We Have Plenty: A Womanist Theology of Communal Abundance for the Black Church

The Black church often maintains an allegiance to white, Western approaches to wealth and material acquisition. In doing so, it can ignore Jesus’s teachings on poverty, wealth, and materialism. The church’s ambivalence toward Jesus’s understandings of poverty and wealth uniquely impacts the spiritual and material well-being of Black women and the Black community. As a womanist theologian, Lorena Parrish argues that the Black church needs a new, liberative way forward.

In We Have Plenty, Parrish traces the history of theologies of prosperity to help scholars and practitioners understand the long-standing appearance of prosperity gospels in the Western church. In doing so, she explores selected sermons and writings of St. Augustine, John Calvin, John Wesley, and Walter Rauschenbusch to show how theologies of prosperity have long been embedded in mainline Christianity, sometimes imperceptibly so. Parrish argues that recognizing these trajectories is critical for the Black church’s capacity to foster pathways toward communal liberation and wholeness.

Parrish offers a womanist theology that hearkens to the liberative work of Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Collective and illumines contemporary initiatives that cultivate pathways toward Black communal abundance. Parrish shows how equipping Black church pastors and community leaders with tools to build similar strategies better positions the church and community, in turn, to promote more equitable human relations and communal asset-building and sharing. We Have Plenty offers a moral imagination for theologians, church leaders, and community activists to envision Black communal abundance and thriving in light of Jesus’s teachings.