Jude 3 Project

No. Every voice on this panel agrees that you can follow Jesus with full seriousness without becoming culturally white. None of them treats Black culture as the thing God has to scrub off before he can use you. They argue about a harder question. If Christ, not culture, has the final word, who decides which parts of a culture he affirms and which he asks you to put down? And how should a Christian describe the order between being Black and being a believer?

The panel was moderated by Perrin Rogers, who pastors Triumphant Church, and included Dr. Malik Blade, Kobe Campbell, Vince Bantu and Khristi Lauren Adams. They agree with each other more than a quick listen suggests. Where they differ, they differ precisely, and those differences are worth mapping carefully.

Where does the confusion between culture and faithfulness start?

Dr. Malik Blade, CEO of the Whole Brother Mission, starts with history. He argues that white supremacy shaped America and the American church so deeply that the loudest Christian voices often presented cultural habits as biblical ones. His example comes from counseling. A Black wife at a white evangelical church had no peace because 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. Many of the white women he later met at seminary did have that option. He is careful to say neither arrangement is right or wrong. His complaint is that one arrangement got preached as the standard. As he puts it, “we need to understand the differences between what God said and what they said.”

That sentence carries the whole article. It moves the question away from taste and toward authority. The issue is not whether a habit feels Black or white. The issue is whose word is binding the conscience. If God said it, it binds everyone. If a congregation’s culture said it, it binds no one, however holy it sounds.

Kobe Campbell, a licensed clinical mental health counselor, names the visual form this confusion takes. She describes social media posts where a person’s “before Christ” photo showed culturally Black clothing and the “after” showed something closer to a finance office. She says the imagery communicates 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 objection is that those posts treat holiness as movement up a social ladder. She insists that a clean heart does not require giving up your dialect or your AAVE, and she says plainly that “you becoming Christian does not mean that you lose your identity as a black person.”

Vince Bantu, who teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary, felt this as a teenager on the north side of St. Louis. His question was never whether he was Black. It was whether who he was could be welcome before God. The Christianity he saw came from outsiders who visited and left, and he concluded he was “too black and too hood for the church.” He describes the pressure he felt this way: “I have to change how I dress. I have to change how I talk. I have to change how I look.”

What broke that pressure for him was Acts 10. In Peter’s vision, the voice tells him: “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common” (Acts 10:15). The vision is about food laws, but the chapter itself applies it to people. Peter soon concludes that God accepts those in every nation who fear him and do right (Acts 10:28, 34-35). So Bantu’s use of the verse is not a stretch. The passage is already about outsiders whom insiders had labeled unclean. Bantu reads his own neighborhood into that category, and the text supports the move.

Then is anything in Black culture something to give up?

This is where the panel gets most interesting, because the speakers press on each other in real time. Bantu had just said that going deeper with Christ “doesn’t take me further away from my culture. It actually brings me deeper into my culture.” Blade agreed and then added a qualification: “There are some aspects though of black culture or any culture that come more from the world than God.” He went further. Some things the people around you endorse may be things that, “as a Christian, I may need to say no.”

Bantu accepted the point and reframed it. When something sinful gets labeled as authentically Black, he argues, “I would say that’s not blackness at all. That’s actually of the enemy.” He says some patterns people defend as simply how the community is are better explained another way: “That’s how oppression and sin has made us to be.” On his view, shedding those things is not losing culture. It is recovering it, going back to who God made people to be.

Look closely and you can see that the two men agree in practice but describe it differently. Both say a Black Christian will sometimes refuse what the community around them approves. Both say the reason is God’s word. Blade describes this as shedding part of a culture. He admits plainly that any culture, including your own, is a mix of gifts and things that come “more from the world than God.” Bantu describes it as refusing a counterfeit that was never the real culture.

Each description protects something. Bantu’s protects dignity. It refuses to let sin define Blackness, which matters to anyone told their people are naturally violent or careless. Blade’s protects honesty. It does not let a culture escape judgment by redefining its faults as foreign. The risk on Bantu’s side is that “that’s not real Blackness” can become a way to avoid admitting that real communities have real sins. The risk on Blade’s side is that the claim that part of a culture must go can get used, as it historically has been, to strip away things that were never sinful at all. Blade’s own counseling example shows that danger.

What keeps both men from those risks is the same anchor. Blade says “scripture and God’s directives have cultural implications, but he comes before the culture and then influences the culture rather than the culture influencing how we understand him.” That principle cuts in every direction. It judges the white evangelical church that made stay-at-home motherhood a test of godliness. It also judges whatever a Black community celebrates that God does not. Campbell, hearing both men, said simply, “I agree with you both.”

There is one more complication. The question assumes there is one Black culture to keep or lose. Rogers reminds the room that “the black church is not monolithic.” Asked about worship music, Campbell argues that “there is a range of black worship,” from songs that shout you down to quieter styles. Earlier she described feeling out of place because her experience of God is tender rather than loud. She noticed that she was sometimes treated as unserious for it, and said many believers feel “we have to abandon the reality of our experience with Christ.” The same mistake can happen inside a Black church: one expression gets treated as the faithful one. Blade’s test applies there too.

Does Blackness come second to Christianity, or out of it?

The sharpest difference on the panel is about wording, but the wording reflects a real concern. Blade said that “my blackness comes second to my Christianity.” He offered this partly as a guard against conversations sliding into us-versus-them.

Bantu said he would prefer to put it another way. He does not like treating his Blackness and his faith as opposites pulling against each other. His version is this: “my blackness comes out of my Christianity.” His reasoning is theological. God made Black and every other color, so the deepest way to be fully Black is to be made right with the God who made Blackness in the first place.

Campbell accepts that nothing defines us more than being God’s children. Her concern is about who hears the demand. She observes, “I don’t think we make the same demand of other people to say, well, you know, you have to put your whiteness as second to this.” Then she adds at once: “I’m not saying that they don’t have to do that. They do.” Her objection is not to the priority of Christ. It is to applying that priority only to some people.

So on the foundation, the three agree. Christ comes before any ethnic identity. Jude 3 Project states the same order: before any adjective, we are Christian. What divides them is how to say it without implying that Blackness is a rival to faith, and whether the demand is applied evenly. Blade’s wording makes the ranking clear. Bantu’s wording makes the relationship clear. Campbell checks whether the ranking is being preached only to Black believers. These are not competing doctrines. They are three defenses against three different errors, and a careful reader can hold all three.

Is looking back at your ancestors faithful or risky?

Khristi Lauren Adams describes spending a month in Ghana and asking her family about grandparents she never knew. She says, “I think it’s made me a bit more of a whole person,” because the history was never naturally passed down. Campbell defends this kind of looking back and draws a line in the same breath: “But then, yes, divination is a real thing.” Her complaint is about a double standard: “how come every time black people try to look back and understand where they came from and who they came from, it’s demonic.”

Bantu goes further and says Scripture asks us to look back. He cites Hebrews 13:7: “Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God: whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation.” In the KJV, “conversation” means manner of life. The verse is specifically about leaders who taught the word of God, so applying it to ancestry in general extends the verse rather than restating it. Even so, the extension follows a pattern Campbell points to: Scripture keeps naming God as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Here the line between culture and obedience is clearer than anywhere else on the panel. Jude 3 Project distinguishes memory and honor from veneration and spiritual contact. Memory is yes. Contact is no. Adams’s family questions and Bantu’s call to remember fall on the first side. Campbell’s warning about divination marks the second. The panel never says otherwise. Remembering the dead is not suspect. Consulting them is.

Who carries the work of unity?

The panel’s most practical disagreement is not about doctrine. It is about vocation. Blade worried that grounding ourselves in Black community can harden into us-versus-them. He suggested that some believers “can be equipped” to stand between communities and explain the problem. He insists this requires white Christians not to check out, and that “unifying everyone does start with telling the truth about what happened.” Later, answering a question from the audience, he recommended “community with black people that don’t hate white people, because we don’t want to go to the other extreme.”

Bantu agrees that God’s goal is unity. He points out that Paul’s path to it runs through honor given to the overlooked: “For our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to that part which lacked: That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another” (1 Corinthians 12:24-25). From that he concludes that “the formula for unity is actually justice.” He is blunt about where his attention goes: “personally, I’m not that concerned about what people in privilege think or their hurt feelings when people who are marginalized start telling the truth about their feelings.” He also says the truth has to be told in love and with grace.

Campbell speaks from her own experience: “I used to be the go-between person, not my job. My job is to be the beloved and to love God.” She adds, “it’s not the job of the oppressed to go convince oppressors that they should stop oppressing.”

Is this a contradiction? Not exactly. Blade said “some of us” may be equipped for bridge work. He did not say every Black Christian owes it. Campbell describes laying down a role she once carried, not forbidding it to others. The real tension is about emphasis. Blade stresses that truth-telling must aim at a shared body. Bantu and Campbell stress that the burden of moving belongs to those with privilege. A question nobody fully answers would clarify the difference: when a Black believer stays in a mostly white space, is that a calling or an assimilation?

Campbell offers a test. Someone once asked her, and she now asks others, “why are you in spaces that prioritizes things that you don’t wanna be a priority?” If God has called you there, she argues, he will give you what you need to endure it. Adams reached the same point from inside an institution where she was the only Black woman. When pressure came over her work, she concluded, “I would sacrifice the institution or any person before I would sacrifice what God called me to.” That is obedience language, not culture language. It shows where the panel’s real line runs.

A clearer map

Put together, the conversation leaves a reader with firm ground and an honest open edge. The panel agrees on these points:

Becoming a Christian does not mean becoming culturally white, and holiness is not a class or a dress code.
Every culture, including Black culture, contains things God affirms and things he does not.
Christ comes before any ethnic identity, and that priority binds everyone equally.
Remembering ancestors is faithful. Seeking spiritual contact with them is not.

The panel differs on how to describe what must be shed, how to phrase the order between faith and Blackness, and how much responsibility a Black Christian carries for building bridges.