The black church is a psycho-social-­spiritual response to the trauma of chattel slavery in the United States. As such, the black church ushered free and enslaved black people living in the brutality of colonial societies into a new body politic, an alternate reality that encouraged a mostly enslaved community to celebrate and embrace their human dignity as bearers of God’s image in the earth. As a liberating space, the black church is not only a refuge from the physical and psychological trauma of enslavement, Jim Crow, and other modern forms of exploitation; it is also a transformative space. In it, black Christians in the United States experience a theological reorientation, an intentional turning away from and rejection of slave religion and the colonized theologies that support it.

But this is not the whole story. For black women, the black church has also been a site of trauma and suffering. While scholars have studied the global suffering of black women, few have connected the traumatic legacy of enslavement to the ongoing trauma that black women experience in traditional black church spaces. This project, anchored in academic research and personal interviews, examines the lives of black female clergy who experienced trauma in traditional black church spaces and left to plant new faith communities. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the theology, ethics, and practices of these new faith communities share characteristics that are grounded in a womanist worldview. The theoretical framework for the project includes academic research on black church history, theology, and practices; intergenerational trauma and its effects; and womanism as the antidote to the sexism and misogyny within the black church movement. The project also features interviews of black women who fit the experiential profile described in the abstract. This qualitative approach will provide illuminate the lives of these women and the impact of their narratives upon the churches they planted.