FireFall Vol.16: Celebrating Black Women
Natasha Sistrunk Robinson + Octavia Ink; Norma T. Roberts, Salvation Army Trailblazer; Pricelis Perreaux-Dominguez; "Rebecca's Revival" + Caribbean History; Reading the Bible with Black Women
Welcome to FireFall! It’s Black History Month, and every Monday in February FireFall is celebrating Black women who are shaping conversations now, who’ve led the church in the past, and who are preaching, creating, celebrating, and liberating in ways that stretch from the early church to today. It’s a joy to share from such a rich depth of scholarship, expertise, and wisdom.
If you’re a newcomer, you need to know this: women of color from the U.S. and around the world are part of FireFall every week, and that’s not accidental. Check out the archives to learn more.
But in Black History Month, FireFall belongs completely to my Black sisters, including women who are African American and women of African descent in other places in the world. We’ll be celebrating voices from the past and voices of women shaping history today, as community both stretches back and launches forward.
God thank you for Black women, whose leadership, joy, insights, and faithfulness have shaped church history for millenia. Let us honor their stories well and learn You through them. Amen.
Listen: Natasha Sistrunk Robinson and Octavia Ink on Art, Justice, Beauty, Grief, & Creativity
Author and leader Natasha Sistrunk Robinson inviters listeners into a compelling conversation with artist Octavia Ink in episode 39 of A Sojourner’s Truth podcast.
Octavia Ink designed the cover for Voices of Lament: Reflections on Brokenness and Hope in a World Longing for Justice, a book Sistrunk Robinson edited. (Check out Pretty in Ink Press here - the artist’s impressive client list includes Penguin Random House, Chipotle, Trustpilot, and more.)
Somehow even just listening, this podcast episode ends up feeling sensory, like you’re overhearing a chat in someone’s studio with a palette sitting nearby, light streaming in. Ink notes, “[my art] can do what I’m shy about doing.”
One of my favorite comments came on the subject of art itself, as Ink explains, “the easiest way for me to communicate is to draw it, to think in that way of shapes or colors.”
When the chat turns to the weight of grief, she comments, “we need that stillness, we need to stand and feel. When we feel sad we just want to be alone, but there’s a real healing in community, letting your loved ones love on you.”
Visit the link here or click play below to listen to the whole episode. If you subscribe to Octavia Ink’s Patreon, you can receive some of her artistic joy in your mail.
Celebrate: Norma T. Roberts in The Salvation Army
In 2023, Major Norma T. Roberts of The Salvation Army turned 101. Two years before, she was awarded the Order of the Founder, the highest honor in the Salvation Army. Decades before in the 1940’s, the daughter of active Salvationist leaders had applied to officer training school in Atlanta and been denied due to her race. She tried again in New York and was accepted; later, she would go on to become the first African American officer stationed at the Atlanta center that had denied her entrance previously.
After working in New York for a brief period, she persisted in requesting assignment in the South, despite facing concerns over what she would encounter there. Finally gaining permission, she was transferred to a center serving an impoverished region on the edge of Little Rock, Arkansas.
She continued working in various leadership capacities throughout the South until her retirement in 1985. The video below celebrates her life and ministry in a tribute recorded when she was awarded the Order of the Founder.
Browse: Pricelis Perreaux-Dominguez Equips God’s People
Pricelis Perreaux-Dominguez radiates joy. Her bio notes that the founder and CEO of Full Collective and host of Being A Sanctuary podcast “is a coach, advocate, creator, writer, and Bible teacher” who is “a Black Latina living in NYC with her husband and son.” She’s also a student at Denver Seminary.
What strikes me about Pricelis - besides her joy, curiosity, and honesty - is that she doesn’t just say it or think it, she does it. Which means if you’ve got a need, she probably already has a resource for that ready to go.
And Ash Wednesday is coming up, so you have a need, and bam, here it is - her free 2024 Lent digital devotional guide.
Also check out her journal available for purchase here:
She has a book coming out with Brazos Press in the fall and I’m excited to learn more, but right now you can also get her kids’ book that’s in both Spanish and English, Good News Is Coming!
“Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World”
This book isn’t especially recent, it came out in 2006, a year when Amazon still felt kind of like a new venture that might not stick around, but I stumbled on the title recently and it looks fascinating.
Here’s part of the description for this book by Jon F. Sensbach, who drew from “German, Danish, and Dutch records, including letters in Protten's own hand” in his historical research:
“Rebecca's Revival is the remarkable story of a Caribbean woman-a slave turned evangelist-who helped inspire the rise of black Christianity in the Atlantic world. Rebecca Protten left an enduring influence on African-American religion and society. Born in 1718, Protten had a childhood conversion experience, gained her freedom from bondage, and joined a group of German proselytizers from the Moravian Church. She embarked on an itinerant mission, preaching to hundreds of the enslaved Africans of St. Thomas, a Danish sugar colony in the West Indies. Laboring in obscurity and weathering persecution from hostile planters, Protten and other black preachers created the earliest African Protestant congregation in the Americas.
Protten's eventful life-the recruiting of converts, an interracial marriage, a trial on charges of blasphemy and inciting of slaves, travels to Germany and West Africa-placed her on the cusp of an emerging international Afro-Atlantic evangelicalism. Her career provides a unique lens on this prophetic movement that would soon sweep through the slave quarters of the Caribbean and North America, radically transforming African-American culture. Protten's life, with its evangelical efforts on three continents, reveals the dynamic relations of the Atlantic world and affords great insight into the ways black Christianity developed in the New World.”
That is a lot. All I can think is, how is this not a miniseries!? (FireFall is warmly ecumenical but I want to give a shout out to the Moravians who also profoundly influenced John Wesley, founder of Methodism. The artist of the book’s cover art was a Moravian who painted many Moravian women and men, including Moravians of color.)
Reading the Bible with Black Women: Dr. Delores Williams on the Wilderness
This excerpt from late famed womanist Dr. Delores Williams’ writing in Sisters in the Wilderness explores the story of Hagar and African American womens’ experience of the “wilderness.”
Among her reflections, she wrote, “For many black Christian women today, ‘wilderness’ or ‘wilderness experience’ is a symbolic term used to represent a near-destruction situation in which God gives personal direction to the believer and thereby helps her make a way out of what she thought was no way. I recently encountered black women’s symbolic sense of wilderness when I lectured at Howard Divinity School in 1992. Arriving earlier than my lecture was scheduled, I went to one of the workshops attended almost exclusively by black female ministers….[One] woman began to tell about her experience in her last parish….Her ministry was about to be destroyed, she said. But she, alone, ‘took her situation to God as she fasted and prayed.’ Finally God ‘came to her,’ giving her direction. This was a positive turning point and her ministry survived to become one of the most outstanding in the district. Other women around the table in the workshop began to share what they termed their wilderness experiences in ministry.”
Dr. Williams continued, “As a result of these hard-time experiences and the encounters with God, Hagar and many African-American women manifested a risk-taking faith…”
Read more here. What does it look like to “manifest a risk-taking faith”? I see it in each of the women celebrated this week.
Thank you for subscribing to FireFall! Be sure to check out our growing archives. Thanks to the generosity of translator Pastora Daniela, FireFall is now also being made available in Spanish at Fuego Descendió!
FireFall is a free weekly newsletter curated by Elizabeth Glass Turner.