Dr. Michael Joseph Brown

It is with profound sadness that we acknowledge the transition of our brother, Dr. Michael Joseph Brown, who joins the “great cloud of witnesses.” A long-time member of the Society for the Study of Black Religion (the Society), Dr. Brown was the rare academic who excelled as a pastor, a preacher of the gospel, an educator of generations of students, and a scholar of the highest order. He was an elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the denominational tradition that he deeply loved and whose values and liberative impulses shaped his vocation, work, and commitments.

Dr. Brown began his studies in New Testament at Vanderbilt University where he became a member of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, a part of his identity that he wore proudly.  He completed the M.Div. and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and pursued further studies on material culture at Columbia University. He honed his skills as an educator as an undergraduate professor at Wabash College, and later as Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Candler School of Theology at Emory University. While at Emory, Dr. Brown served as Director of Graduate Studies and mentored a cadre of African American scholars through the perils and pitfalls of earning the Ph.D. and advancing as a scholar of religion. After leaving Emory, his desire to develop young minds for relevant activism and conscious abolitionism in the 21st-century led him to serve as Director of the Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies at Wabash College. 

Most recently, Dr. Brown accepted the appointment as President of Payne Theological Seminary. Doing so fulfilled his longtime hope of serving the institution where his father studied to become an AME minister. In 2016, Dr. Brown arrived at Payne with his highest hopes, revolutionary ideas about theological education, and a deep commitment to the legacy of African Methodism. At a time when theological education as a whole faced economic headwinds, Dr. Brown fortified Payne’s financial standing, expanded its program, and raised its regional profile to international standing with satellites across the United States and on the continent of Africa.

Dr. Brown’s academic work reflected his enduring commitment to excellence in educating students and in pursuing the study of Black Religion. Born out of his concern that biblical studies had become arcane, and alienated students from its aims, rather than inviting them to value its work, Brown wrote What They Don’t Tell You: A Survivor’s Guide to Academic Biblical Studies (2000) to introduce students to the academic study of the Bible in ways that hold both faithful practice and intellectual integrity in creative theological tension. The Lord’s Prayer Through North African Eyes: A Window into Early Christianity (2004) focuses scholarly attention on African receptions of Jesus’ iconic prayer and asks what such readings might offer contemporary Christians. At his core, Brown was an African American biblical scholar. In Blackening of the Bible: The Aims of African American Biblical Scholarship (2004), Brown demonstrates his fundamental commitment to advancing the enterprise. Blackening appeared as a tour de force that theorized Black biblical studies. It offered judicious but constructive critiques and proposed new directions that decades since appear in the works of younger scholars. In his The Lord’s Prayer and God’s Vision for the World: Finding Your Purpose through Prayer (2014), Brown brings to bear the insights of a seasoned pastor and the grounding of a disciplined scholar and returns to write for his first love, the Black Church. 

His career and his scholarship tell only the public narrative of Michael Joseph Brown, but those of us who were witnesses to his life knew him as a force for good in this world. We will remember him as a man who led with his heart, full of a deep and broad love that he shared generously with students, colleagues, friends, and anyone with whom his path intersected. As he now sits with the ancestors, we will journey onward, indelibly blessed by his love and indelibly inspired to mentor, to teach, to resist injustice and, as he did, to leave this world a better place for having lived here.  Asé.