Each first Sunday of the month, mothers in my childhood church wore all white and sat in the two rows nearest to the pulpit. They typically fanned themselves, saying something about answered prayers while swaying from side to side and listening to an organist softly play an old hymn called “The Blood Will Never Lose its Power.” Most of the time, I found myself in the arms of one of those mothers with butterscotch candy in my mouth as my own mother danced in what is sometimes called a praise break.
The church I grew up in had deep, dark orchid upholstery on the pews, matching the violet-purple carpet marked by the heels and tears of an entire generation. Before I became aware of what was happening, I remember my mother shouting on that purple carpet with a kind of might that suggested what she was doing was more than a dance.
Poet Lucille Clifton once said a line that reminds me of these moments: “won’t you celebrate with me / what i have shaped into / a kind of life?” My mother’s movements gestured toward a Spirit-shaped kind of life that was itself a reason for celebration. She made her testimony visible through her body, and her joy became something the church could recognize.
As the celebration broke into praise, sweat slipped from the napes of necks onto undergarments of those who joined and danced with vigor, showing what it means—at least physically—to give your all to Jesus. Some danced like David until layers fell. Their suit jackets and heels hit the ground, and shame was nowhere to be found. Others wept as their knees buckled beneath them and they laid their bodies at the altar. Some clapped their hands and called on God to intervene again as the carpet absorbed their tears and the purple deepened.
Decades later, in the corridors of the seminary where I am currently studying, my friends and I sometimes do our own praise breaks. We dance and shiver with a joy that lives within us and can come forth at any moment. Black preachers have emphasized a hymn that speaks to these moments. Across Black church traditions, including in the Baptist denomination in which I was raised, it is often sung this way: “When I think of the goodness of Jesus and all he’s done for me, my soul cries out ‘Hallelujah!’”
Although praise dancing is mentioned in the Scriptures, scholars often trace these specific movements back to enslaved Africans in the antebellum South and to a practice known as the ring shout, where worshipers moved in a counterclockwise circle while singing, clapping, and stomping their feet.
In Africa, where the practice originated, the dances and songs were “directed to the ancestors and gods,” historian Sterling Stuckey wrote in his book Slave Culture. The ring shout did not disappear under the violence of slavery. But it was reshaped as more slaves came to Christ, eschewing the twisted version of Christianity presented by white masters and holding onto a biblical faith that spoke against bondage.
As time went on, the rhythm, movements, and communal force of the ring shout became part of the grammar of Black Christian praise. The practice evolved into praise breaks as Black churches incorporated more charismatic practices following the Azusa Street Revival. Today, you can see the form of worship across a range of Black churches. You will also encounter some criticisms from those who say it’s too tethered to emotionalism.
In his book A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor wrote that modern people see themselves as “buffered”—sealed, self-contained, and protected from outside spiritual forces. Taylor contrasts this with its opposite, the porous self, and assigns each to its own era: the porous self to a premodern world alive with spirits, forces, and constant vulnerability to danger; and the buffered self to modernity’s more enclosed, self-governing subject.
The Black church’s praise shows the ways in which the Christian can exist beyond the notions of the porous and buffered self. The Black Christian, especially in the joy of praise, cannot be reduced to a simple category. In giving one’s all to Jesus through embodied worship, the self becomes open, moved by the Holy Spirit, sound, testimony, and communal joy—yet not emptied of agency or self-possession.
The praise break is somewhat porous because it is open to spiritual experiences. But it also exists in a world that often reads these types of Black expressions through a strictly buffered lens: as spectacle, curiosity, excess, or confusion. I find this tension compelling. To outside eyes, the dance can be misunderstood. But for those shaped by it, it is the self brought more fully alive before God.
That said, it is also true that the praise break can become routine, or performative. But the answer to that problem is not to discard the practice. It is to recover its true meaning: a joyous expression of life hidden with Christ, where belonging to God does not constrain the self but frees one to live the life Christ died to give. In this sense, the praise break is more than emotional perseverance through suffering, as it is sometimes depicted. It shows the liberty that comes from the Holy Spirit.
The type of rhythmic clapping done during praise breaks, for example, is profound in the Black church tradition because it is threaded from the same garment of worship that the Old Testament describes (Ps. 47:1). In the scriptures, the Hebrew word for clap (tāqaʿ) means to strike with purpose. It is the same word that can be used for hammering a nail or driving a tent peg into place. In other words, clapping is an active declaration of God’s consistent goodness. In my childhood church, it was also a way of striking joy into shape.
The sweetness of dance in the Black church is like those bits of candy I had as a child during any given praise break: wrapped up, deeply sought after, passed down, and shared. And maybe that is what the praise break has always been doing: shaping joy into something the body could carry, that the church could recognize, and that we can know as good.
Jazer Willis is a poet, writer, and creative theologian studying at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. His work explores spirituality, memory, and culture.
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