Amanda Berry Smith

Born enslaved on a Maryland plantation, Amanda Berry Smith (1837-1915) went on to preach the Gospel across the United States, Europe, Africa and India.  How did an impoverished black woman achieve such freedom and influence?  Did she ever overcome her anxious fears?  Hear the story of one of the greatest Christians you’ve never heard of.

Donyelle McCray, Assistant Professor of Homiletics at Yale Divinity School, writes about the ways African American women and lay people use the sermon to play, remember, invent, and disrupt. Her book, The Censored Pulpit: Julian of Norwich as Preacher, offers a homiletical reading of Julian’s life and ministry. Her current research examines the preaching and spirituality of the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray. She is also working on a documentary film on Race, Church, and Theological Practices. 

Learn more at https://divinity.yale.edu/faculty-and-research/yds-faculty/donyelle-mccray

Meet host Karen Wright Marsh, and learn more about the show here: www.karenwrightmarsh.com

For more reading, Karen recommends Susie C. Stanley’s article on Amanda Berry Smith at World Religions and Spirituality https://wrldrels.org/2016/10/08/amanda-berry-simith/
Smith’s autobiography is online at https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/smitham/menu.html

Become a podcast partner! Make your gift at: www.theologicalhorizons.org/giving. Thank you!

Transcript

Karen Marsh (00:11):
Welcome to the Vintage Saints and Sinners podcast. I'm Karen Wright Marsh. Do you wonder if Christian faith can be truly lived in today's complex and changing world? Well, this is the place to find broken and beautiful companions for your everyday pilgrimage. Here, you'll find embodied witnesses, Christians from different eras and different cultures. They are people we sometimes call saints, but they were also sinners, just like you and me. Today, I'm here to tell you the story of Amanda Berry Smith, and to talk about it with a good friend of mine, Donyelle McCray. And I'm glad you're here with us.

Karen Marsh (01:30):
Amanda Berry Smith was born in 1837. She was enslaved in a Maryland farm, and yet went on to become an international evangelist. It's an amazing story, really. She only had three months of formal education, and her whole life was one of privation and hunger, ill health, and intense stress. She earned only pennies a day doing laundry. She survived two disastrous marriages and grieved the early deaths of four of her five children. When her son Willy died for lack of medicine, she didn't even have the $20 for the funeral. Amanda was surrounded by real and present dangers, and she spoke frankly about her constant struggles with fear. In her view, it was a spiritual battle. Satan was the source of the fear that held her captive, hissing words of self doubt and deception, stirring up panic. For all of her physical privations, Amanda most desired to know the immediate living power of God.

Karen Marsh (02:39):
And she prayed, "I will pray once more, and if there is any such thing as salvation, I am determined to have it this afternoon or die." She prayed and she prayed and at last, she felt a strange yet glorious feeling: The sanctifying presence of the Holy. From that day on Amanda had a passion for two things: to know God and to tell others about God. She even had a vision of two fiery letters, spelling out the command GO, and she knew she was called to go and preach. Of course in her time, women were not welcome in pulpits, especially women of color. But she was convinced that this was her calling. She tells the story of preparing to preach one Sunday, and she's laid low by worry. And so she begins to pray, "Oh Lord, show me what is the matter. Why is this darkness in my mind?"

Karen Marsh (03:45):
When she opens her Bible, she sees the words, perfect love casteth out fear. And then she knows what is the matter. It is the fear. And so she prays, "Oh Lord, give me complete victory over this fear." In the silence, she feels God's delivery. God was with her in her fear. God called her to take action to testify at union church. And so she says, yes, Lord, if thou wilt help me and give me thy strength and go with me, I will go. And go she does. And so Amanda shows up to face the congregation of skeptical strangers and a presiding elder who says, "Mrs. Smith is from New York, and she says that God sent her." When Amanda stands up, she does not muster her own rhetorical skills or dig deep for self-confidence. No, she goes out on a ledge with God alone. And before the packed house, with her heart pounding, God gives her great liberty in preaching and her fright melts away.

Karen Marsh (05:05):
Later she writes, "I seem to lose sight of everybody and everything but my responsibility to God and my duty to the people. The Holy ghost fell on the people and we had a wonderful time." Throughout her life, through controversy and hardship this self-taught former slave became an evangelist. She traveled across oceans and around the world, a preacher unlike any other that the people had seen. She went to England and Scotland, to Calcutta and Liberia, back in the United States. She founded an orphanage for African girls. She lived to the age of 78, a remarkable life of privation and suffering, but also a life of faith and calling and courage.

Karen Marsh (06:03):
The Vintage Saints and Sinners podcast is the audio companion to my book, Vintage Saints and Sinners: 25 Christians who transformed my faith. To learn more, come on by my website, karenwrightmarsh.com. Please rate and review this podcast on iTunes and invite your friends to join us. Now, for a conversation about Amanda Berry Smith, with my friend, Danielle McCray,

Karen Marsh (06:36):
I'd like to welcome Donyelle McCray, an assistant professor of homiletics at Yale divinity school, where Donyelle focuses on preaching and Christian spirituality. She studied African American women preachers, the life and witness of Reverend Pauli Murray, and she has a wonderful new book called The Censored Pulpit: Julian of Norwich As Preacher. Thank you for talking with me today, Donyelle.

Donyelle McCray (07:01):
Yes. Thank you for having me.

Karen Marsh (07:04):
So Amanda Berry Smith. I know you've done a lot of work in this area of African American women preachers. And I'm curious to know when you read the story of Amanda Berry Smith and her words, does she fit into this community of women? Is she typical?

Donyelle McCray (07:22):
You know, I think there's so many extraordinary aspects of Amanda Berry Smith's story. The global nature of her preaching, I think, is really striking because it's clear that she has a sense of how large the world is. She's not tied into a very insular view of preaching.

Karen Marsh (07:46):
So to imagine her traveling to India, traveling to Liberia, and then England and Scotland. I mean, how did this happen?

Donyelle McCray (07:59):
You know, so there's something very powerful about the preaching that she does, when we think of it in the traditional sense, of these individual messages given at a point in time. Right? And so in thinking about Amanda Berry Smith, as preacher, is to think about someone who is embodying a message of love and peace and grace within multiple contexts. She's embodying that in different countries, she's embodying that in different cultures and experiences, a level of freedom of movement in proclaiming, which I think is really powerful.

Karen Marsh (08:49):
I'm interested to know how, what you see in her words, in her understanding of God, of her faith, especially when you consider how she lived. She lived with poverty, under incredible racism. She was born enslaved, even misogyny, you know, and unhappy marriages. What are clues to her view of God, her understanding of faith?

Donyelle McCray (09:17):
So I guess one thing that is really striking, with when her home is broken into essentially, and her parents are attacked. She witnesses violence up close and had to have been very afraid. That's where I'm going. I'm going to the place of fear. To have that experience, I don't even, I don't even have language for it. I think there is no language for the kind of - the fact is there is no language for the kind of violence that was a part of African American experience for those in captivity, and those who, you know, are one step removed from captivity. I mean, even when you know, her father buys the family's freedom, it doesn't, there's no full insulation from the violence and the separation and the fear.

Donyelle McCray (10:16):
And so God seems to be one who is present in the midst of fear. God is one who is a source of strength and comfort in the face of profound loss. I think God is also a guide, a kind of compass for her, leading the way in the face of uncertainty. You know, the other thing that strikes me about, I would need to think about how this connects to her vision of God, but there's something about her relationship with her father that's very, it just really struck me as very powerful that her story is also a kind of father daughter story, you know, because her father, she talks about her father, seeing him labor late into the night trying to buy the family's freedom and also her memory of her father reading scripture to them. It's a beautiful portrait of father-daughter love. You know her deep faith is in some ways traceable to this experience of hearing her father read scripture.

Karen Marsh (11:39):
And to have a parent who will sacrifice for her, she's coming out of a family of love and loyalty.

Donyelle McCray (11:46):
Right, right. And considered worthy. Her family is willing to labor for her. That's really powerful

Karen Marsh (11:56):
Reading her words, I'm struck by, in her descriptions of spiritual things, how much physical sensation and emotional content there is. You know, her experience of the spiritual is not, it is an intellectual experience, but so much of it is embodied and physical. And I wonder how important that is to you in your own life or your experience of Christian spirituality.

Donyelle McCray (12:25):
Yeah. That's such a good question. So I think it's a really big part of my experience with spirituality. I'm very sensitive to space just as a person. That's always been true of me. I can't always explain why I feel comfortable in a space or feel connected to God in a given space. It just is sort of a thing that is, but it is incredibly powerful. You know, I'm actually working on this project with the Louisville Institute, its on race, church and theological practices. And it's a clergy-scholar research team. There are five of us working together ,and we're focusing on a basement, on a church basement, and on the tactical experience, the sensory experience of the space. And so I say all this to say it's a fascinating line of inquiry for me, but it's also central to my own faith experience. And I think, you know, with the constant experience of feeling endangered and the fear of attack and violence, being able to really inhabit one's body is really central to a meaningful worship experience for Amanda Berry Smith. There's every reason to numb out, but she is able to feel, and that's how the divine is manifest through these sensory experiences that help her embrace and claim and celebrate her humanity and her connection to God. Her flesh is a medium for that connection to God. It is not a purely cognitive kind of connection.

Karen Marsh (14:28):
Yeah. And she didn't have the luxury of sitting back and reflecting in safety. So I'm curious to know if Amanda Barry Smith were here today, if Amanda Berry Smith took a look around at our churches, at our culture, what do you think she might make of us? Or what might she have to say? What of sermon would she deliver?

Donyelle McCray (14:54):
You know, I think it would depend on how she's reading the contemporary moment. Well, I will say this, what I would be eager to hear her talk about is prayer. As the anchor of ministry, it is clear that her prayer life, her sense of connection to God really shapes her preaching. It's certainly shaped the reception that she gets from other people. And I think people felt like she was interceding for them. You know, when she was serving in the communities, I'm thinking in particular of the AME Zion community in Sierra Leone, and their gratitude for her and for her ministry. But there's a sense throughout that, that she was praying for them. And it's clear that she's not, um, relying on her own power, but she's connecting to this divine source that sustaining her. And so that I think is a message that speaks now.

Donyelle McCray (16:03):
I read, this is Evelyn Underhill years ago, I can't remember which book, but she said people come to church because they long to pray. They come because they want to pray. Not because they actually pray or they pray well, but because they want to be people of prayer. They want to hear about the inner life. They want to hear about people's experiences of the divine. And I think that's an area where Amanda Berry Smith has something really precious to offer. You know, she can talk about her conversations with God and all of the strength and healing and wisdom that have emerged from it. I mean, she knew such extreme grief in her life, losing four of her five children. I mean, and God is a real companion for her along the way.

Karen Marsh (17:01):
I do think with you that we all want to see that authentic voice and hear that real spiritual experience from someone. And she narrates her experience in every page of her autobiography. We're seeing her live out her faith in a most honest way. Well, I've learned so much about Amanda Berry Smith from you, Danielle, and I thank you for this taking the time to talk with me about her.

Donyelle McCray (17:29):
Thank you for talking with me.

Karen Marsh (17:42):
I wonder if you had ever heard of Amanda Berry Smith before today? To me, she was one of the most courageous, faithful people I had never met, a woman who was born enslaved in Maryland, and yet ended up preaching across Africa, Europe, and India. What a story. How many unknown saints are out there living unseen, but beautiful lives? I hope that through Amanda's witness and through Donyelle McCray's thoughtful insights, you can borrow a measure of strength, and that you can lean on God a bit more fully, even in the midst of fear. So thank you for joining me today.

Karen Marsh (18:30):
I'm Karen Wright Marsh and I'm the executive director of Theological Horizons, a ministry based in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia. I'd love to hear from you. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Theological Horizons. Come by my website, karenwrightmarsh.com. You'll find out more about the Vintage Saints and Sinners podcast, get show notes, and learn about my book, Vintage Saints and Sinners. You can download free personal study guides for your small group or just for yourself, and keep the conversation going. Thanks to the generosity of the Lloyd and Vivian Noble foundation, and to the friends of Theological Horizons. I hope you'll support the Vintage Saints and Sinners podcast with a tax deductible gift to Theological Horizons. Go to theological horizons.org/giving, donate on Venmo at theological dash horizons. The Vintage Saints and Sinners podcast is produced by Gabriel Hunter-Chang. Our music is by Will Marsh of Gold Connections.