Testimony as a Spiritual Literacy: Pedagogies of the Black Church

• In Event: The Black Church Ain’t Dead! A Revival on the Educational Legacy of the Black Church

Abstract

Testimony in the Black Church is a praxis of spiritual awakening, a Sankofian method to (re)member what God has done and inspire spiritual hope for the future (Dillard, 2000). Through archival research and sharing our own testimonies, we expose the dialogic resonance that fosters spiritual wholeness in an era of increasing social, political, and spiritual fragmentation (Author 2 et al., 2024). The spiritual literacy cultivated in the sharing of what we theorize as ‘Sankofa Testimonies’ provides an exemplar of the critical spirituality (Dantley, 2005) required in educational spaces for liberation and healing. We uplift Jesus as the model of ‘Sankofa Testimony,’ which attends to the nexus of the temporal and the spiritual and is grounded in His frequent proclamation throughout the gospels of who He is, where He’s been, what He has been through, and where He’s going. We take up Author3’s (2020) inquiry, “what can be learned from Jesus the Teacher and the praxis of His pedagogical approach” (p. 234) to explore the ways the Black Church enacts Sankofa Testimony with implications for how disillusioned practitioners might draw on pedagogies of the Black Church to enact liberatory social futures.

Authors

• Jamila Lyiscott, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Jasmine Hoskins, Urban Dove