Angelita Clifton

I would say that God is amazingly good and amazingly kind, and he qualifies the unqualified in every space. I give all acknowledgement, all glory, all honor, all praise goes to God, because if it were not for the Lord, I would truly be lost. So the guidance from God and the Holy Spirit is what I attribute my success to.

I would tell young sisters to be strong and be confident in your call. Trust that God will carry you through any and every situation, no matter what it looks like or feels like. And then make sure that your witness speaks louder than your words.

I think one of the biggest challenges in the field right now, particularly for women, is being excluded, and that being a form of exploitation. I don't think that our brothers, who tend to dominate the leadership space, are really necessarily as cognizant of the fact that you have the women doing all of the labor, yet there are so few of them in leadership. And that is exclusion, that is 100% exploitation. It's not as violent as if it were something where it did bodily harm, but the psychological harm that you do to a person, where they can do all the work but they can't move forward in terms of making decisions that matter, and considering that most churches are probably somewhere between 70% and 85% women who have no real say in anything that's going on, it's problematic in every sense of the word. At the same time, I want to say that the opportunities for women have expanded by leaps and bounds. There are probably far more women pastors than there have ever been in the history of the Black Baptist Church. But at the same time, they are also relatively limited in terms of how many opportunities there are for that. It's phenomenal because we have far more women than we've ever had, but the number is still small.

I think justice is at the top of my list - not justice for some people, but justice for all people. Because I believe in the African phrase, ubuntu, and I am because you are. In my mind, if you're not well, no matter where you are in the world, I'm not really well either. I may not be cognizant enough to recognize it, but the reality of it all is, if one person suffers in the world, we all suffer. I think that respect is important because we allow our confirmation bias to turn people into what we believe them to be, not who they actually are. So the fact that we need to respect the uniqueness of people, and not allow our own confirmation bias to shape them into whatever we believe them to be, especially since our beliefs may be shaped by distorted different ways. And then I would just say that what I say and what I do have to line up. They have to line up, because if they don't, both things become really hollow and empty.