On one level, Saved and Sanctified tells a very particular story: this is the story of a church started above a horse stable in Great Migration Philadelphia, which, led by a charismatic woman born just sixteen years after the Emancipation Proclamation, not only survived the death of the founder, but also institutionalized power-sharing by female and male elders. On another level, this book tells a more universal story: this is the human story of institution-building, establishing community, and pursuing a life of faith while negotiating rapidly changing and often adversarial social realities. ... More

On one level, Saved and Sanctified tells a very particular story: this is the story of a church started above a horse stable in Great Migration Philadelphia, which, led by a charismatic woman born just sixteen years after the Emancipation Proclamation, not only survived the death of the founder, but also institutionalized power-sharing by female and male elders. On another level, this book tells a more universal story: this is the human story of institution-building, establishing community, and pursuing a life of faith while negotiating rapidly changing and often adversarial social realities. Crumbley first situates “The Church,” as members, “saints,” refer to it, within the socio-historical landscape of the Great Migration, when, over six decades, six million African Americans left the Jim Crow South. She does this not only by drawing on germane historical research, but also by documenting the oral histories of founding members, both North and South of the Mason Dixon Line. Crumbley also explores the ritual and symbolic content of The Church, as a Sanctified Church within Black Church traditions and as an expression of African Diaspora religion. She analyzes its institutionalization as an experiment in employing both gender and age as organizing principles. Crumbley brings a unique perspective to this historically embedded ethnography in that she looks at The Church through the telescopic lens of the trained anthropologist and through the microscopic lens of one raised within this faith community.