The blog made the case. This study is for letting the text catechize you: learn what it actually says, believe it in your bones, and worship the God who keeps lifting up the people the world counts last. Work it alone with a journal, or out loud in a group. Plan on about an hour.
Part one, know it: the claim on the table
Every reader brings a lens to Scripture, shaped by where they have lived and what they have survived. This study takes up a simple claim from Dr. Cheryl Sanders. When Black women read the Bible with their own questions in hand, they notice things the church often skips, and the text is richer for it. The honest move is not to drop your lens. No one can. The honest move is to name it, and then read so carefully that the words on the page can correct you.
Before you open a single passage, write down two things in your journal. First, one story or person in the Bible you have always heard preached the same way. Second, who taught you to read it that way. Hold those answers loosely. We are going to test them against the text.
One word of definition, because it matters. Womanist theology, in Sanders's words, is a Black feminist approach to liberation theology. It grew out of a double bind. Black women stood inside the fight for Black freedom without always being treated as equals by the men leading it, and inside the women's movement without always being seen by the white women leading that. The point of this study is not to settle every debate about that movement. It is to borrow one thing it does well: it reads slowly, and it asks who in the passage the church has been skipping.
Part two, see it: sit with the passages
Do not settle for the citation. Read each passage slowly, out loud if you can, then answer the question under it before you move on.
- Genesis 16 and 21. Hagar in the wilderness, seen and heard by God, naming him El Roi, the God who sees. Read it as the story of a woman, not a footnote to Abraham. Question: Hagar is the only person in the whole Bible who gives God a name. Why do you think that honor lands on her, of all people, and what does it tell you about who God notices?
- John 4. The woman at the well trades theology with Jesus and carries his message back to her town. Read the whole conversation, not just the part about her husbands. Question: how much of the chapter is about her past, and how much is about her witness? What did the church add that John left out?
- Acts 2 with Joel 2:28-29. The Spirit poured out on all flesh, sons and daughters prophesying, the marginalized named on day one. Question: if daughters prophesy in the very first hour of the church, what happens to the verse you have heard used to silence women? Which one carries more weight, and why?
- Galatians 3:28. In Christ there is neither slave nor free, male nor female. Read it as the lens for the whole. Question: what would change in your own church if this verse set the default instead of the exceptions?
Voices to discuss
Read these aloud and let the room react before anyone explains them.
- “There is nobody else in the Bible who gets that privilege to give God a name.” (Dr. Cheryl Sanders)
- “She gets the point of evangelism and does it, while his disciples are still scratching their heads.” (Dr. Cheryl Sanders)
- “The people at the bottom rung of the ladder are not exempted from the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.” (Dr. Cheryl Sanders)
- “Beware of the interpreter and the interpretation. The oppressor can look like you.” (Ekemini Uwan)
- “If you believe that you are a person created in the image of God, then you move in the world and demand that people treat you that way.” (Yana Connor)
- “If we will break down some of the barriers, God will do the rest.” (Dr. Cheryl Sanders)
Part three, believe it: questions that build
Work these in order. Each one leans on the last.
- What lens do you bring to Scripture without realizing it? Go back to what you wrote at the start. Where did it come from?
- Ekemini Uwan warns that the oppressor can look like you. How do you tell the difference between the text itself and the additives later teachers bolted onto it? What is one additive you can name?
- Read Hagar's story again. What do you notice now that you never noticed in a sermon about Abraham?
- Have you heard the woman at the well preached as a scandal? How does it change things to read her as a theologian and the first evangelist to Samaria?
- Yana Connor says people created in God's image should move through the world and expect to be treated that way. Where have you read yourself, or someone else, down to less than that?
- Who are the people at the bottom rung in your own context, and does your church actually expect God to pour his Spirit out on them?
A practice for this week
Pick one overlooked woman in Scripture: Hagar, the Samaritan woman, Mary Magdalene, the daughters of Zelophehad in Numbers 27. Read her story slowly every day for one week. Each day, write one line answering two questions. What is she actually doing? What is God doing through her? At the end of the week, ask the harder one. Who in your own world have you been reading the same careless way the church read these women, and what would it take to pay real attention?
If you are doing this in a group, add one more step. Come back next week and read your seven lines out loud to each other. You will be surprised how differently the same woman read across the room, and how much you each saw that the others missed. That is the whole lesson in miniature. The text gives back what the careful reader brings to it.
Leader notes
Two things to hold. First, keep the room in the text. The point of this study is not to score the church or to win an argument about gender. It is to read Scripture more carefully than any of us usually do. If the conversation drifts into politics, gently steer it back to the page. Second, expect some discomfort, especially from anyone who has only heard these passages preached one way. Let the silence sit. The goal is not agreement by the end of the hour. It is a room full of people who go home and actually read.
Part four, worship it: a closing charge
Hagar looked up from the dust and named God the One who sees. That is where this study lands. Not on a grievance, but on a God careful enough to notice the woman everyone else wrote off, and generous enough to let her name him.
So read like that God is real. Break down the lazy fences. Trust the text to keep lifting up the people the world overlooks, because it always has. Then go find the person in your own life you have been skipping, and see them the way God saw Hagar. He does the rest.
Go deeper
This study draws on the Jude 3 Project podcast conversation with Dr. Cheryl Sanders, with added voices from the conversations with Ekemini Uwan, Humble Hermeneutic (Dr. Cynthia James and Yana Connor), and Quonekuia Day. For a related study already in this series, see the conversation on whether the Bible is good for Black women. Sanders develops these themes further in her book on empowerment ethics for a liberated people.