Pink Robe Chronicles
Pink Robe Chronicles ™ is a digital hush harbor that centers faith and spirituality using the womanist and Afrocentric values of self-determination, serious engagement, and liberating self-love to highlight the importance of collective work and responsibility in healing and sustaining marginalized communities.
Dr. Melva streams Pink Robe Chronicles every Sunday at 8:00 am (EST.) on Facebook Live
Black Women struggle to “love ourselves regardless.” Truth: we’ve been socialized to save everyone but ourselves. Many of us are spiritually malnourished, emotionally drained and physically taxed. We need an infusion of radical self-love!
Image from the inaugural 2020 Love Under New Management Retreat.
In August 2016, I went live on Facebook for the first time. Responding to news that yet another Black person, this time a young woman, was killed by law enforcement was unsettling. Subsequently, around the same time, the senior pastor at the church I attended, shared with me that a female parishioner was dissatisfied with my pulpit presence and demanded that I no longer be allowed to preach. What started out as curiosity quickly burgeoned into a commitment. Every Sunday at 8:00 AM, EST often wearing my tattered pink robe, I go live.
Initially, the livestreams were brief reflections about the lessons my grandmother and others shared with me while coming of age. Now, they are meditations on heavy theological concepts like theodicy, the vindication of goodness in the face of evil or soteriology, the study of aliveness. A viewer named these reflections Pink Robe Chronicles (PRC). The pink robe is my priestly garment and represents both strength and vulnerability. The virtual community—half coffee house and half church—is a blend of insiders and outliers. Pastors of offline Black Churches searching for sermon inspiration. Muslim Black women with Black Church roots appreciative of the Black Church prophetic tradition that PRC is squarely rooted. LGBTQ+ who don’t have to explain away their identity in order to praise God. Practitioners of African heritage religious traditions honoring our Egun (ancestors) with prayers of gratitude. All here in what Je’ Exodus Hooper calls a “theologically inclusive spirit-driven black sanctioned space of love-working. In this digital hush harbor, I and other innovative creatives are “reimagining Black joy, Black love, Black affirmation, Black resistance and sacred truth telling within the offline Black Church.” We are transcending the margins designed by interlocking oppressions lived out in the Black Church.