Often the church does not see the Black girl in front of it. It sees a label first: fast, angry, too grown, acting white. Or it sees a slot in a program that needs filling. Khristi Adams, the Firestone Endowment Chaplain at a boarding school in Pennsylvania and an associate pastor at her church in Somerset, New Jersey, argues that the change has to start with the adults. Seeing a girl takes slow, patient listening before any advice, and enough humility to admit she may understand her own life better than we do.
Most churches would say they love Black girls, and many mean it. Affection is not the issue. Perception is: what an adult actually notices when a particular girl walks in, and which assumptions arrived in the room before she did.
The labels arrive before she does
Adams wrote a book about this, Parable of the Brown Girl, built from years of relationships with Black girls in church youth ministry, university chaplaincy, a residential treatment facility, a counseling center and now a boarding school. Asked about her research method, she said it amounted to having conversations with Black girls. Each chapter title follows the pattern of such-and-such brown girl and names a struggle a real girl was carrying. Some were obvious to Adams from the start. The angry Black woman stereotype was one. The word “fast,” which she heard growing up, was another.
The chapter titles record labels that adults assign, and some of the girls wearing them are nine, ten or eleven years old. A child that young has not earned a reputation. Adams describes these things as being placed on the girls from outside.
That is the claim worth examining. Inherited categories do the seeing, so good intentions never get a chance to work. A quiet girl is read one way. A girl with an attitude is read another. A girl whose body develops early is read a third way. Each reading feels like common sense to the adult, which is why it goes unexamined.
The limits of the evidence matter here. Adams worked in schools, a treatment facility and a counseling center as well as churches, and her conversations do not separate church habits from wider ones. What her account shows is that these labels reach girls through the adults around them. It does not measure how often churches in particular use them, and it does not suggest that every congregation does. Many readers will know churches that guarded girls well. The question for any given church is whether its adults have tested their own reflexes.
Where “fast” comes from
Lisa Fields, the founder and president of Jude 3 Project, named the dynamic when she raised the subject with Adams. Black women, she said, are hypersexualized and “thought of just off the bat as fast, without knowing the story behind it.” The label replaces the story.
Adams traces the word through a history. In a feminist and womanist class in seminary she studied how myths about Black women’s sexuality began, and she connects those myths to slavery and to the story of Sarah Baartman. Her chapter follows that line to the present, including the public reckoning around R. Kelly. These are Adams’s historical claims, and the conversation offers them as her account rather than a documented chronology, so the specifics belong to her. Her narrower point stands on what she observed directly: the assumption that a Black girl’s body is a problem did not begin with the girl or with her generation.
She adds a detail that keeps the analysis honest. She asked girls today whether they hear the word, and mostly they do not. In her words, “they hear the sentiment behind it, but not necessarily the term like we did.” A church could retire the word and keep the attitude. The real test is whether adults still read a girl’s body as an accusation.
Each chapter of Adams’s book moves from history to theology, and here she turns to why God created Black girls’ bodies for goodness. Scripture supports that at its foundation. Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” A few verses later comes the verdict on the whole creation: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). The passage speaks of humanity as a whole, and that is the point. No body falls outside the image of God. A congregation that treats a twelve-year-old’s body as a moral danger has taken a position Genesis does not take.
Isn’t the label meant to protect her?
The strongest objection deserves a fair hearing. Many adults who called a girl fast were afraid for her, not trying to wound her. They knew the world was not safe for Black girls, and a sharp word felt like a warning. Some readers heard it from people who loved them fiercely.
The fear is real, and protection is a legitimate goal. But the label protects in the wrong direction. It locates the danger in the girl rather than in the adults and situations around her. It teaches her that attention she did not ask for is her fault, and it trains the people near her to doubt her.
Adams gives an example of where that training leads. One girl told her that after she was assaulted, she went to a family member, and the response was “you better not be lying.” Adams frames this as something inherited, and she declines to assign simple blame: “it’s more just the nature of being a black girl growing up in this world.” The reflex to doubt the girl was passed down. So was the girl’s expectation of being doubted.
For a church, the practical lesson is direct. If a girl says someone has hurt her, take her seriously enough to act. Make sure she is safe, bring in people trained to help, and follow the reporting obligations that apply to you. Where abuse is happening in a home or a dating relationship, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. A church that cannot receive a disclosure without suspicion has not yet learned to see the girl making it.
More than one kind of Black girl
The labels do not all point the same way, which is another reason a single expectation fails. One chapter addresses what Lisa Fields remembered classmates being called at school: an Oreo, black on the outside, white on the inside. Adams added it after a student at her school spoke in chapel about not fitting in at her earlier, mainly Black schools, and finding the same tension followed her to a predominantly white one. Adams recognized her own childhood in it: a Black church where she spent most of her time, and a white school before high school.
This girl is accused of distance from her community, the opposite charge from the girl called too much. A youth ministry that pictures one kind of Black girl will misread both. Adams’s question for this girl applies to any church that serves her: “what healing spaces do they have in order to manage their emotions in it?” A church can only become one of those spaces if its adults have stopped assuming they already know which girl she is.
Why the program comes first, and what listening changes
If seeing a girl is so basic, why is it rare? Adams’s answer is impatience, and she includes herself. Early in her work at a university in California, her supervisor told her to spend the first year only building relationships: coffee with students, lunch with the janitor. She was annoyed, because there were services to plan and events to run. She came to believe he was right, and she now gives the same advice:
We don’t have the patience to do the hard work of building relationships. We wanna hurry up and get to revival, we wanna hurry up and plan the next cool event or whatever.
She names the pressure underneath. Adults feel they are paid for results. Adams answers that this is not how God works with us: “God doesn’t rush us. We rush other people and we rush kids.”
A reasonable objection follows. Churches serve many young people with limited staff, and programs are how you reach a group. Adams heard a version of this from a supervisor at Georgetown University who told a team of chaplains they were the experts and should be planning programs. She pushed back: “The kids are the experts over their own lives, right? The students are.” Then she added a line any ministry calendar should absorb: “they may not want a Bible study.”
Her disagreement concerns sequence. She believes that once relationships are in place, God opens doors for other things. A program designed after listening serves a real girl, while one designed before listening serves the adults’ picture of her. James 1:19 gives the order: “let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.” The letter applies that to every believer in every relationship, and youth ministry is not exempt.
Adams describes the moment her own approach changed. At a counseling center, sessions with girls were officially meant for advice, and she arrived asking how she could counsel them. The longer she sat with them, the more she saw they needed someone who would hear them out. She remembers driving home feeling full, aware she had learned as much as she taught. Her conclusion: “I had to approach these conversations like a teacher and a student.”
The clearest illustration is a nine-year-old who, while coloring, asked her, “why did God make me a warrior when I’m really just weak?” Adams had no answer. She said they would talk next week, then spent the week realizing she had the same question about her own life. Her eventual answer was that warriors are weak, and that “God makes room for us and our weakness and our strength.”
That answer echoes what Paul heard when he asked for relief from his thorn in the flesh: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Paul is describing his own apostolic suffering rather than offering a formula, and Adams did not cite the verse. The connection still holds. A girl told she must be strong all the time can learn from Scripture that weakness does not disqualify her.
Adams links her own humbling to Jesus’ words about children. When the disciples asked who was greatest, Jesus set a child among them and said, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). In context, Jesus is confronting adult status-seeking, and he is not handing out a method for youth ministry. Adams’s application is reasonable all the same: adults who want to serve children have to give up the posture of the one who already knows.
The adults are the ones being formed
Adams is firm about her intended reader. People tell her they plan to give the book to their twelve-year-old, and she corrects them: “it’s not written for kids, to be honest.” She wrote it for adults who mentor, teach, pastor or parent. As for the girls, “They already know what they’re going through.”
She sees the struggles as intergenerational. Girls today describe the same burdens older women carried, even without reading the same books, and when Adams’s mother read the manuscript, she recognized her own life in it. Lisa Fields drew out the implication: many adult women carry trauma they are afraid to process, and a younger person’s story can give them courage to face it. The adults who need formation may need it for their own sake as well as the girls’.
Adams also credits the wider culture with gains in representation and in celebrating Black womanhood, so girls now meet affirming images she did not have. That sharpens the challenge for the church. If the surrounding culture is learning to celebrate Black girls, the church should not be the last place still reading them through the old labels. It has more to offer than representation: the claim that God made her, called her very good and makes room for her weakness. That claim reaches no one if the adults are too busy managing her to hear her.
So the test for any congregation is concrete. Could the adults who know a particular girl describe what she is carrying in her own words, rather than in the words someone assigned her? If not, the church has met a category. It has not yet met the girl.