Our History
The story of our church begins in Africa in 1483 when Catholic missionaries made their way from Portugal down into Central Africa and encountered the Bantu speaking people. They found their way into the Kingdom of Kongo. In 1491, King Nzinga a Nkuwu and his son, Mvemba a Nzinga, were baptized and took Christian names. The Kingdom became Christian and Africans started integrating Roman Catholicism into their pre-existing world view. Although Churches were built and there were willing conversions, the people did not stop practicing Ancestor veneration, mediumship, or making plant-spirit medicine. In Kongo cosmology the term Nkisi refers to an object that holds power.
The most sacred religious symbol was the Kongo Cosmogram. An equal armed cross with energy flowing in a counterclockwise motion. When Catholic holy men arrived with crucifixes and saint statues, Africans viewed these as the European version of their Cosmogram and Nkisi. They assigned the same spiritual attributes they had in their objects of power to this new, foreign, iconography. Kongo Christian iconography is breathtaking as it is the African perception of Christianity.
From that point forward there was a syncretizing of traditional African beliefs with Catholicism. When Europeans betrayed Africans and started kidnapping and selling Congolese Christians into slavery, the practices of the Bantu people spread throughout the Western Hemisphere. Mixing with other West Africans in the New World, Old World practices evolved into African Diasporic religions such as Santeria, Lucumi, Palo, Vodou, Obeah, and Espiritismo Cruzado in the Caribbean. In the United States, the spirituality of Africans took a different form. In the Caribbean, it was easy to hide traditional mediumship behind the facade of Catholicism. But in the Protestant South any representations of African Traditional Religion were stamped out. So, the Ancestors had to adapt the best way they could to preserve their beliefs. Traditions like Hoodoo, Rootwork, and Conjure became prominent. Then there was the birth of the Black Church which became the central location for information sharing. The Black church played a profoundly significant role in the Civil Rights Movement, serving as a central hub for organizing, providing crucial moral and spiritual support, mobilizing activists, and acting as a platform for leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., making it a vital force in the movement's success.
Black churches provided a safe space for meetings, rallies, and planning for civil rights actions due to their established infrastructure and widespread reach within African American communities. Ministers and prominent church figures often led the movement, using their pulpits to preach about equality and social justice, motivating and inspiring their congregations to participate in activism. Churches contributed funds to support civil rights organizations and activities. The Black church provided a strong moral framework for the movement, emphasizing nonviolent resistance and the importance of fighting for justice based on Christian principles. The Black church represented a symbol of resilience and hope for African Americans during a time of oppression, making it a powerful rallying point for the movement.