Bishop Leontine Turpeau Current Kelly: Toward an Ironic Prophetic Rhetoric

Abstract

This article considers the rhetoric of Leontine Kelly, the first woman of color to be elected bishop in any Christian denomination. As a black woman bishop in the United Methodist Church, a denomination with a history fraught with contradiction on issues related to gender and racial (in)justice, Kelly often preached to primarily White audiences with the goal of convincing them that racism and sexism were sinful. To do so, Kelly brought together prophecy and irony. This combination proved useful for Kelly and offers possibilities for fruitful interactions between irony and prophecy.

Keywords:

• Irony
• Leontine Kelly
• Prophecy
• Racism
• Sexism
• United Methodist Church

Notes

1. The United Methodist Church’s General Council on Finance and Administration began collecting data on the racial and ethnic background of the denomination’s membership in 1989, shortly after Kelly’s retirement. At that time, 94% of United Methodists identified as White; 4% identified as Black; and Asians, Hispanics/Latinos, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders made up the remaining 2% (Arieux, 2015).

2. All the Hebrew prophets Darsey discussed are men, so Darsey’s use of the male generic here is technically accurate. I strongly prefer never to use the male generic, and part of the function of this essay is to highlight the appropriateness of other pronouns in this sort of sentence.

3. All of the sermon texts come from the archives at the Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary library in Evanston, Illinois. Throughout this article, I cite sermons from the archive in the following format: following Kelly’s name, the date, and the given title of the sermon, I identify the occasion and location of the sermon (when known). I avoid the use of brackets and “[sic]” because Kelly created the manuscripts on typewriters without the benefit of word processing software. Where Kelly underlined for emphasis or in using Latin terms, I use italics to maintain consistency with current convention.

4. In 1972, at the beginning of Kelly’s seminary career, only 4.7% of mainline Protestant seminary students were women (Zickmund, 1995).

5. See Revelation 8:10–11.

6. According to Richardson (1986), Apartheid “has theological and ecclesiastical roots as well as powerful social-ethical and ecclesiological effects” (p. 5).