This guide is for anyone who has felt pressure to become someone else in order to be a good Christian. The question it takes up is practical: how do you tell which parts of your life are gifts God gave you and your people, and which are habits the world handed you and you started calling holy? The answer it trains is simple to say and slow to practice. Scripture gets the final word, not the church that made you feel out of place and not the community that raised you. Over seven days you will sort real examples from your own life against that standard. You can do this alone with a notebook, or work through it with a small group that meets at the start and end of the week.
The material comes from a panel on personhood moderated by Perrin Rogers, with Dr. Malik Blade, Kobe Campbell, Vince Bantu and Khristi Lauren Adams. You do not need to have heard it. The guide gives you what you need at the point you need it.
Day one: notice the pressure before you judge it
Do not start by deciding what is right. Start by catching what you already feel. For the next day, pay attention to the moments when you sense that some part of you is wrong for church or wrong for God. It might be how you talk, how loud or quiet you worship, your hair, your music, how your family runs a household, or how you feel about your history. Write each one down in a few words as it happens. Do not explain it or defend it yet.
Vince Bantu describes this pressure from his teenage years on the north side of St. Louis. The Christianity he saw came from people who visited his neighborhood and left, and he concluded that who he was could not be welcome before God. He put the weight of it plainly: “I have to change how I dress. I have to change how I talk. I have to change how I look.” Notice that his list is about appearance and speech, not about sin. That is your first clue. Pressure often arrives dressed as holiness while asking for nothing more than conformity.
Also write down the opposite kind of moment: a time this week when your community, your friends or your feed approved of something and a quiet part of you wondered whether God did. You will need both kinds of entries. A sorting exercise that only examines one side is not sorting. It is just choosing a team.
Day two: let Scripture set the standard
Read Mark 7:1-13 slowly, out loud if you can. Religious leaders criticize Jesus’s disciples for eating without a ceremonial hand washing. Jesus answers by drawing a line between God’s command and human custom: “For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do” (Mark 7:8). A few verses later he names the cost: by holding to the tradition they had handed down, they were making the word of God of no effect (Mark 7:13).
Look carefully before you apply it. Answer these observation questions on paper:
- What exactly did the leaders accuse the disciples of? Was it a command from God or an expectation from their tradition?
- Jesus does not condemn having traditions. What does he condemn about how this one was being used?
- What happens to God’s actual word when a custom is treated as equal to it?
Now read Acts 10:9-35. Peter, a faithful Jew, sees a vision of animals his law called unclean and hears a voice: “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common” (Acts 10:15). The vision concerns food, but Peter himself applies it to people. He tells Cornelius’s household, “God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common or unclean” (Acts 10:28), and then says, “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him” (Acts 10:34-35).
This is the passage that broke Bantu’s sense that his neighborhood made him unacceptable to God. Ask yourself what the passage actually says and what it does not. It says God accepts people from every nation who fear him and do right. It does not say every practice of every nation is acceptable. Hold both halves. You will need both on day five.
Finally, read Romans 12:2: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” Notice the verb “prove.” Paul expects believers to test things, not just absorb them. That is what the rest of this week asks of you.
Day three: learn the question that does the sorting
Dr. Malik Blade tells of counseling a Black wife who attended a white evangelical church and had no peace. She kept measuring herself as a wife and mother against the white women around her. Blade’s own mother raised him alone in Washington, DC, and staying home was never an option for her. He is careful about what he claims: “It’s not to say one is right or wrong, but there are cultural differences.” The harm came when one arrangement got preached as God’s arrangement. His conclusion gives this guide its tool: “we need to understand the differences between what God said and what they said.”
That question moves the sorting away from taste. The issue is not whether something feels Black or white, old or new, loud or quiet. The issue is whose word is binding your conscience. Blade states the order behind it: “he comes before the culture and then influences the culture rather than the culture influencing how we understand him.”
Here is the discovery that makes the exercise work. When the panel’s speakers are heard together, Blade’s question produces three possible verdicts, not two.
- A gift to keep. Something God made or blessed that others pressured you to drop. Kobe Campbell names the pressure directly, describing images implying that “the closer you get to God, the closer you will get to the appearance and to the stature and to the socioeconomic status of a middle aged white man.” Her answer is that “you becoming Christian does not mean that you lose your identity as a black person.”
- Something to refuse. Blade does not let the test point only outward: “There are some aspects though of black culture or any culture that come more from the world than God.” Some things your own people approve of may be things where, in his words, “But depending on what it is, as a Christian, I may need to say no.” Bantu describes the same refusal differently. When sin gets labeled as authentic, he says, “I would say that’s not blackness at all. That’s actually of the enemy.” Some patterns, he argues, are not who a people are but “That’s how oppression and sin has made us to be.”
- A freedom. Many things are neither commanded nor forbidden. Blade’s working mother and the stay-at-home mothers he met in seminary both fall here. So does worship style. Campbell, asked about music, says “there’s not only one type of black worship, there is a range of black worship.” Perrin Rogers adds that “the black church is not monolithic.” In this category, the error is making your preference a rule for others, in either direction.
Most people sort with only two boxes, holy and worldly. The third box protects you from two opposite mistakes: treating your culture as automatically suspect, and treating it as automatically sacred.
Days four to six: the sorting practice
Take one sheet of paper. Draw a line down the middle. Label the left column What God said and the right column What they said. Copy every entry from day one into the right column. Everything starts on the right, because at this point all you know is that someone expects it.
Each day, work through two or three entries using these steps:
- Name the source. Next to the entry, write who taught you this expectation: a church, a family member, a friend group, a feed, yourself. Be specific.
- Look for the text. Search Scripture for a passage that actually addresses it. Read the passage in its context, not just one verse. Ask whether it is a command, a description of what someone did, or a principle that needs wisdom to apply.
- Move it only with a reason. If you find a clear command or a clear prohibition, move the entry to the left column and write the reference beside it. If you find none, it stays on the right.
- Mark the verdict. Put a K beside gifts to keep, an R beside things to refuse, and an F beside freedoms. An entry on the right with an F means you are free, and so is everyone else.
Two rules keep the practice honest. First, test entries from your own community with the same seriousness you bring to entries from churches that hurt you. Second, if you cannot decide, write a question mark and leave it. An honest question mark is better than a forced verdict. Campbell’s reminder fits here: “We have not exhausted all the ways that an infinite God can be experienced.” Some of what you sort will be about how you meet God, and faithful people meet him in more than one register.
Two hard cases to work through
Looking back at your ancestors. Khristi Lauren Adams describes asking her family about grandparents she never knew, saying “we need to be able to know our stories and know where we came from.” Campbell defends looking back and draws a line in the same breath: “But then, yes, divination is a real thing.” Bantu points to Hebrews 13:7, which tells believers to remember those “who have spoken unto you the word of God: whose faith follow.” In the KJV, “conversation” in that verse means manner of life. Jude 3 Project honors the desire to respect heritage and the dead, and distinguishes memory and honor from veneration and spiritual contact. Sort your own practices with that line: learning, telling and honoring the stories go on one side; seeking guidance or contact from the dead goes on the other.
Where you belong. Some entries will not be practices but places. Campbell repeats a hard question someone once asked her: why stay in spaces that prioritize what you do not want prioritized? “Either you’re there to just like lowkey be a hater, or you’re there because God’s called you to be there.” And if God has called you there, “then there’s a resource God’s gonna give you to endure in that space.” Adams faced this when outside pressure came over her work and concluded, “I would sacrifice the institution or any person before I would sacrifice what God called me to.” For each room on your list, ask whether you are there by calling, by habit, or by fear.
Day seven: read the whole sheet
Lay the page out and look at it as a map. Which column is longer? Which sources show up most often on the right? Did you find more pressure from outside your culture or from inside it? Did the test surprise you anywhere, either by freeing something you thought was wrong or by convicting something you assumed was fine?
Pick one K, one R and one F. For the gift, choose a concrete way to stop hiding it this week. For the thing to refuse, name one specific step and one person who can help you take it. For the freedom, ask whether you have been judging anyone else over it.
Blade notes that after a hard experience, a person can begin “having a fresh view of those things so that we aren’t looking at them as negatives.” That is the aim of the sheet. Not a verdict on your culture as a whole, but a clearer view of what in it belongs to God, what belongs to you, and what never belonged to either.
If you are doing this with a group
Meet once before day one and once after day seven. In the first meeting, read Mark 7 and Acts 10 together and explain the three verdicts. In the second, invite people to talk about the process rather than their sheets. No one should be asked to read their columns aloud. Some entries will touch church hurt or family pain, and those belong to the person who wrote them. If someone describes pain that runs deeper than a study can hold, encourage them toward a trusted pastor or a licensed counselor.
Expect disagreement on the F column. That is not a failure. When two people disagree, ask each one to name the passage they are relying on. If neither has one, you have probably found a freedom.
Questions for discussion
- In Mark 7, Jesus does not condemn having traditions. What separates a tradition that serves God’s word from one that cancels it out?
- Peter needed a vision repeated three times before he stopped calling people unclean. What made his old categories so hard to give up, and what makes yours hard?
- Blade describes some things as parts of a culture that must be shed. Bantu describes them as counterfeits that were never the real culture. Which description fits the entries you marked R, and does the difference change how you feel about refusing them?
- Which entry did you move columns on most reluctantly, in either direction? What evidence finally settled it, or what evidence would?
- Is there anything in your F column you have treated as a rule for other believers? What would change if you stopped?
- Where is the line between remembering your ancestors and seeking something from them, and why does it matter where you draw it?
- Which of your question marks still needs the most work, and who could help you read Scripture on it more carefully?
Keep the sheet. Next month, add what you notice and sort again. The point is not to finish. It is to make Blade’s question a habit you ask before anyone else gets to answer it for you: did God say this, or did they?