Where did your view of Black Lives Matter come from? Not the arguments you now use to defend it, but the voices that first handed it to you: a feed, a family, a pastor, a political tribe. This guide will not tell you which side to take. It gives you a practice. You will trace one conviction back to its sources, then rebuild it from Scripture before you defend it to anyone. Alone, it takes about two hours spread over a week. A group can use two meetings, with the tracing exercise done at home in between.
The practice comes from Dr. Carl Ellis, in a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation with Lisa Fields. Ellis names a condition he calls theological welfare. Most of us have it on some subject. The question here is whether you have it on this one.
Before you read anything else
Take a sheet of paper and write two short statements. Do not write what you think you ought to believe. Write what you actually think.
- What I believe about the cry for justice behind the words Black Lives Matter.
- What I believe about the organizations and the movement that use the phrase.
If you cannot separate the two, write that down too. Fold the paper and set it aside. You will come back to it at the end, and no one will ask to see it.
Two texts about where a mind gets its shape
Start with a small scene from Acts. Paul has preached in Berea, and Luke says of his hearers: “These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11).
Notice what the Bereans did not do. They did not reject Paul because he was new, and they did not accept him because he was persuasive. They were eager and they checked, both at once, and Luke calls that combination noble. They checked against the Scriptures, and they did it daily, as a habit.
Now 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.”
Paul is writing to believers, and he assumes they can be shaped by the world without noticing. Conformity is the default. Renewal takes deliberate work, and Paul ties it to being able to prove, or test, what God’s will actually is.
Two observation prompts:
- In Acts 17:11, what were the Bereans testing: Paul’s character, his popularity, or his claims?
- In Romans 12:2, what can a renewed mind do that a conformed mind cannot?
What Ellis means by theological welfare
Ellis argues that when Christians lack a biblical account of justice, they do not stay neutral. They borrow. The church ends up “taking our cues from other people who don’t have access to the wisdom of God.” The result is a loss of independence: “we let non-Christians decide what our options are.” His reply is short: “only God decides what our options are.”
He names the condition. “We find ourselves on theological welfare,” he says. We are “dependent on other people to do our theology for us, and we should be doing our own.” He compares it to the Reformation, when “People got tired of being on theological welfare to the priest.”
Two parts of his account keep the idea from becoming a slogan.
First, Ellis applied it to himself before anyone else. As a student at Hampton during the early days of Black consciousness, he was asking “what does Jesus have to do with the Black Revolution?” He found no Christian books on the question. He had also accepted a view that “only Paul’s letters applied to us,” and in street debates with Black militants, “Paul wasn’t helping me.” So he went back to the start: “I started reading the Bible from Genesis one.” In the prophets he found justice, oppression and compassion for the poor treated as God’s own concerns. He decided, “I’m gonna start with the Bible, whatever the Bible says, that’s what I’m gonna believe.”
Second, Ellis does not say you should never learn from others. He has “benefited from studying theology that others have done,” and adds that “it doesn’t mean that I’m on welfare.” The problem is dependence: someone else’s conclusions standing in for your own encounter with the text.
That distinction shapes the exercise ahead. A conviction you learned from your grandmother or your pastor is not automatically borrowed in Ellis’s sense. It becomes borrowed when you hold it without ever testing it against Scripture. The question is not who taught you. It is whether you have done your own checking, the way the Bereans did.
The practice: trace one conviction upstream
Unfold your paper. Choose the one sentence you feel most strongly about, and work through these steps. Allow about thirty minutes.
- Find the first time. Recall the first place you heard this idea put roughly the way you now hold it: a person, a sermon, a video, a channel, a candidate. If you cannot remember, write “unknown.”
- Find what keeps it in place. List the voices that repeat it back to you each week. Then list the voices you have stopped listening to on this subject, and why.
- Name what you would lose. If you changed your mind on this point, who would be disappointed in you? You do not have to act on the answer. You just have to see it.
- Find the Scripture, if there is any. Write down every passage you could point to. Mark each one: did you reach it by reading it in context, or find it after you already held the view?
Expect a mix of channels rather than a single villain. The point is to see which parts you have actually tested.
The hardest test: is your principle consistent?
Serious Christians disagree about whether the phrase can be separated from the organizations. One side argues that a slogan works like a brand: using the words lends credibility to whoever controls them, including agendas Christians reject, so careful distinctions vanish in public. The other side argues that refusing a true sentence because of who else says it is a way of not hearing the people saying it, and that answering a specific grievance with a general counter-slogan changes the subject.
Ellis holds parts of both. He affirms the concept and is untroubled by the absence of “all lives matter,” because “When you’re marginalized, then your life doesn’t matter.” Yet he would not come under the official organization’s leadership, citing aims he could not support. He warns that every movement attracts both sincere people and those using it for other ends, and that “we have to be very discerning about that.” He also insists “people have common cause with other people that they disagree with on other things.”
His sharpest move is a consistency test. He criticized the official organization for, in his view, speaking up for some Black victims of violence and not others, asking whether it makes a difference who the killer was. Run that test on your own conviction, whichever side you are on.
- If you support the movement: does your concern hold for victims your side would rather not discuss? Does it extend to the organizations’ aims you have never actually examined?
- If you oppose the movement: does your concern for human life and justice show up when Black people are killed unjustly, or mainly when it can be used to rebut activists? Would you hold a conservative cause to the same guilt-by-association standard?
A conviction that bends depending on who benefits may belong more to a tribe than to you.
Rebuild it from the text
Ellis describes a method. Your situation raises questions: “my cultural context then gives me questions that I take to scripture.” Then “the first thing the scripture does is that it corrects my question.” Only then does he look for an answer, take it back to his situation, meet new questions and return to the text. He calls this doing theology, “applying God’s word to every area of life,” and insists “theology is something that we should do, not just study.”
Try one round of that cycle this week, with the conviction you traced. First, write your question as it stands, perhaps something like Am I allowed to support this movement? or Why do Christians who claim to care about justice keep defending it? Then read one passage on each of four days, with its surrounding chapter.
- Amos 5:21-24. God refuses Israel’s feasts, offerings and songs, then says, “But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24). The KJV word judgment here carries the sense many translations render as justice.
- Micah 6:8: “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”
- Isaiah 1:17: “Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”
- Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” This one answers a different question from the prophets. They say what God requires; Genesis says why a wronged person’s worth was never anyone’s to deny. Ellis grounds Black lives in this text, calling the image of God “the loftiest statement about human dignity.” Ask what a claim about justice stands on if it lacks this foundation.
For each passage, write three answers. Who was being addressed, and what were they doing or failing to do? What does the text say God wants? What does it not say? Be strict with the last one. Amos does not name a modern organization, and Micah endorses no party. The prophets speak to God’s people about worship that ignores injustice, a narrower claim than many on either side would like.
After four days, rewrite your question. If Ellis is right, the text will have changed it. A question about which side to join might become a question about what God requires of you where you actually live. Write the answer the passages support, and keep it as modest as the texts are.
Where the test cuts in more than one direction
Theological welfare is easy to aim at other people. One reader will use it against Christians who took their justice language from activists. Another will use it against Christians who took their suspicion of activism from cable news. Ellis’s point covers both.
Doing your own theology can also slide into trusting only yourself. Ellis did not do that. He read with questions from his community, learned from other theologians, and took his conclusions back into real arguments. Lisa Fields put the test plainly: “does your orthopraxy match your orthodoxy?” A rebuilt conviction is finished when your practice starts to match it.
Questions for discussion
- When you traced your conviction upstream, what surprised you about where it came from? You may describe the process without revealing the conviction.
- Where is the line, in your own life, between receiving wisdom from others and being on theological welfare?
- Which version of the consistency test was harder for you, and why?
- Christians disagree about how Amos 5 applies today. Some read it mainly as a word to the church about its own worship and dealings. Others read it as a mandate to press for justice in public life. Restate the reading you find weaker as fairly as you can. What in Amos 5 supports it?
- Did one of the four passages correct your question, and not only your answer? If none did, why might that be?
- Which voices on the other side have you stopped hearing? What would it cost you to hear one of them out, with Scripture as the judge between you?
For anyone leading a group
People will arrive from different feeds and tribes, and some will carry real grief about racial violence or how a church handled it. Do not sort the room into camps. The practice works only if people feel free to admit a conviction was borrowed, so no one should be pressed to read their statements or tracing notes aloud. Invite people to talk about what they discovered, and let them decide how much to share.
When someone uses theological welfare to diagnose a person who is not in the room, gently bring the group back to their own papers. If someone’s pain surfaces, stop the exercise and stay with them. Some may need a pastor or counselor, and helping them find one is part of leading well.
Back to the folded paper
Reread your two opening statements. Beside each, mark it one of three ways: tested and holding, tested and changed, or not yet tested. Choose one marked “not yet tested” and set a day this month for its four-day reading. Ellis’s advice on resources was simple: “number one is the Bible.” The renewal Paul describes rarely comes all at once. It comes one tested conviction at a time.