What We Have
The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of Rev. Dr. Neichelle R Guidry’s talk from our 2021 Enfleshing Witness gathering.
Niechelle preaches because she believes in the liberating and transformative power of the gospel and of the Black preaching tradition. Niechelle preaches to primarily Black women and Black communities. She preaches, love yourself as God loves you. Niechelle preaches at Sisters Chapel of Spelman College in Atlanta, GA, on social media, and wherever the Spirit leads her.
Zora Neal Hurston once famously said that Black women are the mules of the earth.
By this, she meant that for years and centuries, black women have carried the hopes and the dreams, the expectations, the burdens and even the very members of our communities on our proverbial backs. In recent years, it has often been said that black women have heroically saved this nation. Time and time again, we have galvanized our communities and our resources and expended our money and our power and our influence to dig this nation out of the moral holes that it has repeatedly found itself in.
We even save our churches. We provide invaluable labor in spaces where we're not even sure that we're respected, that we're valued. And in some cases where we haven't even been allowed to be ordained into leadership. And most often this heroism happens at our own expense. We know so well now that when we put other people in other places before ourselves and before our needs, we are the last ones to benefit if we benefit at all.
Recently, however, we have been blessed to bear witness to another way of being black women who lead, elite athletes. Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles, both have stepped down recently from incredibly high profile, very powerful competitions in order to preserve their mental health. Allison Felix became the most decorated track and field athlete in the aftermath of walking away from a sponsorship contract with Nike, after they deducted her pay for becoming pregnant. She went on to start her own athletic wear enterprise that centers the stories and the bodies of women. And when she walked away from that deal, that woman took all of her amazingness, she took her force, she took her speed with her. And as I look and think about what it will look like and what it means to enflesh witness to and from our communities, the words that come to mind are creative agency.
See for so long the models and expectations of leadership have been handed down to us. We have enfleshed these roles as they've been taught to us, as they've been dictated to us, as they've been modeled in front of us. We have not always been empowered to ask the question of what does it mean to me to preach and to pastor and to serve the body of Christ.
And when we have dared to ask these questions, we have often ended up bruised and battered and broken simply for trying to show up in our realness and our authenticity and our fullness. So not only right now are we in need of a church that will go into some new directions, but we are in need of some leaders who are healing , and who are whole, and who are free, and who love what we do.
In 2nd Kings chapter 4 verses 1 through 7, we see a woman who is also in need. She's a widow. Her husband has died and she is now in so much debt that her creditors are threatening to take her children away from her. She consults the prophet Elisha who asks her,
“what do you have in your house?”
“Nothing”, she says, “but a jar of oil.” And he gives her very clear instructions to go and get as many jars as possible from your community, take your children into your home, shut the door behind you, and as long as you're pouring this fresh oil into these jars, fresh oil will be there, will be provided.
And in this time of need, this woman became an entrepreneur. She found fresh use for things that she already had. And if I'm being quite honest, what I am finding in this season is that as a result of so many of the traumas that we've suffered in our vocations in these churches and other institutions, so many of us don't even like what we do anymore.
We've lost the sense of excitement and passion for our ministries because they've become so tiring and so political and draining and exhausting. And perhaps like this woman, we have overlooked what's in our houses. In an effort to fit in as we lead, we have overlooked our own passions and curiosities and our innate skill sets and talents because they don't quite fit into the box of pastor that we've seen and that we were taught.
We have dismembered ourselves from our own spirits, trying to walk like and preach like and preside like everybody else. And in the process, we have forfeited our creative agency to create the flourishing that we want in our lives, in our vocations, and certainly in our churches.
As I conclude, I want to invite you to go back into your house, shut the door behind you and take an inventory of all that you have overlooked.
Yes, we do need leaders who are visionaries, but maybe the vision isn't as far off as we thought that it was. Maybe what we need to flourish in our vocation, in our community is right here in our own house, in our own heart, in our own hands. Nobody knows what you need to flourish like you know what you need to flourish.
And what will it take for that need to be met? How do you want to feel even as you are bringing healing to others? How can we begin to center our pleasure and our creativity and our sense of fun and playfulness in our ministries? Can we look to our innate passions and gifts outside of ministry and work for an indication of what God is trying to do in the church in this season?
Let me de-stigmatize these questions. It is not arrogant and it is not selfish to ask yourself, what do you need to do this work? Black woman photographer, Carrie Mae Weems said in one of her pieces, “I knew not from memory, but from hope that there were other models by which to live.” Models. If we want to be models to the future, we have to be not so wedded to what we have seen as much as we are wedded to what we hope for. And if we ask these questions, and we earnestly live into the answers, and we enflesh them in our communities maybe we can then be the models for those who are coming behind us. God's word for God's people. Ashe and Amen.
We are excited to announce a new chapter in the Enfleshing Witness movement: “Enfleshing Witness: Rewilding Otherwise Preaching.” Learn more about this new grant opportunity and sign-up to stay connected as the project unfolds.
REV. DR. NEICHELLE R. GUIDRY
Rev. Dr. Neichelle R. Guidry is a spiritual daughter of New Creation Christian Fellowship of San Antonio, Texas, where the Bishop David Michael Copeland and the Rev. Dr. Claudette Anderson Copeland are her pastors and where she was ordained to ministry in 2010. She is a graduate of Clark Atlanta University (2007, BA, Lambda Pi Eta) and Yale Divinity School (2010, M.Div.), where she was the 2010 recipient of the Walcott Prize for Clear and Effective Public and Pulpit Speaking. She is also a graduate of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary (2017), where she completed her Doctor of Philosophy in the area of Liturgical Studies with a concentration in Homiletics. Her dissertation is entitled, "Towards a Womanist Homiletical Theology for Subverting Rape Culture." She currently serves as the Dean of the Chapel and the Director of the WISDOM Center at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.
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