Anthea Butler's study of women in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) tells a fascinating story of development and change both within sanctified African American women's self-understanding and within the denomination itself. The heroines in this story are Elizabeth “Lizzie” Robinson, Lillian Brooks Coffey, and Arenia Mallory, with special “guest appearances” by Joanna P. Moore and Mary McLeod Bethune. They established a female dimension of leadership within the church, and this was not just a separate female sphere of influence, but influence within the denomination as a whole. Then, given that platform, this group of gifted women slowly transformed the piety of the denomination, moving its core orientation away from otherworldly concerns to a spirituality of godly redemptive engagement with the larger society.
The Church of God in Christ is the largest pentecostal church and also the largest predominantly African American denomination in the United States, and it deserves to be studied for these reasons alone. But this church is also unique in that its founder, Charles Harrison Mason, remained the unquestioned leader of the denomination for more than fifty years until his death in November of 1961. Under his control, the male leadership structure of the church was predetermined, but the structures of female leadership were malleable and open to negotiation. Butler's book traces how, within this space of flexibility, a series of strong women leaders emerged and became agents of change in the church as a whole.
Butler begins her story with the work of Joanna Moore, a white woman, who in the late 1800s organized a number of “Bible bands”—local Bible study groups—among African American women in the South. Within this Bible-band movement, Lizzie Robinson soon rose to prominence through her talents as a teacher and movement organizer. Robinson was raised a Baptist, but she received the baptism of the Holy Spirit under the ministry of Charles Mason in 1911 and joined the Church of God in Christ. Recognizing her talent, Mason invited Robinson to move to Memphis and work with him in his own congregation. In Memphis, she continued to organize Bible bands for women, but she also was given the task of teaching the Bible in church to both men and women. At first, COGIC men were inclined to leave when Robinson was the teacher, but Mason himself shooed them back into the meeting, saying, “Go back and sit down and learn some sense” (37). But while Robinson was a pioneer in the realm of gender, she was a traditionalist with regard to spirituality. Godliness existed in inverse relationship to one's connections with the world; holiness was defined as separation from society.
Lillian Brooks Coffey questioned that perception of holiness. Mason had known Coffey since she was a child, and he treated her almost as his own child, grooming her for leadership. When Robinson died in 1945, it was therefore no surprise that Coffey took over as supervisor of the COGIC Women's Department. Coffey developed close working relationships with Arenia Mallory, director of the COGIC Saints Industrial School in Lexington, Mississippi, and with Mary McLeod Bethune, founder and president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) and later adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Coffey rejected the notion that spirituality was necessarily opposed to social engagement, believing instead that social reform was a necessary dimension of genuine holiness. Under her leadership, COGIC women and the church as a whole began to carry holiness into the world, seeking to foster social change that would be of benefit to everyone.
Coffey knew that at least some COGIC men felt threatened by the new power women were gaining, and she expressed that sentiment in print in the early 1950s. After Mason's death in 1961, there was a male rush to fill the leadership void, and the period from 1961–1969 was especially turbulent. Coffey died in 1964 in the midst of that struggle, and the women who followed her as directors of the Women's Department never attained her level of influence. Engagement with the world remained a part of COGIC spirituality, but the status of women in the church became linked with the status of their husbands in a way that had not been the case before. As a result, some of Coffey's main accomplishments were seemingly undone.
Butler tells this story with great care and with a sympathetic understanding of the different ways each of these women understood themselves and their roles in the church. Rather than trying to uncover the “real” story that lies beneath or behind the language of spirituality, she takes the spirituality of these women seriously and explores the connections between that spirituality and the broader contours that defined their lives and the contexts in which they lived. Butler has done all historians who labor in this field a great service by discovering and saving numerous COGIC publications and personal papers that otherwise would have crumbled into oblivion, something that has happened far too often with documents related to African American history. In conclusion, this is a wonderful book that significantly enhances our understanding of both the black church experience and women's spirituality in the twentieth century.
