Healing for the Holidays: Recap—Merry Christmas!

Healing for the Holidays: Recap—Merry Christmas!

Over the past three weeks I have been posting at RPM Ministries a ten-part blog mini-series called Healing for the Holidays. That series is now complete.

I’m making it available to you as an early Christmas gift. I’ve collated the entire series into a twenty-page PDF and placed on it my RPM Ministries website under Free Resources. You can find it there, or click this link to open it now: Healing for the Holidays.

You may be thinking, “I don't need holiday healing. I love the holidays!” Awesome. But perhaps not all your friends and family members will experience the next 30 days quite as joyously as you will. Feel free to forward them a copy or to use the principles you learn to minister to them.

Merry Christmas!

Oh…speaking of Christmas, here’s a Christmas gift idea. I’ve “bundled” my latest book, God’s Healing for Life’s Losses so that you can purchase ten copies for just $9.99 each and also save on SH. You can order at the RPM Store.

Of course, you can still buy one copy at 35% off for just $10.99 as another Christmas special.

Designed in gift-book format and written with the grieving person in mind, God’s Healing for Life’s Losses is a thoughtful gift this Christmas season. Enjoy a free sample chapter and three-dozen quotes of note at the God’s Healing for Life’s Losses Page.

If you want to learn more about the book, check out the featured article at Everyday Christian: Grieving with Hope.

The Legacy of African American Christian Christmas Celebration: Part II: Hardships Do Not Make It Too Hard to Love

The Legacy of African American

Christian Christmas Celebration
Part II:

Hardships Do Not Make It Too Hard to Love

For years now, Kwanzaa has been supported as a way to bring African American tradition into the Christmas celebration. However, what is severely lacking in Kwanzaa is the Christian legacy of African American Christmas celebration. This “mini-series” of blogs will explore the legacy of African American Christian Christmas Celebration.

A Brief Break from Horrible Hardships

Booker T. Washington discussed his memories of Christmas in The Booker T. Washington Papers. Washington noted that Christmas was the favorite holiday of the year for most slaves. It allowed them a respite from the horrible hardships and an opportunity to join as families to celebrate together.

During the Christmas season for slaves in Virginia, the slaves ceased to work for up to ten days. Some slaves received a present from their master. Washington recalled that a master who did not give his slave presents was looked down upon by other masters.[i]

Family Love Remembered at Christmas Time

Though everything fought against them, enslaved African Americans battled gallantly to maintain family cohesion—a cohesion that provided a sturdy platform from which to handle life courageously and to celebrate Christmas even during the horrors of enslavement.

Jennie Hill was born and enslaved in 1837 in Missouri. Florence Patton interviewed the ninety-six-year-old Hill in 1933. During her interview while talking about Christmas memories, Hill adamantly resisted the notion that enslaved families lacked closeness. “Some people think that the slaves had no feeling—that there was no heartbreak when the children were torn from their parents or the mother taken from her brood to toil for a master in another state. But that isn’t so. The slaves loved their families even as Blacks love their own today. . .”[ii]

Communicating the message of African American family love was so important to Reverend Thomas Jones that he bore witness to it on the very first page of his narrative. “I can testify, from my own painful experience, to the deep and fond affection which the slave cherishes in his heart for his home and its dear ones. We have no other tie to link us to the human family, but our fervent love for those who are with us and of us in relations of sympathy and devotedness, in wrongs and wretchedness.”[iii]

The slave narratives and interviews tell remarkable stories about family love celebrated at Christmas and year round. One ex-enslaved person, reflecting back on his favorite Christmas memories, recalls his enslaved father’s character. “I loved my father. He was such a good man. He was a good carpenter and could do anything. My mother just rejoiced in him. . . . I sometimes think I learned more in my early childhood about how to live than I have learned since.”[iv] All he ever needed to learn, he learned in his enslaved home.

Will Adam’s father, a foreman on a Texas plantation, always came home exhausted after a long day’s work. However, he never failed to take his son out of bed and play with him for hours.[v]

Satan longs to blind African Americans to their legacy of family love. He wants all of us to believe that hardships make it too hard to love. These Christmas reflections from enslaved African Americans teach hardships do NOT make it too hard to love.

[i]Jessica McElrath, “Slaves and Christmas Celebration,” About.com.
[ii]Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering, p. 84, from Blassingame, Slave Testimony, p. 593.
[iii]Andrews, p. 211.
[iv]Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, p. 80.
[v]Rawick, The American Slave, vol. 4, Texas, pt. 1, p. 2.

The Legacy of African American Christian Christmas Celebration: Part I: Jesus First

The Legacy of African American Christian Christmas Celebration
Part I: Jesus First

For years now, Kwanzaa has been supported as a way to bring African American tradition into the Christmas celebration. However, what is severely lacking in Kwanzaa is the Christian legacy of African American Christmas celebration. This “mini-series” of blogs will explore The Legacy of African American Christian Christmas Celebration.

Jesus First

A major reason for celebrations like Kwanzaa is the lack of knowledge about the Evangelical Christian legacy in African American history. Thus it is important to explore how and why African Americans turned to Christianity given the hypocritical religious culture of many of the Christian slave owners. In the midst of suffering through the ordeal of the sin of slavery, how did God save enslaved people from the slavery of sin?

Of course, it is equally important to acknowledge the inner battled that resulted from such hypocrisy. Daniel Alexander Payne explains. Born to free parents in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1811, during his ordination in 1839, he describes the testing of faith caused by Christian duplicity. “The slaves are sensible of the oppression exercised by their masters; and they see these masters on the Lord’s day worshiping in His holy Sanctuary. They hear their masters professing Christianity; they see their masters preaching the Gospel; they hear these masters praying in their families, and they know that oppression and slavery are inconsistent with the Christian religion; therefore they scoff at religion itself—mock their masters, and distrust both the goodness and justice of God. Yes, I have known them even to question His existence.”[i]

If spiritually famished African Americans were going to convert to Christianity, then they had to convert on the basis of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection as revealed in the Bible, not on the basis of Christianity revealed in the lifestyles of the Christians they knew.

Christ’s suffering for humanity’s sin was the key that unlocked their hearts and enlightened their eyes. “Jesus quickly became the ardent personification of the slaves’ own suffering.”[ii] Their suffering at the hands of Christians caused them to identify with a suffering Savior who suffered at the hands of religious leaders.

At the same time, African American Christians clearly recognized and constantly emphasized the difference between Christ’s sinlessness and their personal need for forgiveness from sin. The recurring theme of the conversion narratives was salvation from sin, not from suffering. Yes, Christ shared with them the experience of unjust suffering. But more importantly, they shared in Christ’s suffering for their sins.

Pastor James W. C. Pennington, reflecting on his conversion, seamlessly expresses his understanding of suffering and of sin. Without minimizing for a moment the evils of slavery, he maximizes for all eternity the horrors of his own enslavement to sin and Satan.

"I was a lost sinner and a slave to Satan; and soon I saw that I must make another escape from another tyrant. I did not by any means forget my fellow-bondmen, of whom I had been sorrowing so deeply, and travailing in spirit so earnestly; but I now saw that while man had been injuring me, I had been offending God; and that unless I ceased to offend him, I could not expect to have his sympathy in my wrongs; and moreover, that I could not be instrumental in eliciting his powerful aid in behalf of those for whom I mourned so deeply."[iii]

Rejecting the “slaveholding gospel” of the institutional Church of that era, the enslaved African Americans gave birth to a regenerated Christianity that reflected fundamental Christian doctrine while maintaining compatible African traditions. Their cultural practice of biblical Christianity provided the new orientation toward existence that they needed given their shattered external circumstances and sinful internal nature. It created the new narrative of present resilience made possible by a Savior who suffered with them because they were sinned against. It also created the new narrative of future hope made possible by a Savior who suffered for them because they were sinners.

Christmas with Jesus First

Therefore, Christmas for African American believers was a celebration of the One Person they could both identify with and entrust themselves to. One unnamed slave described his Christmas conversion joy. “After my conversion I was happy, and I spent a whole week going over the community, telling everybody what happened to me. I was the happiest person in the whole world. I have gone on praising the Lord since that time.”[iv]

More than anything, Christmas was an internal celebration of a free gift to an enslaved people. It was the remarkable wonder that God in Christ had broken into a broken world and unshackled the bonds of their soul, even if the physical bonds yet remained shackled.

Pastor Peter Randolph expands on the nature of a converted Christmas response. “The eyes of my mind were open, and I saw things as I never did before. With my mind’s eye, I could see my Redeemer hanging upon the cross for me. I wanted all the other slaves to see him thus, and feel as happy as I did. I used to talk to others, and tell them of the friend they would have in Jesus, and show them by my experience how I was brought to Christ, and felt his love within my heart—and love it was, in God’s adapting himself to my capacity.”[v]

The African American Christian Christmas was a joyous internal celebration of the greatest gift ever given: Jesus Christ. A suffering people empathized with a suffering Savior. A suffering people submitted to a Savior who submitted His will to His Father. A suffering people rejoiced that unto them a child was given, unto them a Savior was born.

Of course, their internal joy was mitigated by their horrible external situation. In Part II we will see how African American Christians responded on Christmas to their external situation with the truth that hardships do not make it too hard to love. We’ll see something of the family Christmas joy that moved beyond the suffering.



[i]Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction, Baker Books, 2007, p. 104. Quoted in Payne, “American Slavery Brutalizes Man,” in Foner, Lift Every Voice, p. 177.
[ii] Andrews, Practical Theology, p. 18.
[iii] Pennington, “The Fugitive Blacksmith,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, p. 52, emphasis added.
[iv] Johnson, God Struck Me Dead, p. 140.
[v] Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, p. 1.