8. Jarena Lee and African American Evangelists
8
Jarena Lee and African American Evangelists
For twenty-eight years I lived in an integrated neighborhood, more blacks than whites. My son’s education from kindergarten through high school was the same. Whites were a minority. There my son found friends as I did. In fact, I often visited with my friend and neighbor Claretha, and it was to her arms I would go when my son was in trouble. I’ve likewise worked alongside a black woman as my business partner (and we were guests on a radio talk show featuring the topic “business in black and white”). I dedicated a book to friends, husband and wife, both black. My son and granddaughter have both dated across color lines. I have taught courses with segments on racism.
With that backdrop, I opened one of my lectures on racism with controversial remarks. After distributing handouts and briefly introducing the topic, I paused and made a statement that caught my students off guard. They were mature seminary students, all white males, many with families. My remark was anything but startling. In fact, it should have been regarded as the most obvious statement I could have made regarding race. I repeated my words twice, as I slowly and solemnly looked at each of them: “There is racism here in this classroom. There is racism in this room.” Another pause. (I had prepared for these introductory remarks.) Then I said: “I know there is racism right here in this room” (pause) “because I am here.”
I’m not sure what they had expected me to say during those fleeting moments. Was I going to reveal an incident that related to one of them? Was I going to remind them of a comment someone had made in class the previous week? Whatever was going through their minds, my confession forced them to think seriously about racism.
I recently read an online article by Tyler Glodjo on white privilege. After laying out a lengthy factual premise, Glodjo writes:
But this article is not ultimately about racialization, nor is it about white privilege. These are simply concepts that are necessary in order for us to begin engaging a much deeper conversation on race within the body of Christ in our nation. So with all of the aforementioned said, I begin with a confession: I am a racist.1
Many of us (who are white) go through life without the slightest awareness of white privilege. Those confronted with the term typically deny that it relates to them. Likewise, they would be horrified at the thought of being racist. It is very easy for white people today—ones who strongly affirm equality and integration—to deny their own racism and white privilege.
One of the most searing personal examples of racism was told to me by my neighbor Jack. He was an easygoing trucker, and typically our chats were lighthearted. Not that day. The setting of his story was Mississippi in the early 1960s. He was on a double date, the car parked along a river on a moonlit night. It was an area typically consigned to black teenagers. Headlights flashed behind them. In a matter of moments a white sheriff and his deputy were ordering them out of the car at gunpoint. Their girlfriends, crying out and sobbing, were brutally raped.
Though the story was decades old, Jack couldn’t tell me without choking. The utter awfulness of it. And the guilt after all those years. The guilt for having done nothing to save the girls. He couldn’t have. The sheriffs had guns. He shook his head and twice repeated almost under his breath: “They called me boy.”
I’ve often wondered about the girls. How did they fare in the years and decades that followed? And I wonder about Jarena Lee, Harriet Tubman, Amanda Berry Smith, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Eliza Davis George. Did they too suffer such terrible violence, often excused on the basis of their perceived double inferiority—black and female? They encountered racism and blatant discrimination in ministry. Yet in each instance they overcame all odds and effectively fulfilled the call to serve.
JARENA LEE
First AME Woman Preacher
During the early nineteenth century, when the preaching of Mary Fletcher was still ringing in the ears of English Methodists, Jarena Lee heard God calling: “Preach the gospel. I will put words in your mouth.” She consulted with Richard Allen, the bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), only to be told that the Methodist Church made no provision for women preachers. Had he known or heeded the precedent of John Wesley himself, Allen might have welcomed her as a circuit preacher during a time when the AME was barely getting off the ground itself. But his bias or ignorance got the best of him, and Jarena backed down—though not for long.
Jarena was born in Cape May, New Jersey, in 1783, the last year of the long and drawn-out Revolutionary War. Unlike the vast majority of African Americans at the time, she was born free. That freedom suddenly seemed to end, however, when she was sent away to be a servant at the tender age of seven. In her autobiography she mentions very little of these years except for a few occasions when she was prodded along in her spiritual quest. In one instance she lied to her mistress: “At this awful point, in my early history, the Spirit of God moved in power through my conscience, and told me I was a wretched sinner.” In the years that followed, the weight of sin, prompted by Presbyterian preaching, distressed her to the point that she contemplated suicide: “There was a brook about a quarter of a mile from the house, in which there was a deep hole, where the water whirled about among the rocks; to this place, it was suggested, I must go and drown myself.”2 This is a haunting confession. What sin was awful enough to tempt her to take her own life? Might she have been raped and perceived herself to be in some way culpable? One can only wonder.
“‘In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your young men will see visions,
your old men will dream dreams.
Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.’”
Acts 2:14–18
It was not until she was in her early twenties that under the preaching of Richard Allen she was converted. There, amid a crowd of hundreds and with no apparent hesitation or embarrassment, she jumped to her feet and declared that God had pardoned her sins. But as she later testified, the devil began harassing her the moment she took her stand.
So oppressed was she that for four years she was “under the awful apprehension” that she “could never be happy in this life.” Again she was tempted to take her own life, this time by hanging. As she escaped this temptation, she saw herself held only “by a spider’s web” over “the awful gulf of hell,” hearing “the howling of the damned” and seeing “the smoke of the bottomless pit.”3 Her image may very well have been drawn from the late Jonathan Edwards’s still-popular, oft-repeated sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—sinners dangling over hell, held only by the thread of a spider’s web.
After a lengthy time of further temptation by Satan, Jarena found assurance of salvation, only to be informed by a minister that she must experience sanctification. Again she endured a lengthy period of torment until finally she heard a voice telling her, “Thou art sanctified!” Several years after that, she heard God’s call to preach the gospel and was then told by Allen that there was no place for women preachers among those in the AME. She mulled over his words:
O how careful ought we to be, lest through our by-laws of church government and discipline, we bring into disrepute even the word of life. For as unseemly as it may appear now-a-days for a woman to preach, it should be remembered that nothing is impossible with God. And why should it be thought impossible, heterodox, or improper for a woman to preach? seeing the Saviour died for the woman as well as for the man.4
Jarena was convinced that God had called her to preach. Why else, she asked, would her ministry be accompanied by the testimonies of so many conversions?
In 1811, at the age of twenty-nine, Jarena married a pastor of a Methodist society. Six years later she was a widow with a toddler and an infant. Still the call to preach weighed heavily on her. Eight years had elapsed since Bishop Allen had denied her request to preach. Then on a particular Sunday she was in his congregation. He announced his text from the book of Jonah. “But as he proceeded to explain, he seemed to have lost the spirit.” At that moment, Jarena sprang to her feet and took over:
I told them I was like Jonah; for it had been then nearly eight years since the Lord had called me to preach his gospel to the fallen sons and daughters of Adam’s race, but that I had lingered like him, and delayed to go at the bidding of the Lord, and warn those who are as deeply guilty as were the people of Nineveh.5
She sat down, fearing that she might be expelled from the assembly. Amazingly, Allen was not offended by her interrupting his sermon. In fact, he took her spontaneous exhortation as a sign from God. He admitted that he had denied her the opportunity to preach eight years earlier but now believed she had indeed received a genuine calling from God.
With his public pronouncement, she became the first woman preacher in the AME. In the years that followed, she traveled thousands of miles throughout New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and beyond, often leaving her little ones with others. In 1832, she began a preaching tour in Canada, and in a little more than a year had traveled nearly three thousand miles, preaching two or three times each week. She even ventured into the South, preaching to slaves during the perilous decades before the Civil War.
Along the way, Jarena returned to Cape May to visit her elderly mother, whom she had not seen in eleven years. Here she had several opportunities to preach:
Goshen School-house, to both white and colored . . . some were Baptists and some Methodist. . . . Four miles from there I preached in the Court House to a congregation of different denominations, and the house was crowded. . . . On the following Sabbath I spoke in a School-house to a white Methodist congregation.6
In the early 1840s, when she was approaching sixty, Jarena again visited her aged mother, who was eighty-two and not in good health. Nor was Jarena. Nevertheless she eagerly accepted opportunities to preach, with walking often her only means of travel. Her autobiography ends shortly thereafter, and her life seems to fade away, with no record of her death.
AMANDA SMITH
Evangelist, Preacher, Missionary, Worldwide Traveler
One of the most revered nineteenth-century missionaries to India, James Thoburn, an American, served for many years as the Methodist bishop. In 1876, back in Ohio, he first observed the “colored lady dressed in a very plain garb . . . expounding a Bible lesson to a small audience.” He was not impressed, but he inquired who she was. “I was told that the speaker was Mrs. Amanda Smith, and that she was a woman of remarkable gifts, who had been greatly blessed in various parts of the country.” Three years later, after he had returned to India, he learned that she would be visiting. They were scheduled to minister together on many occasions, and she later returned to India a second time. Of her time there, he wrote: “During the seventeen years that I have lived in Calcutta, I have known many famous strangers to visit the city, some of whom attracted large audiences, but I have never known anyone who could draw and hold so large an audience as Mrs. Smith.”7
Amanda’s autobiography is a classic, and the subtitle sums up her life: The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith the Colored Evangelist; Containing an Account of Her Life Work of Faith, and Her Travels in America, England, Ireland, Scotland, India, and Africa, as an Independent Missionary.
Unlike Jarena Lee, she was not born free. Her parents were slaves on small farms adjacent to each other. Her father, after his master died, essentially took over the farm, traveling some twenty miles to Baltimore twice each week to sell produce. His mistress, according to Amanda, “was very kind, and was proud of him for his faithfulness, so she gave him a chance to buy himself.” His situation certainly was not the norm, but it does illustrate what one man was able to accomplish with his owner’s goodwill:
She allowed him so much for his work and a chance to earn what extra he could for himself. So he used to make brooms and husk mats and take them to market with the produce. This work he would do nights after his day’s work was done for his mistress. He was a great lime burner. Then in harvest time, after working for his mistress all day, he would walk three and four miles, and work in the harvest field till one and two o’clock in the morning, then go home and lie down and sleep for an hour or two, then up and at it again. He had an important and definite object before him, and was willing to sacrifice sleep and rest in order to accomplish it. It was not his own liberty alone, but the freedom of his wife and five children. For this he toiled day and night. He was a strong man, with an excellent constitution, and God wonderfully helped him in his struggle. After he had finished paying for himself, the next was to buy my mother and us children.8
With their freedom, the family remained in the neighborhood and farmed, though there were harrowing times when it was feared that her father—and all of them, for that matter—might be kidnapped and taken out of state and back into slavery. Otherwise, family life was routine:
My father and mother both could read. But I never remember hearing them tell how they were taught. Father was the better reader of the two. Always on Sunday morning after breakfast he would call us children around and read the Bible to us. I never knew him to sit down to a meal, no matter how scant, but what he would ask God’s blessing before eating. Mother was very thoughtful and scrupulously economical. She could get up the best dinner out of almost nothing of anybody I ever saw in my life. She often cheered my father’s heart when he came home at night and said: “Well, mother, how have you got on today?”9
Barely in her teens, Amanda began working as a live-in maid, with opportunities for further education and religious instruction. Soon thereafter she experienced a religious awakening, but the fervor was quickly dissipated. Then she came upon a book that featured “an argument between an infidel and a Christian minister.” As she read page after page, the minister was winning the debate. But then “by and by the minister began to lose, and the infidel gained.” She continued reading and was soon convinced: “His questions and argument were so pretty and put in such a way that before I knew it I was captured; and by the time I had got through the book I had the whole of the infidel’s article stamped on my memory and spirit, and the Christian’s argument was lost.”10
Sometime later, the opportunity came for Amanda to test her faith as an infidel. She was taking a walk with her aunt, who commented: “How wonderfully God has created everything, the sky, and the great waters.” Amanda might have agreed, but that was not her style. She “let out with [her] biggest gun” and startled her aunt with, “How do you know there is a God?” and then answered her own question “with just such an air as a poor, blind, ignorant infidel is capable of putting on.” Her aunt gave her an arrow-piercing look and stamped her foot as she gave the ultimatum: “Don’t you ever speak to me again. Anybody that had as good a Christian mother as you had, and was raised as you have been, to speak so to me. I don’t want to talk to you.”11
With that, “God broke the snare.” Had her aunt come back with proofs for God, Amanda, clever as she was, might have bested her. “If she had argued with me,” she later wrote, “I don’t believe I should ever have got out of that snare of the devil.”12
During her teen years, Amanda frequently returned home to live with her parents and siblings, eventually twelve of them. Poor as they were, life was good except for the constant fear that the powerful arm of slavery and savagery might reach into their home and strangle them and their little ones. Nevertheless, the family was willing to risk all for black people in bondage, as Amanda movingly recorded:
Our house was one of the main stations of the Under Ground Railroad. My father took the “Baltimore Weekly Sun” newspaper; that always had advertisements of runaway slaves. After giving the cut of the poor fugitive, with a little bundle on his back, going with his face northward, the advertisement would read something like this: Three thousand dollars reward! Ran away from Anerandell County, Maryland, such a date, so many feet high, scar on the right side of the forehead or some other part of the body,—belonging to Mr. A. or B. So sometimes the excitement was so high we had to be very discreet in order not to attract suspicion. . . . I have known him to lead in the harvest field from fifteen to twenty men. . . . After working all day in the harvest field, he would come home at night, sleep about two hours, then start at midnight and walk fifteen or twenty miles and carry a poor slave to a place of security; sometimes a mother and child, sometimes a man and wife, other times a man or more, then get home just before day. Perhaps he could sleep an hour then go to work, and so many times baffled suspicion.13
Her father was suspected of harboring slaves and was on more than one occasion seriously roughed up and almost killed, but Amanda was convinced that God was watching over him.
Still in her teens at the height of Underground Railroad activity, Amanda herself did not actively participate in this dangerous work. Amanda’s early adult years were characterized most by domestic difficulties. At seventeen, she married a minister who turned out to be a wretched alcoholic. When the Civil War broke out, he joined the Confederate army, and she never heard from him again. Soon she was courted by another minister, whom she married with the hope of establishing a Christian home. Her hopes were quickly dashed, though the marriage would hang on for many years, often with lengthy separations. Her husband died in 1869, leaving her impoverished with a sickly baby soon to be buried as well.
That same year she began preaching in neighboring towns, supporting herself by washing dirty clothes for white folks. After receiving five dollars on one occasion, she determined that God had called her to preach full-time. Nevertheless, she struggled with the same kinds of questions and doubts that almost derailed her when she was very young: “Some time after the Lord had sanctified my soul [in 1868], I became greatly exercised about the Trinity. I could not seem to understand just how there could exist three distinct persons, and yet one. I thought every day and prayed for light, but didn’t seem to get help. I read the Bible, but no help came.” Later, she testified, “God made me understand it so I have had no question since.”14
In the years that followed, Amanda would become perhaps the most celebrated woman preacher in America. Her work began primarily in Methodist camp meetings and continued in England and Scotland. She received an invitation to go to India in 1878, where she would spend time with Bishop James Thoburn. On the way she went to Paris, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Egypt. Impressive travel for one who was so recently a penniless washerwoman. On her return trip she visited West Africa, including Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Calabar (in present-day Nigeria), where she would spend nearly eight years. From there she returned to England at the invitation of Hannah Whitall Smith, after which she sailed back to New York in 1890.
Two years later she moved to Illinois, where she established an orphanage for destitute black children. She retired from that work in 1912 and died three years later at age seventy-eight. Three years after her death the orphanage burned to the ground and was never rebuilt.
MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE
Educator and Counselor to Presidents
As a little girl, perhaps seven years old, she was one day playing at the home of a white neighbor girl. She reached for a book, and the neighbor girl grabbed it away, handing her instead a picture book. It was at that moment that the sensitive Mary McLeod vowed that she would one day learn to read. Visiting with a white neighbor girl, however, was hardly part of Mary’s daily routine. At the tender age of five, she was often out in the fields working with her parents and siblings.
She was born in Mayesville, South Carolina, in 1875, the fifteenth child in a poor family of sharecroppers, her parents having been slaves. Mary prayed for a miracle, and when she was ten the miracle arrived in the form of a newly established local school for black children and a young teacher, Emma Wilson, all sponsored by a Presbyterian mission society. “The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.”15 After three years of exceptional progress, Mary was sent to a boarding school in North Carolina, and after graduating she continued her education at Moody Bible Institute in preparation for service as a missionary in Africa.
She later spoke well of her experience at the school and of the occasions when D. L. Moody had shown his concern for her well-being. Her great disappointment came, however, when she learned that the Presbyterian mission had no place for an African American missionary. The enforced segregation of travel and living arrangements, she was told, would create too many problems. Instead, she was asked to serve as a teacher in an all-black mission school in Georgia.
Soon thereafter in 1898, Mary married Albertus Bethune and moved to Florida, with a baby on the way. During the early years she and her husband were separated much of the time, and in 1907, he left altogether. Before their final separation, Mary had opened a day school for African American girls that would grow to more than two hundred students. It began with five girls and her son Albert, in a small rented house next to the Daytona dump. Soon neighbors and church members got on board, and before the school year ended she had thirty students.
In subsequent years Mary brought in additional teachers and devoted her own time to administration and fund-raising, pleading for support from rich and poor alike. Her hard work brought rewards, including a gift of more than sixty thousand dollars from John D. Rockefeller.
In 1931, under Methodist sponsorship, the school merged with a boys’ school to become Bethune-Cookman Collegiate Institute. In addition to educational work, Mary served with the Red Cross, established a hospital, organized a public housing project, and became the first president of the National Council of Negro Women. Presidents Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, and Truman all called upon her participation in White House conferences. In fact, with Eleanor Roosevelt as a go-between, she had the president’s ear on several occasions.
In 1953, she served as an American delegate to Liberia for the country’s presidential inauguration. At last, she was convinced, she had in some way fulfilled her missionary calling: “Ever since my student days at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, in the ‘Nineties,’ when I so much wanted to find happiness as a missionary to Africa, I had seen myself doing just this—counseling and praying with the native people in the far-away land of my ancestors—and here I was. It was wonderful.” She died two years later, age seventy-nine.16
Her active involvement in civic and charitable organizations gave her wide recognition and awards, but it was her educational work, particularly in the early decades, that most distinguished her. She was a dominant force, head held high, always carrying an unnecessary cane that added to her flair. To the children she was known as “Mama Bethune,” but not one to be trifled with. Early morning Bible study was followed by home economics, math, and science. Strict hours of study were enforced. Of her, one of President Roosevelt’s advisors said: “She had the most marvelous gift of effecting feminine helplessness in order to attain her aims with masculine ruthlessness.”17 Africa’s loss was truly America’s gain.
In her social activism Mary calls to mind Sojourner Truth, who died in 1883 (when Mary was seven) after a long life of struggle for equal rights for blacks and for women. Like Mary, Sojourner consulted with a president, Ulysses Grant, at the White House. She is remembered for, among other things, her riveting speeches, particularly “Ain’t I a Woman?,” delivered in 1851 at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.
ELIZA DAVIS GEORGE
African American Missionary to Liberia
There are many incredible tales told of the work of “Mother George” in Liberia, West Africa. One particular story was about a harrowing journey, when she walked some two hundred miles, wading and swimming rivers with her two adopted African boys. She had run out of money and was making the trek to claim a two-hundred-dollar gift from America that had been incorrectly sent to Monrovia instead of the town near her mission outpost. On arrival, worn out and hungry, she learned that the money had been returned—or perhaps confiscated.
Eliza Davis lived a long and fruitful life that spanned a century, from 1879 to 1979. Born into a large impoverished family of former slaves turned sharecroppers, she was an eager learner who through sheer tenacity enrolled at Central Texas College, determined to excel despite prevailing race prejudice. Like Mary McLeod, her goal was to follow God’s call to Africa. Initially turned down as a missionary candidate by the Texas Baptist Convention, she boldly appealed the decision. So impressive was her testimony that the board agreed to appoint her a missionary to Liberia.
It was not until 1914, when Eliza was well past thirty, that she arrived at her post to work with another single woman. In the years that followed she conducted successful evangelistic outreach and established an industrial academy for boys. That she was ill-equipped for supervising such a school may have been a factor in the decision of the Texas Baptists to discontinue her support, though the immediate issue was a split between the Texas and the National Baptists. Eliza was now on her own, alone in Africa with no financial support. Her options were very limited, that is until prince charming came calling with a marriage proposal.
Actually, Thompson George was in her eyes anything but a charming suitor. A native of British Guyana, he was employed by a Portuguese company. She had spurned his advances before, but now she was in no position to do so. She agreed to the marriage, though surely not for love. In fact, she was repulsed by his expectation of sexual intimacies. He did, however, join her in the work, and despite his issues with alcohol and later, adultery, they continued to work together for a number of years.
By the time he died in 1939, she had sought and received support from the National Baptist Convention, which had recognized her gift for evangelism and for planting churches. Only a few years later, however, she was recalled to America due to health reasons—or so the board claimed. She was to turn her work over to others. She refused, and her missionary service was terminated in 1945. Again, she felt abandoned. But by this time, certain individuals had become aware of her work and began supporting her through what became known as Eliza Davis George Clubs.
In a little more than a dozen years, there were nearly thirty churches in the Eliza George Baptist Association, supported by more than one hundred churches in her homeland. Whether most of the funds were properly spent or whether, through her generosity and lack of oversight, they slipped too easily through her fingers is uncertain. By the time she left Africa, however, her work was well established and being run by native believers. She continued to raise funds for the work until she was ninety-nine.
Several years before she died, Joseph Jeter, a black evangelist and mission founder from Philadelphia, encountered her on the job in Liberia. His commentary speaks to her dedication and perseverance: “I met Mother George at the Evangelical Negro Industrial Mission deep in the bush at the age of 91. Her ministry was vast. She was almost blind. She walked with a walking stick. She had a large tropical cancer on her leg, and she was still pressing the claims of Christ.”18
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
Jarena Lee was born in Cape May, New Jersey, and returned decades later to preach. I lived just up the road from that town in the late 1970s, working in the field of social services. My assigned territory included the tiny village of Whitesboro, then almost entirely African American. Many years later I returned to the area to preach at a church missions conference. The Sunday night service at the all-white church included the congregation of a nearby sister church, all black. I recall that evening as truly memorable. Nothing routine about it. Here, with audience participation, I delivered a rousing sermon. I stuck to my text, all the while being spurred on by the black congregation’s response. What might have taken on the tone of a lecture turned into an inspirational oration, affecting me as much as anyone there. Now as I reflect on Jarena and the obstacles she faced, I can only hope that she found a welcome in Cape May as warm as I did.
The odds were stacked against Jarena, as they were against Amanda, Mary, and Eliza. But a profound sense of calling spurred them on. Born into slavery, Amanda would travel the world challenging listeners not so much with her own story of rescue from slavery but with the gospel story of salvation from sin and degradation, passed down by her mother and grandmother.
Although Mary was not born into slavery, sharecropping was often little better. Education, however, was the path to freedom. And when the door was closed for mission work in Africa, she made education her primary ministry. There are photos posted online of her entering the White House and visiting with Eleanor Roosevelt and other dignitaries, but the most telling of them all is a photo of her standing on a dirt road, long black skirt, white Victorian long-sleeved blouse, Bible in hand, her head crowned with a stylish hat. Behind her are dozens of children lined up in single file, the first five in white dresses with similar stylish hats, and behind them dozens more clad in white blouses, dark skirts, hats—every one of them wearing shoes. More than that, every one of them acquiring an education.
Eliza also found a path out of poverty through education. She might have become an educator herself, but the call to Africa took precedence. But a black American woman, with no cross-cultural training, is not necessarily an obvious fit in Africa. Complicating matters were her lack of administrative skills and a marriage fraught with moral issues and misunderstandings. But like Jarena, Amanda, and Mary, she was highly motivated. Determination and a call from God transformed them all into the very prophesying daughters of whom the apostle Peter spoke.
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
Have you ever known anyone personally who was targeted by Satan as Jarena believed she was? Do you believe in a personal devil? Have you ever felt as though you were being attacked by the devil or an evil presence?
Have you ever struggled with atheism as did Amanda? Would you recommend in your situation or other similar instances the forceful response of her aunt? Have you ever interacted with anyone who professed atheism?
How should we assess Mary’s incredible career, which might not have occurred were it not for the malice of segregation and racism that prevented her from going to Africa? Have you ever experienced good coming from evil in your own life?
Is it ever okay to marry someone for reasons other than love, as Eliza did? Have you ever known of such a marriage that fell apart—or one that eventually developed into a loving relationship? Why is marriage often so difficult to maintain even when both parties have fallen in love with each other?
Have you ever discussed the sin of racism with others—with others across racial lines? Do you believe most people who enjoy white privilege are unaware of personal or institutionalized racism?
If you were assigned to serve as a partner in ministry to one of these four women, which one would you choose? Which one would be the most difficult to work with?