The Freedom Assemblies Worldwide Reading Initiative
Toward a Culture of Liberation, Formation, and Prophetic Imagination
Beloved Freedom Assemblies Worldwide Family,
There are moments in the life of a movement when reading itself becomes sacred work.
We are living in such a moment.
The Freedom Assemblies Worldwide Reading Initiative emerges from the conviction that intellectual formation is not ancillary to spiritual development, but constitutive of it. If worship forms our devotion, and service forms our compassion, then disciplined reading forms our consciousness. To read together, critically and communally, is to participate in the transformation of both mind and world.
This initiative is being launched under the auspices of the Institute for Intersectional Theology and Liberation, whose mission is to cultivate emancipatory Christian thought and praxis adequate to the complexities of the twenty-first century. Rooted in the intertwined philosophical frameworks of Ubuntu, Sankofa, and Afrofuturism, the Institute understands theology not merely as reflection upon God, but as a technology of social imagination capable of shaping institutions, informing public life, and advancing human liberation.
The purpose of this initiative is therefore larger than literacy, enrichment, or intellectual accumulation. Our goal is the cultivation of a denominational culture of critical consciousness—one in which the members, leaders, clergy, scholars, creatives, and ministries of Freedom Assemblies Worldwide are formed by a shared corpus of transformative texts that become the intellectual framework for liberation praxis at every level of the organization.
Through sustained engagement with works in Black theology, political theory, womanist ethics, social criticism, public theology, philosophy, and cultural analysis, we seek to build a community capable of discerning the times with both spiritual depth and analytical rigor. We believe that the Church must once again become a site of serious intellectual production—a space where prayer and study, prophetic witness and disciplined inquiry, worship and strategy converge in holy synthesis.
This initiative invites us into precisely that convergence.
The selected reading corpus has been curated not simply to inform, but to form. These texts challenge us to interrogate systems of domination, rethink inherited assumptions, and imagine emancipatory futures beyond the limitations imposed by empire, exclusion, and ideological captivity. They call us toward a faith that is public rather than privatized, liberatory rather than passive, and structurally engaged rather than merely symbolic.
In this initiative, we understand:
Ubuntu as an ethic of communal becoming;
Sankofa as the disciplined retrieval of ancestral wisdom for present struggle;
Afrofuturism as the sacred expansion of Black possibility beyond colonial imagination.
Together, these frameworks orient us toward a prophetic mode of Christian existence that is intellectually serious, spiritually grounded, and socially transformative.
Our aspiration is that every auxiliary, every local assembly, every leader, every ministerial candidate, every fellowship, and every department within Freedom Assemblies Worldwide becomes a site of theological reflection and emancipatory practice. Reading circles, study cohorts, public conversations, lectures, and communal dialogues will become instruments through which we cultivate a denomination capable not merely of surviving history, but of shaping it.
This is, ultimately, a work of discipleship.
For Scripture itself testifies: “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). The renewal of the mind is not incidental to the Christian journey; it is central to it. Likewise, the prophetic tradition consistently links wisdom with justice, knowledge with liberation, and understanding with communal flourishing.
We therefore invite the entire Freedom Assemblies Worldwide communion into this sacred intellectual journey.
Let us read courageously.
Let us think critically.
Let us imagine expansively.
Let us build collectively.
And let us become the kind of Church capable of embodying the future toward which God is calling us.
In faith, scholarship, and prophetic hope,
Rt. Rev. Dr. Edward Donalson III
Presiding Prelate
Freedom Assemblies Worldwide
The Black Antifascist Tradition
Black Intellectuals and Black Society
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Random House Trade Paperbacks
Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)
Imagination: A Manifesto (Norton Shorts)
Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundation, Theory, Practice, Critique
The #BlackLivesMatter Movement: Toward an Intersectional Theology
Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader
Becoming Whole: A Journey of Identity, Theology, Liberation, and the God Who Holds It All
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois - A Groundbreaking Work