| by Lew Harris She was a stockbroker and an accountant who wanted to be
a poet and novelist. So how did Renita Weems become a professor of the Hebrew Bible at the
Vanderbilt Divinity School who is recognized as one of the best African-American female
preachers in the country?
 "I guess I wasn't enough of a
capitalist," said Weems of her days as an accountant for Coopers and Lybrand in
Boston and a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch in New York. "I'm one of those who
graduated from college and then discovered that I like the world of books and reading and
the academic world _ the world of the mind. I wanted to be a poet and a novelist more than
anything else. Divinity School was a temporary layover until I published my first
novel."
Weems is married to a minister, Martin Espinoza, who is the pastor of Berean Baptist
Church in Nashville. She says the fact that they are "in the same industry"
makes them both sympathetic and empathetic of one another.
"My husband says to me all the time, when I am critiquing him, `That is the
difference between you and me, Renita. I get to come back next Sunday and fix whatever I
didn't get to do. You have one shot. You are like the evangelist. You come in and you
leave. You have to make your preaching work in 20 or 30 minutes.'"
Weems agrees with her husband's assessment, using a baseball metaphor. "I have to
bat a thousand," she says. "That's the kind of pressure on me as a traveling,
itinerant minister, as opposed to the pastor of a single congregation."
She began preaching and speaking during graduate school at Princeton Theological
Seminary, where she graduated cum laude, and has continued to speak professionally for the
last 18 years. Ebony Magazine recently named her the fourth best black female preacher in
the nation.
The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright said in the magazine article that Weems "combines the
scholarship of a Ph.D. in Old Testament and Hebrew languages with the Deep South's wisdom
of Black women who have known hard times." The magazine also praised Weems for her
ability to make Scripture "come alive to town and gown" and for her
"profound understanding of the pain, suffering, aspirations and hopes of
African-American women."
Weems, who is already booked as far ahead as 1999, says that she could be on the road
every weekend if she took every engagement offered. She has cut back in recent years,
however, and now limits herself to about one preaching engagement about every two months
in order not to be away too long from her 5-year-old daughter, Savannah.
"My own work takes me far beyond just pulpits and church work," Weems said.
"It is not unusual for me to speak at a church where they have 6,000 or 7,000
members, but it is also the case that I speak at events that may be more social and civic
related. I do far more workshops, seminars and just lecturing and speaking than I do
preaching. Of the engagements I take in any given year, only about 30 percent are actually
preaching."
Another reason that Weems is speaking less these days is that she has discovered that
it severely curtails her writing time. And writing is very important to her. After her
fling with the business world, she picked Princeton Theological Seminary partly because of
its close proximity to New York, where she could do poetry work and develop contacts for a
novel.
"I went to divinity school to do the `little God thing' on the side, but what I
was really working on is my novel," she said.
"But the `little God thing' ended up taking over and I never got the novel
published. The divinity degree stretched out to become a doctorate degree, which stretched
out to me becoming a professor. I'd like to think that I'm able to draw on my interests in
literature and my talents in the pulpit in choosing as my profession biblical scholarship
and teaching in a divinity school."
While still a doctoral candidate at Princeton Theological Seminary, Weems made a speech
in San Diego and was approached afterward by the publisher of LuraMedia Press, who was
looking for African-American women writers who dealt with matters of spirituality. The
publisher asked Weems if she had ever written down some of the issues she had dealt with
in her speech.
"It was just a very lucky kind of meeting," Weems said. "It got me to
think about just putting down in writing some of the things I was already doing. It was a
matter of bringing together my speeches, study lessons and devotional material."
From that chance meeting emerged the book, "Just a Sister Away." The book is
a collection of devotionals on women in the Bible and lessons of spirituality to be drawn
from those Bible stories. The book was printed by LuraMedia Press and has gone through
four reprintings and sold more than 45,000 copies.
"I deliberately and explicitly set forth in the preface that I was writing for
African-American women because I thought there was just such a paucity of books for
African-American women," said Weems, adding, "The book met with a far larger and
broader audience, male and female."
She also wrote the book, "I Asked for Intimacy," published by LuraMedia
Press. Weems is the author of two forthcoming publications, "Marriage, Sex and
Violence: Hebrew Rhetoric and Audience" and "The Ideology of Race and Gender in
the Hebrew Bible."
"I get inspired writing because that's another medium for communicating. Teaching
is another medium for communicating. I think before I was a preacher who happened to
write. Now I'm a writer and a scholar who happens to preach." |
