When a friend tells you he has joined the Hebrew Israelites or the Nation of Islam, your first reply will probably decide whether there is a second conversation. This guide prepares you for that reply and for what comes after it. It works on you, not on your friend. Dr. Vince Bantu, a pastor in North St. Louis, lays out an order for this kind of conversation in a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation with Lisa Fields. First, name the injustice honestly. Second, show your friend a Christianity that cares about justice. Third, and only third, tell the older history of African Christianity. The final session is a rehearsal, because an order you have only read about tends to fall apart the first time someone pushes back.
There are four sessions. Each takes about an hour alone with a notebook, or one weekly meeting in a group. In a group, every written exercise can stay private. No one should have to describe a real friend, a real church or their own doubts aloud unless they choose to. Session one asks you to write something and keep it. You will come back to it at the end.
Session one: Notice what you bring into the room
Before reading further, write two or three sentences answering this question: Why do I think my friend left? Do not polish it. Fold the paper and set it aside.
Now read two passages. “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him” (Proverbs 18:13). And: “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath” (James 1:19). The proverb describes how life usually goes. The verse from James is an instruction to a congregation. Picture how both apply. Your friend texts that Christianity was the slave master’s religion. Within a minute you have sent back three dates and a Bible verse. He has not yet told you why he left, and you have already answered him. Proverbs calls that folly, and James tells believers not to do it.
Bantu gives a further reason to slow down. Of the Hebrew Israelites, the Nation of Islam, the Five Percenters and their many offshoots, he says “it’s interesting how similar they all sound.” He thinks many of these groups are thin on theology and history. He also says they are often fueled by “a very understandable anger and rage” at what was done to Black Americans. When people criticize the young men in his own neighborhood, he answers that “it is really more what is wrong with our society.” The anger and the conclusion are separate things. The anger can be fair even if the conclusion is wrong.
Exercise. In one column, list what you believe is actually true in your friend’s complaint about the church. In a second column, write the conclusion he drew from it. Write no rebuttal yet.
For groups, set one ground rule before anyone speaks: nobody mocks the movements or the people in them. Jude 3 Project treats people of other faiths with genuine respect and engages their beliefs honestly. A group that laughs at your friend’s new community is rehearsing the opposite of that.
Session two: The Christianity your friend did not see
Read Luke 4:16-21. In the synagogue at Nazareth, his hometown, Jesus reads from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:18-19). Then he says this scripture is fulfilled that day.
Jesus is among his own people, reading their own Scripture, and announcing his mission. Christians differ on how much of this liberty is spiritual and how much is bodily and social, and both readings deserve a fair hearing. Neither reading, though, makes the passage indifferent to the poor or to people in chains.
Bantu’s first two steps come from this kind of text. He says believers must be able “to speak to the injustice and the pain” and to give voice to how Scripture speaks to it. Then they must “show people a different Christianity,” one that cares about justice. He insists this is not a strategy: “It’s about the spread of the gospel.”
Exercise. Write one paragraph naming what was done to Black people by people who called themselves Christians. Do not use “but,” “however” or “not all Christians.” Read it aloud to yourself. If you are in a group and willing, read it to one other person.
Session three: Learn the older story, including its limits
The third step is history. Bantu says it happens less often than he would hope. He wants believers to understand that “the last five centuries that we’ve experienced are not the beginning of the story.” He calls seeing the faith only through the American experience “historical nearsightedness.” Most readers will be learning this history for the first time. Lisa Fields, who trained in seminary, says “a lot of this history wasn’t taught in seminary.” Bantu’s word for the task is direct: “we have to study up.”
Evidence practice. Rank these four claims from the one Bantu is least confident about to the one he is most confident about. Write one sentence justifying each placement.
- The Egyptian church’s tradition that the apostle Mark brought the gospel to Alexandria.
- The Ethiopian belief that their faith began with the official baptized in Acts 8.
- A fragment of John’s Gospel found in Egypt, which Bantu dates to the second century and describes as the earliest surviving biblical fragment.
- Ethiopia becoming predominantly Christian under its own king in the fourth century, and Nubia in the fifth.
For facilitators: Bantu calls the Mark tradition a legend that the evidence can neither prove nor disprove. He calls the Acts 8 origin very possible. He treats the papyrus and the fourth- and fifth-century conversions as the hard evidence. Expect people to rank the Acts 8 claim higher than he does. Ask them why they wanted it to be stronger.
Then read Acts 8:26-39. It is narrative, so it describes rather than commands. It tells of one African official who reads Isaiah, hears about Jesus and is baptized. It does not say what he did when he went home. Acts 2:5-11 lists Jews and converts from Egypt and the parts of Libya around Cyrene at Pentecost. That passage bears on a question Lisa Fields asked Bantu: did early African Christians teach that Africans alone were the true Israel? He knows of no such teaching in early Christianity. He describes the idea as particular to twentieth-century African American religious groups.
Bantu’s dates are his own scholarly claims. Choose one and check it in the books he recommends by scholars of African descent on Nubian, Eastern and Ethiopian Christianity. Then write one sentence of history you could say calmly from memory. Bantu offers one: “Christianity has a long legacy and history among black people in Africa.” Jude 3 Project holds that calling Christianity a white man’s religion is historically inaccurate. Your friend will still hear that fact as an attack if it arrives too early, so practice offering it as something you learned and want him to have.
Session four: Rehearse the order, then watch it break
Read 1 Peter 3:15: “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” Then read Colossians 4:6: “Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.” (“Alway” is an older spelling of always.) Peter asks for readiness and gentleness together. You have spent three sessions on readiness. This session tests gentleness under pressure.
Round one. Work in threes: one person plays the friend, one plays the believer and one observes. The friend should argue well. Start with the hardest objection: Fine, Africa had churches long ago. The Christianity that reached my family came on slave ships, and it was shaped by slavery here. The believer follows Bantu’s order. The history does not try to outweigh the slave ships. It challenges a narrower claim: that the faith belongs to the people who abused it. The observer notes the moment the believer skipped ahead.
Round two. This time the friend rejects the order itself: You’re only admitting the racism so you can get to your history lesson. That accusation may be fair, and a real friend may make it. The believer cannot argue past it with technique. The observer notes what the believer does next. Did he defend the method, concede the point, or ask what would make the conversation honest? Switch roles after each round. If you are working alone, write both rounds as scripts and give the friend the better lines.
Bantu also names a limit worth rehearsing. If someone rejects Christ because they do not believe Jesus is who he said he was, Bantu says, “that’s one thing.” What troubles him is people who “can’t even see Jesus because he’s so covered by Western packaging and centuries of colonialism and slavery, that should not be the case.” Your part is to remove that covering. The decision belongs to your friend.
Now unfold the paper from session one. Which of your assumptions about why your friend left would you now turn into a question?
Questions for the whole study
- Which part of your friend’s grievance was hardest to write in the “true” column, and why?
- Bantu separates understandable anger from a mistaken conclusion. When could that distinction become a polite way of dismissing someone?
- How would you explain Luke 4:18-19 to one person who reads it mainly spiritually and another who reads it mainly socially, so that each would recognize their own view?
- In the ranking exercise, where did your order differ from Bantu’s? What does that difference show about how you might use history?
- In round two, what did you do when the order itself was rejected? What would you want to do differently?
- What changes in your approach if you fully accept that the outcome of this conversation is not yours to secure?
Before the real conversation
Bantu tells of describing to an Ethiopian priest how many people of African descent reject Christianity as the white man’s religion. The priest laughed hard, because the idea was so far from his own world. Bantu’s response: “I pray for the day that that can be hilarious to our people too.”
Your friend is not there yet, and one conversation will not get him there. This week, ask for time together with no agenda. If faith comes up, ask him what made him leave, and then keep listening past the point where it feels comfortable. Carry this question with you: What would have to be true of me for my friend to tell me the real reason?