus Christ in African-American Christian worship. Through the liberating presence of the Holy Spirit, both God the Father and God the Son are immediately present, and Blacks will fluctuate between calling upon Jesus for strength to help them climb up "the rough side of the mountain" and testifying to an Almighty God about '"how they got over.'"10

African-American Christian worship is the corporate celebration of what God, through Jesus Christ, has done for the community in diaspora. In worship, celebrants confess their sins and accept God's forgiveness after they have been confronted by God, made uneasy by His judgments, and consoled by God's grace.11

For African Americans, worship is not as cerebral and rationalistic as it is experiential and dynamic. This is the case because African-American Christian worship focuses not so much on the transmission of abstract ideas and information as it does on the communal sharing of reality.12

African Americans, in their worship, do not want only to learn something but to feel something, namely God's Spirit.13 They aspire to know God personally rather than to know about God through doctrines and creeds, and they frown on the mere recitation of dogmas as proof that God is known. What matters most is to know God through God's revelational activities in their personal and corporate lives.14

Yet their emphasis on experience does not mean that their worship is hollow and mere emotion. On the contrary, African-American worship has always held emotion and intellect in creative tension, rejecting the either/or for the both/and paradigm.

Pastoral Care. Few things have provided African Americans with the coping and survival skills so vital to their experience in the United States as has worship. Black worship sup plied slaves with effective psychological and emotional medicine to combat slavery's decimation of their sense of being and worth. Today it is still a veritable "Balm in Gilead" that keeps African Americans sane and balanced in their world of traditionalized disenfranchisement and powerlessness. In short, Black worship has always been about pastoral care, providing celebrants with comfort and healing.

How are comfort and healing engendered during worship? Comfort is experienced as worshipers sing songs grounded in struggles that speak of a better tomorrow and hear testimonies from those who have "come over a way that with tears has been watered." Comfort comes as prayer is offered that reminds celebrants of the power of God to right wrongs, and preachers who know how to speak to aching hearts and confused minds expound the Word.15

Yet it is in drawing people into God's never-ending story of love that African-American worship functions best as pastoral care. As African Americans become aware of the fact that they have been integrated into God's story, their sense of being and wholeness is validated, and they respond by giving praise to God.

Liberation. Another characteristic of African-American Christian worship is liberation. African-American worship is a celebration of freedom in which people enter and experience the liberating presence of the Holy Spirit. It has been called a "black happening, the time when the people gather together in the name of the One who promised that he would not leave the little ones alone in trouble."16

A critical aspect of the liberation themes characteristic of Black worship is its refusal to be victimized by the tyranny of the clock. Liberation in African-American Christian worship is also evident in the ways in which music is performed, with Black singers and instrumentalists seldom being content to render a piece as it appears in print. Not uncommonly, they elect to search for notes and chords that strike a responsive strain in the African-American soul and experience. 006ab0faaa