THE PROBLEM

Black People have been dismembered from the “mainline” church

(the dismemberment is NOT from the Church of which Christ is the head

but the institutional church as it were in America)

The book of Judges tells the stories of a people who “did what seemed right in their own eyes.” This is the phrase woven through the pages of this book of the Bible that includes Deborah, Gideon, Samson, and a nameless woman who meets a tragic death. 

Chapter 19 introduces a nameless woman, known only by her relationship to the Levite man she accompanies—and even that identification is vague. She is a concubine or maybe his wife or maybe his girlfriend or maybe a sex slave. The text is unclear about her identity but is explicit about her worth to her Levite companion: she is a commodity. 

You can read the text to unpack the story but I’ll just ruin it for you and say her story ends with her body being dismembered and tossed to the wind.  

This story has resonance with the Black experience in America in that the dismemberment of Black people from the church in America has rendered them unprotected, and unloved.

It has been communicated in words, actions, and inaction for over 400 years: Because you are not white, we have no need of you, Black people. Black bodies are bartered with, brutally and continuously raped, left lifeless on hard pavements, dismembered from full participation in the church in America, and tossed to systems, structures, and institutions that conspire with the winds to keep them emotionally, mentally, and psychologically dismembered.  

The tendency is to deny the dismemberment, to scapegoat comfort and style as the reasons for segregated white churches. Meanwhile, unlike the Black church, it only sings its own songs, amplifies its own voices, and perpetually ignores the suffering of other parts of Christ’s body.