...The introduction delineates the overlapping geographies of non-elite black women’s work, black church expansion, and Northern suburbanization. Creating sacred space in a Northern suburb in the wake of southern disenfranchisement and the Plessy v. Ferguson separate but equal ruling...

...This chapter explores the role of black working women in racial construction and black church formation in the North. Black women transgressed boundaries and disrupted the politics of respectability by building churches and sustaining communities. Though integral to the Northern expansion...

... geographic, class, and gender boundaries. African Methodist Episcopal Zion AME Zion Church Glenwood Place Jim Crow Randolph Florence Spearing segregation Wallace P A Woman’s Home and Foreign Missionary Society WH&FM AME Zion color line “ideal suburb” Summit NJ Johnson Violet Lincoln YMCA...

...This chapter explains why most men and women are unlikely to find full-time paid positions in their local Church of God in Christ (COGIC) churches and how this situation handicaps opportunities to serve in the kinds of positions, even as unpaid laborers, where their peers in other denominations...

...This chapter traces history of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana in New York (PCGNY) and examines the reasons for its formation, its organizational structure, demography of membership, and general ethos. It attempts to locate this congregation within both the structure and culture of its parent...

... that on a macro-social scale, churches are hindered from enacting effective cultural performances, but on the local scale a host of opportunities are still present. For Saddleback and other postdenominational evangelical (PDE) churches, effective performances will speak to narratives of individuality, family...

...This chapter analyzes the fragmentation and diffusion of the PDE church through the small group. In members' homes every week, thousands of Saddleback members meet and enact their own performances and counterperformances of an evangelically inspired postsuburban life. This weekly diffusion...

...This concluding chapter claims that postsuburban PDE churches like Saddleback are not sacred islands. This spatial imagery needs to be suspended in order to more fully capture the other spatialities of religious life at Saddleback. Archipelago imagery flattens out the various performative energies...

...The conclusion attends to the identity of the heretic as a social category privileging the importance of choice. It opens with a description of the year’s last book study session at West Hill United Church to choose the subject for the next year’s group. Amid the discussion and debate concerning...

...The Conclusion contends that the Black Coptic Church has been a substantial missing link in African American religious studies—one that deserves the attention of scholars as we seek to conceptualize a more vibrant and fuller picture of Black religious traditions in North America. The Conclusion...

... feminism as they justified the value of their separate women’s organizations and redefined “missions” to a much larger program of “Christianizing” social, racial, and world relations. American Society of Church History bureaucracy Council of Women for Home Missions CWHM ecumenical Protestantism...

...The chapter examines ecumenical Protestant women’s various approaches to interracial cooperation in the interwar years with a focus on the Church Woman’s Committee on Race Relations within the Federal Council of Churches and local interracial efforts in Rochester, New York, and Oakland, California...

... secular and evangelical rhetoric of the need to “save” other women from so-called oppressive religions. At the same time, the conclusion also highlights the increased leadership of Black women in the United Council of Church Women (that became Church Women United), and how this Protestant women’s...

...This chapter surveys the role of the Catholic Church in the Caribbean during the colonial era. The history of the Roman Catholic Church in the colonial era is marked by its complicity with and support of Spanish colonial domination and exploitation of indigenous and African peoples throughout...

...The conclusion provides an overview of what the Mar Thoma case teaches us regarding the types of changes globalization is bringing about in Christian immigrant communities in the United States, and in Christian churches in the Global South. It examines the impact of transnationalism on the Mar...

...This introductory chapter outlines the specific points of study to be undergone in further detail in the latter parts of this book, which can be more broadly termed as the urban impact within church histories and congregations. Urban expansion influenced religious experience, and these variables...

...This chapter explains the intersections of gender with race in church life. In the larger society, slavery, poverty, and menial status meant that black men risked being labeled feminine and without power. Thus in the black churches men, not women, took primary place, mimicking the white church's...

... as independent from white schismatics and churchmen alike, while keeping their local independence from other black churches. Black Episcopalians avoided serious battles in this decade, largely because their perilous financial position impelled them to cling to the High Church Party in the Episcopal Church...

...This chapter introduces “the Living Stations of the Cross,” a Black Catholic reenactment of the passion and death of Jesus performed annually by parishioners of Chicago’s largest Black Catholic church from 1937 to 1968. This devotional practice serves as a lens through which to better understand...

... Luther King Jr South Side Chicago African Americans Black Power Boyd Louis Catholic schools Robinson Renault “Reggie ” St Dorothy parish “Wall of Black Saints ” Black Catholic Clergy Caucus BCCC Black Catholicism Black Catholics “Black Church ” Catholics Catholicism conversion Evers Medgar...