Who Built It, Who Runs It: On the Pew and the Pulpit
- Indhira Udofia
- May 7
- 5 min read
Mapping the Tapestry | April 2026
Mapping the Tapestry is where we trace the threads. Before we read a vibration or untangle a knot, we have to know who wove the fabric, whose hands have held the edges, and whose names are embroidered into the seams that the institution pretends it did without them. Anancy doesn't begin with critique. She begins with accounting.
A statistic has been circulating this month, and I want to sit with it in this section because it does not yet belong in the other three. It belongs in the archive. It belongs on the map.
Eight in ten Black church congregants are Black women. Fewer than one in ten Black church leadership positions are held by Black women.
That is not a gap. That is a tapestry whose loom is held by the bodies the institution refuses to name.
I first encountered versions of this number in the footnotes of Toinette Eugene and Cheryl Townsend Gilkes more than a decade ago, and the ratio has not moved meaningfully in my lifetime or my mother's or my grandmother's. When Word in Black restated it in March of this year, the response online was exactly what it has always been: a round of knowing exhales, a flurry of 'this is why I left,' a countervailing flurry of 'this is why we stay,' and a small, precise silence around the question neither camp wants to hold, which is this: what is the Black church if not the sustained labor of Black women, and what has been required of that labor to keep producing an institution that could not survive without it and will not be led by it?
Mapping the tapestry means beginning there.
The Labor at the Loom
In Anancy Webwork, every institution is a tapestry. And every tapestry has laborers whose hands are at the loom and designers whose names are on the commission. The distance between the hand and the name is almost always where the governance formation lives.
Who cooks the repast. Who runs the usher board. Who teaches the children on Sunday morning and who teaches the mothers on Tuesday night. Who writes the program, who buys the flowers, who pays the light bill, who sits with the grieving widow, who calls the sick list, who organizes the women's day, the men's day, the youth day, the anniversary. Who stays after service to sweep. Who arrives before service to pray.
In the overwhelming majority of Black churches I have sat in, the answer to those questions has been the same. And in the overwhelming majority of those same churches, the answer to who gets called Reverend, who preaches the Easter sermon, who signs the deed to the building, who decides whether a survivor is believed, has also been the same. It has just been a different same.
This is not an accident. It is a weave.
What the Tapestry Teaches
The governance formation I keep writing about in Untangling the Knot has a particular habit: it naturalizes its own history. It teaches that the preacher has always been male because the tradition has always required a male preacher. It teaches that the anointing tends to fall where it falls, and the fact that it keeps falling on men is a coincidence of the Spirit rather than a consequence of the loom.
The archive disagrees.
Jarena Lee preached the AME's first sanctioned sermon by a Black woman in 1819, and she did so by standing up in the middle of a service where a male preacher had faltered and finishing what he could not. Julia Foote. Amanda Berry Smith. Sojourner Truth. Zilpha Elaw. The women of the sanctified tradition who were ordained before the mainline denominations had imagined the word woman could modify the word bishop. Katie Geneva Cannon. Delores Williams. Jacquelyn Grant. The womanist theologians who built the vocabulary the pulpit now uses without attribution.
The tapestry was always woven by Black women. The institution's habit of naming the weave something else is itself a piece of the weave.
This is what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham was mapping in Righteous Discontent. It is what Cheryl Townsend Gilkes names when she calls the Black Church a structure Black women built and men administered. It is what Eugene named when she called the Church a regulatory site. The tapestry is not incidentally the work of Black women. It is constitutively the work of Black women.
Naming that is mapping.
What Happens If You Stop Calling It Coincidence
If the ratio between pew and pulpit is coincidence, then the question is how to find a few more exceptional Black women and slot them into the seats marked for them.
If the ratio is a weave, the question is different.
The question becomes: what governance formation produces and reproduces this distribution of authority? What training does the seminary do to male candidates and female candidates that arrives at different vocational destinations? What happens in search committees, pulpit committees, denominational placement offices, that moves women into associate and assistant and director-of roles and men into lead and senior and bishop? What is the theological work that makes the ratio feel natural to the people inside it, so natural that an 80/10 structure can be described with a straight face as 'the way God has ordered it?'
Those are structural questions. They do not have individual answers.
I have watched, over the past decade, a quiet and significant shift: more Black women in the pulpits of some mainline denominations, more women in seminary than men, a generation of preachers who do not ask the formation for permission to speak. The tapestry is being rewoven, in some quarters, by the women whose grandmothers paid for the looms with their Sunday offerings and their second-shift paychecks.
The ratio is still the ratio. But the tapestry is no longer the same tapestry.
That is what mapping is for: to know what is actually there, underneath what the institution says is there. To see the hands at the loom. To read the tradition not from the top down but from the offering envelope up.
What This Section Is and Is Not
Mapping the Tapestry is not the section where I tell you the Black church is irredeemable. It is not the section where I tell you the Black church is the only home your grandmother ever had and therefore beyond critique. It is the section where I trace what is there.
What is there: an institution carried, across centuries, by the labor of Black women, increasingly led, in some quarters, by the voices of Black women, and still, in most of its governance structures, organized by a formation that treats that labor as background and that voice as supplemental.
What is also there: a generation of us who are naming the weave out loud.
The map does not tell you what to do with the territory. It tells you where you are.
That is where I want to start this month.
— Church Gworl Maroon
Sources and related work: Word in Black, 'Black Women Built the Black Church. Why Can't They Lead It?' (March 2026); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent (1993); Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, If It Wasn't for the Women (2001); Toinette Eugene, 'There is a Balm in Gilead' (1995); related: 'It's Not One Pastor. It's the System.' (Untangling the Knot).
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