When someone tells you Christianity was handed to your people to keep them in chains, the most useful thing you can have is a set of names, places and turning points you know well. Learn them well enough to tell them in order without notes. The record has a shape: a church born under persecution in Philadelphia, a hidden church in the arbors where enslaved believers taught the Bible themselves, and a long line of Black Christians who built and organized because of their faith. This guide walks that chronology one station at a time. It draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and historian Dr. Tiffany Gill, who teaches history and Africana studies. You can work through it alone over a few evenings or with a group in one longer session. Either way, keep a notebook open. The goal is to finish with a timeline you built yourself.
Start with what you already carry
Before reading further, take five minutes and write down everything you already know about Black church history. Names, events, places, half-remembered stories from a sermon or a documentary. Do not look anything up.
Now sort what you wrote into two columns. In the first, put things that are facts about time and place: who, where, when. In the second, put things that are interpretations: what an event meant, why it happened, what it proves. Most people find the second column is longer than the first. That is worth noticing. Lisa Fields made a similar observation in the conversation: she said that “people only know things oftentimes in this day and age by memes,” along with videos and movies, rather than by going deep into history. A meme is almost all interpretation and very little sequence. This guide works the other way around. Sequence first, meaning second.
Stones by the Jordan
Scripture has a model for carrying history as ground to stand on. After Israel crossed the Jordan, Joshua had twelve men take stones from the riverbed and set them up as a marker. Joshua 4:6 gives the reason: the stones were to be a sign among the people, so that when their children asked in time to come what the stones meant, the parents would have an answer. The next verse supplies that answer: the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and the stones would be a memorial to Israel.
Read Joshua 4:1-9 slowly. This is narrative, and it describes what God commanded Israel to do at one moment. It is not a command that every believer build monuments. But notice the pattern the passage assumes. The memorial is concrete. It is tied to a specific event. And it is built to prompt a question from the next generation, which the older generation must be ready to answer with the actual story.
A careful reader can apply that pattern to church history without claiming the Black church story is Scripture or that Joshua was written about it. The application is simpler: God’s people have always been expected to know what happened and to tell it accurately. The stations below are stones. Your task is to be able to answer when someone asks what they mean.
Walk the stations in order
For each station, write one line of fact and one line of interpretation in your notebook. Keep them separate.
Station one: before the chains
Gill notes that African engagement with Christianity predates the transatlantic slave trade. She mentions it briefly and moves on, because other Jude 3 Project guests have covered it. Write it down as your first stone anyway. The faith was present among Africans before the ships, which means the American chapter is not the beginning.
Station two: Philadelphia and the balcony
Richard Allen and Absalom Jones were free Black men worshiping at a predominantly white Methodist church in Philadelphia. They were not allowed to sit among white parishioners and were sent to the balcony. Then came the moment Gill describes this way: “while they were praying, they were dragged off their feet and beaten and thrown out of the church.”
Here is the interpretive line. Gill observes that their response was not to turn away from God. They concluded that “God was still worth pursuing,” and they built their own institution where Black people could worship, learn Scripture and pray in safety. Their church became the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Gill says the AME “is the longest held property by African Americans,” with Bethel AME still standing on a similar plot of land bought in the early 19th century.
Gill’s summary of what this station means is short enough to memorize. She describes “the way that the black church, as we know it, was born as a persecuted church.” If someone claims the faith was simply handed down by oppressors, this station answers that the first formal Black church was built because oppressors threw Black worshipers out.
Station three: the arbors
Allen and Jones could buy land. Most enslaved people could not, though Gill notes that in some cases they did buy land for churches. On larger plantations, enslaved people might attend services with the families who held them. Then, often in the afternoon or evening, they went out to arbors and worshiped on their own, away from slaveholders. Historians call this the invisible church.
Gill is direct about its importance: “that’s really where the theology of the Black Church was built.” The preachers were usually literate members of the community, sometimes enslaved, sometimes free. She names Nat Turner, a slave preacher in Virginia, as one example. She also corrects the picture of these gatherings as only emotional. Expressive worship was part of the culture, but the arbors were also places where the Bible was taught.
For your interpretation line, notice what this station requires you to believe. Slaveholders used Scripture against enslaved people who mostly could not read. Yet the people in the arbors came away with a different understanding of God than the one they were given. Gill calls that a miracle. That is her theological judgment. The historical fact underneath it is the existence of a teaching church outside the master’s control.
Station four: penny savers and the Great Migration
This station answers a specific modern claim. Lisa Fields raised it with Gill: some people who follow Umar Johnson’s thinking say the Black church has done nothing economically for Black communities. Gill’s reply was that “it’s just false that they have not been there,” and she gave particulars.
Churches hosted penny saver clubs, which Gill describes as precursors to insurance at a time when insurance companies would not sell African Americans burial insurance. With no state support for Black families in hard times, churches raised money to keep families going through the 19th and early 20th centuries. Later, as African Americans left the South for the North in the Great Migration, churches helped them build networks for jobs and housing.
Station five: the writers and the activists
Gill names several people whose faith drove their public work. Frederick Douglass called out the hypocrisy of the white American church. Henry McNeil Turner took part in debates about whether African Americans could ever be fully free in America and whether they should go to Africa, and in the Colored convention movements, where African Americans discussed how to live, organize politically and support themselves. Gill is clear about where his work came from: “at his heart, he was a church leader.”
Ida B. Wells used her platform as a journalist to expose lynching. Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten for trying to vote and saw the economic injustice in rural Mississippi as an affront to the kingdom of God. Gill warns that retellings often obscure “how deeply rooted they were in faith.” When you write your fact line for this station, write the faith in. Leaving it out is how a story gets bent.
Station six: the movement and its money
Gill points to something people rarely ask about the civil rights movement. Marches were organized, and “movements take money.” She asks, “Who was feeding the people at the marches who was raising money to get people out of jail during these movements?” Her answer is the Black church. Many of the women who built the movement’s infrastructure, she argues, learned their skills and formed their networks in church.
Where the record refuses a clean story
A memory built only from heroic moments will break the first time someone mentions a counterexample. Lisa Fields saw this coming. She told Gill, “I don’t wanna overemphasize ’cause there is a romanticized view” of Black churches and the movement. Gill agreed. Of those who were active in the civil rights movement, she said, “it’s a small percentage of people,” and an even smaller share of churches. Some religious leaders came out against King. Some preached to their congregations to stay out of it.
Gill does not treat this as a hole in the record. She notes that many of these pastors disagreed about tactics rather than goals. Nonviolence was not passive, and sitting in a segregated space knowing you would be beaten struck some as too radical, while others in the movement believed in self-defense. As Gill put it about the pastors who held back, “They just believed in different ways of doing it.”
She is also plain about abuse in churches today, including churches that fleece people. Her test is the same one the arbors applied: a person can say and do things in the name of Christ without belonging to him. Add these counterexamples to your timeline. A record that includes its own failures is harder to dismiss than one that leaves them out.
For groups: the Allen and Jones station can stir up real church hurt, especially for anyone who has been pushed out of a congregation. If someone names that, let it be heard before moving on. You do not need to resolve it, and no one should feel that sharing is required. The aim of the session is a well-founded memory, not a debate won.
The practice: build a timeline you can defend
Gill gives few exact dates in the conversation, and that is a gift for this exercise. She also sets a standard for how to fill the gaps. She urges “making sure that you’re reading biographies by reputable scholars,” and she wants sources that have “something with some footnotes, with some research, with some archival digging.” Use her standard.
- On one sheet of paper, draw a single line. Mark the six stations along it in the order above.
- For each station, look up one date from a footnoted scholarly source, not a social media post or an unsourced website. Write the date, the source and the page. If you cannot verify a date, leave a question mark. A blank you admit is better than a date you guessed.
- Under the line, write the fact for each station. Above the line, write the interpretation. Keep them visibly apart.
- Pick one station and read a primary voice from it: a section of Frederick Douglass, a collection of Henry McNeil Turner’s writings, or a footnoted biography of Fannie Lou Hamer or Ida B. Wells. Gill mentions Evelyn Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent, a history of women in the Black Baptist Church, as another place to begin. Write down one claim the author makes about God, and one claim about what was happening at the time.
- Finally, practice telling the whole line out loud in under three minutes, in order, to one other person. Ask them to stop you whenever you state an interpretation as if it were a date.
Gill says of these writers that “these people have so much to teach us.” The reading in step four is where that becomes true for you rather than a line you repeat.
Questions for discussion
- Allen and Jones left the congregation but kept the God. What would they have had to believe about Christianity for that choice to make sense?
- Gill calls the arbor believers’ discernment a miracle. What would a skeptic say about the same facts, and which parts of her account would the skeptic still have to accept?
- Which station on your timeline was weakest when you started, and what did checking a footnoted source change?
- How does knowing that only a small share of churches joined the civil rights movement change the way you tell the story? Does it weaken the case, or make it more honest?
- Gill warns that the faith of Wells and Hamer is often left out of their stories. Where have you seen a figure’s faith dropped in a retelling, and what changed when it was dropped?
- Joshua’s stones were meant to prompt questions from children. Who in your life is likely to ask you about this history, and which station would you tell first?
Keep your timeline somewhere you will see it. The next time the charge comes, you will not be reaching for a slogan. You will be walking someone from a balcony in Philadelphia to an arbor after dark to a church basement raising bail money, in order, with sources you checked yourself.