Become Flesh/Enflesh Spirit

Abstract This chapter examines the Allen Liturgical Dance Ministry (ALDM) as a powerful site of Black Christian worship, performance, and theological formation. It focuses on the 2020 Candlelight Service, where ALDM performs Make Me a Body, a choreographic piece that reimagines divine creation through the expressive movement of Black dancers in an empty, film-lit sanctuary. The chapter traces ALDM’s forty-year evolution as both a dance company and a worshipping body shaped by Africanist cosmology and TransPentecostal traditions. It situates ALDM within a broader genealogy of Black dance, rejecting Eurocentric binaries to reveal how Black bodies perform sacred narratives and embody liberatory spiritual power. Finally, the chapter asserts that ALDM exemplifies Black performance as a sacred and generative force that continually reshapes communal theology, worship practices, and embodied expressions of faith.