Making a Way: Black Women’s Legacy of Spiritual Innovation

What do we do with the weight of the world pressing down?

We live in a time when college students, activists, and faith leaders are expelled and arrested for protesting the very real genocides and manufactured famines in Palestine, Congo, and Sudan.

A time when the American flag is lowered for a white supremacist and Christian Nationalist, while repeating his words could cost you your livelihood.

A time when signing up to detain and deport immigrants, the lifeblood of this nation, brings debt relief, while teaching children in classrooms shadowed by daily school shootings does not.

It is a time when 300,000 Black women have lost their jobs, when communities are stretched thin, and when next week, or even tomorrow, feels uncertain.

How do we sustain ourselves when the very institutions that once held us, including our churches, are revealed as agents of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, misogynoir, and fascism?

In the face of so much unraveling, Black women have always asked, and answered, with creativity, defiance, and care. We have always been spiritual innovators.

What is Spiritual Innovation?

There is no single definition. For some, spiritual innovation is a lifeline in oppressive times. For others, it is the courage to push the boundaries of what seems possible. For others still, it is dismissed as heresy.

At Faith Matters Network, we define it as:

The creative, transformative, and subversive ways Black women engage, reinterpret, and reimagine spiritual practices, beliefs, and traditions in order to affirm their dignity, resist oppression, and cultivate communal and personal liberation.

Spiritual innovation is not a philanthropic buzzword. It is the daily, embodied work of survival and flourishing. It is the auntie who turns a kitchen into a sanctuary with pots of collard greens and stories carried across the table. It is the doula who insists on the dignity of Black mothers in a healthcare system that too often denies it. It is the organizer who braids song, prayer, and protest into a single act of resistance.

What examples have you seen of spiritual innovation in your life?
Who are the spiritual innovators in your life?

Spiritual innovation takes each of these and asks: What must be remembered? What must be reimagined? What must be resisted?

Our womanist lens insists that we start with Black women’s lives, our creativity, our wounds, our laughter, our communities. Womanism refuses the myth of the lone “charismatic innovator.” It says innovation is not about being the sparkliest, but about being faithful to lineage, accountable to community, and bold enough to dream otherwise.

As Toni Cade Bambara once wrote, “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” Black women spiritual innovators make the revolution irresistible by weaving beauty and justice together, by turning survival into poetry, resistance into ritual, and everyday acts into sacred technologies.

Spiritual innovation is our inheritance and our invitation, the way we as Black women have always lived, resisted, and created. It calls us to dream together, to gather in love, to imagine otherwise, even in the midst of exhaustion. When we honor our stories and plant seeds of liberation, we are already innovating. We have always been the way makers.

We welcome you to journey with us. Bring your questions. Bring your imagination. Bring your story.

Tell us:

• What practices sustain your dignity in hard times?
• How are you resisting the forces that would diminish you?
• What seeds of liberation are you planting for the future?