Completing the series, The Africana Worship Book (Year C), offers the same diversity as the past two volumes with all new materials from new and experienced voices. The Africana Worship Book (Year C), contains new calls to worship, liturgies, prayers, litanies, offertory prayers, doxologies, choral readings, creeds, chants, and benedictions. The compilations are related to Year C of the Revised Common Lectionary. This volume invites the whole church to become open to the fresh movements of God in the midst of corporate worship. The book includes a bound-in CD, making it easy for congregations to reproduce the material for use in worship.

African religion is ancestor worship; that is, funeral preparations, burial of the dead with ceremony and pomp, belief in eternal existence of souls of the dead as ancestors, periodic remembrance of ancestors, and belief that they influence the affairs of their living descendants. Whether called Akw?sidai, Homowo, Voodoo, Nyant?r (Aboakyir), CandomblZ, or Santeria in Africa or the African Diaspora, ancestor worship centers on the ancestors and deities. This makes it a tenably viable religion, because living descendants are genetically linked to their ancestors. The author, a traditional king and professor, studies the Akan in Ghana to demonstrate that ancestor worship is as pragmatic, systematic, theological, teleological, soteriological — with a highly trained clerical body and elders as mediators — and symbolic as any other religion in the world. Ancestor worship follows prescribed rites and rituals, formulas, precepts for ritual efficacy, and festivities of honor with music and dances to provoke ancestors and deities into joining in the celebration.

Worship is when "God shows up and shows out!" African-American worship affirms that an active God embodies human lives through companionship and communion. This volume of essays, interlacing worship pieces with reflections from prominent leaders and emerging thinkers in Africana life, is designed to help churches, professors, and students reflect more deeply on worship and practice. Building a bridge of understanding through collective experiences, the Companion to the Africana Worship Book shows the roots and fruits of rich worship. The series of worship books includes The Africana Worship Book (Year A | Volume 1) and The Africana Worship Book (Year B | Volume 2). Essays and contributors in the Companion include: "21 Questions Revisited" by Valerie Bridgeman Davis "Go Play with God: Reclaiming Liturgy for Spiritual Formation" by Valerie Bridgeman Davis "Liturgy as Subversive Activity" by Safiyah Fosua "To Serve This Present Age" by Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. "Africana Theology for the Black Church" by Safiyah Fosua "Worshipping Contextually: the Bassa People in the United Methodist Church in Liberia" by Pianapue Kept Early "Translatability as Belonging: Bassa United Methodist Christians in Liberia" by Pianapue Kept Early "The Creation of an Africana Worship Ritual: Baptism in the Shouters of Trinidad" by Gennifer Benjamin Brooks "The African-American Church and Sacraments: But Can We Still Get Our 'Circament?'" by William B. McClain "Death as Worship: Celebrating Dying as Part of Life" by Cheryl Kirk-Duggan "The African-American Funeral Sermon: Divine Re-Framing of Human Tragedy" by Frank A. Thomas "Music in Africana Worship" by Melinda Weekes "Doxology in Darkness" by Jessica Kendall Ingram "In the Spirit" by Lisa Allen "That Was Then, This Is NOW" by Otis Moss III "Emerging Possibilities for African-American Churches" by Douglas Powe "Technologies for Worship" by Elonda Clay "Lord, How Come We Here?" by William B. McClain "Spiritual Focus and Africana Worship" by Henry Mitchell "Worship: The Realm of the Spirit, the Realm of the Imagination, and Real Time" by Marilyn Thornton "Inclusive Language and Africana Worship" by Valerie Bridgeman Davis "Testify!" by Wilma Taylor "A Womanist Perspective on Spiritual Practices" by Linda Hollies

The second volume of this compilation includes all new Africana worship references and great new features including a worship plan for young adults, articles on the Africana worship praxis, short dramatic monologues and sound files. Like the first volume, Volume 2 offers new, specially written... calls to worship liturgies prayers litanies offertory prayers doxologies choral readings creedsd chants and benedictions Contributors include: Dr. Eugene Blair, Vonzella Bryant, Carolyn Dandridge, T. Anne Daniel, Rev. Joseph Daniels Jr., Rev. Junius Dotson, Rev. Sherrie Dobbs Johnson, Rev. Bryan Fleet, Dr. Cynthia Hopson, Theon Johnson III, Rev. Kwasi Kena, Rev. Darlene Moore, Toni Payne, Tony Peterson, Rev. Vance P. Ross, Ciona Rouse, Rev. Kelvin Sauls, Rev. B. Kevin Smalls, Rev. Lillian Smith, Rev. Marilyn Thornton, Stephen Williams, Brian Wilson, Rev. Stacey Coles Wilson. CD-ROM included! Easily copy and paste excerpts from the many creative prayers and meditations of The Africana Worship Book for use in your own congregation's printed orders of worship.

Using the Akan in Ghana as a paradigmatic African representative group, African Spirituality: On Becoming Ancestors, Third Edition offers a unique African developmental praxis to eternal life immortality. Indeed, this way of life is predicated on the awareness and application of certain intrinsic values, which, if followed, lead to eternal life. As a way of living, African spirituality begins when an individual becomes morally and ethically responsible for one’s own actions while engaged on an ethical path (Ɔbra Bↄ) in pursuance of one’s unique career endeavor (Nkrabea). Though an individual quest, society is, however, the arbiter of one’s ethical and moral life, when society confers on the person adjudged a success the stage title of Nana. At old age, Ɔbra Bↄ ends as an active endeavor. However, as repositories of wisdom, senior elders continue to inculcate in succeeding generations the principles, art, and mastery of ideal life (Ɔbra pa). Then upon death, senior elders are transformed into deities, bequeathing to living descendants names worthy of evocation and worship. Indeed, this book is the first study of its kind to draw on the experiences of an entire people, their psychological dispositions and effects on the Akan during adulthood. Thus, this book brings a unique perspective to the study of spirituality, religion, developmental psychological theory, what it means to achieve perfection as an elder on earth, and upon death join the esteemed company of the Nananom Nsamanfo (Ancestors).

Joy Unspeakable focuses on the aspects of the Black church that point beyond particular congregational gatherings toward a mystical and communal spirituality not within the exclusive domain of any denomination. This mystical aspect of the black church is deeply implicated in the well-being of African American people but is not the focus of their intentional reflection. Moreover, its traditions are deeply ensconced within the historical memory of the wider society and can be found in Coltrane's riffs, Malcolm's exhortations, the social activism of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. The research in this book-through oral histories, church records, and written accounts--details not only ways in which contemplative experience is built into African American collective worship but also the legacy of African monasticism, a history of spiritual exemplars, and unique meditative worship practices. A groundbreaking work in its original edition, Joy Unspeakable now appears in a new, revised edition to address the effects of this contemplative tradition on activism and politics and to speak to a new generation of readers and scholars.