The blog makes the case. This study is for letting it land in your own story. Bishop Emilio Alvarez did not argue his way back to Christ from Santeria. He was met. So this guide is less about winning a debate and more about an honest look at what you have been carrying, and a step back toward the God who was yours before anyone framed him otherwise.
Work it alone with a journal, or out loud with a group. Take it slow. Some of this touches old wounds.
Start here: the question under the question
A lot of Black and Latino Christians have heard, or quietly wondered, whether the faith they were handed is really theirs. Underneath the history debate sits a more personal ache: did whiteness take something from me, and could going back recover it? Before you reach for an answer, name the ache. Where did you first get the sense that this faith might not be made for people like you? Write down the moment, the person, or the picture on the wall that planted it.
Receipts to carry
These are not trivia. They are ground to stand on the next time someone tells you the faith is borrowed.
- Christianity was in Africa before it was in America. The faith did not arrive on the slave ship.
- Athanasius, mocked by his enemies as the Black Dwarf, is the man who held the line on orthodoxy at Nicaea.
- African councils met before Nicaea and helped shape the ecumenical councils the whole church now rests on.
- For a thousand years the church was one, and weekly communion was a church practice long before it was a Catholic one.
- What gets called a generational curse is often repeated habit and unforgiveness, not a biblical sentence on your family.
Read it slowly
Acts 2:1-4. The Spirit falls at Pentecost on people from many nations, and the church is multiethnic from its first hour. Read it and ask: if this is the birth certificate, who has ever had the right to call this faith one nation's property?
Acts 8:26-39. An Ethiopian official reads Isaiah, believes, and is baptized, carrying the gospel toward Africa before most of Europe had heard it. Picture him on that road. What does it do to you to know Africa was in the story this early?
Luke 24:13-32. On the road to Emmaus, the disciples walk with the risen Jesus and feel their hearts burn before their minds understand. Alvarez built his whole approach on this: the encounter came first. Where in your life did you feel God before you could explain him?
Ezekiel 18:2-4. God forbids the proverb about fathers eating sour grapes and the children's teeth being set on edge. The one who sins is the one who answers. Read it against the idea of a generational curse. What does it free you from? What does it ask of you instead?
A practice for this week: the distinction
Alvarez says you have to make a distinction between what hurt you and who God is, and that you cannot make it while you are still angry. So this week, try it on paper, then in prayer.
Take twenty quiet minutes. Draw a line down the middle of a page. On the left, write the honest list: the ways church, family, or culture introduced you to God that wounded or distorted him. Do not soften it. On the right, across from each one, write who God actually is, in his own words from Scripture. Then read the right column out loud as a prayer. End by asking God for the one thing data cannot give: an experience of his love you can stand on.
A heart check
Alvarez says much of the drift toward the occult begins in resentment, often among people raised in church who were never truly converted. This is not an accusation. It is an invitation to look underneath.
- Where might anger or resentment be steering your spiritual choices more than you have admitted?
- Is there a difference, in your own story, between the way you were introduced to God and who God actually is? Where exactly is that line?
- Mahlatse Mashua warns that not everything is right just because it existed, and Justice Okoronkwo warns against keeping one leg in two faiths. Is there a place where you are trying to stand in both at once?
Discussion questions
- Have you ever felt the Christian faith was not really yours, or not made for people like you? Where did that feeling come from?
- What did you know about the early African church before this study? What changes when you learn the faith was African before it was European?
- Alvarez calls the reflex to dismiss anything old or liturgical 'catho-phobia.' Have you seen it? Where might suspicion be cutting you off from part of your own inheritance?
- Chris Broussard says the barrier between many Black men and Christ is the lie that Christianity is the white man's religion. Once that barrier comes down, what do you think a person needs next?
- Think of a pattern in your family you have called a curse. How would naming it a habit, and choosing to forgive, change how you fight it?
Leader notes
This conversation can open real pain. Some people in the room were hurt by the church and never found the language for it. Do not rush them to the right answer. Alvarez's whole point is that the encounter comes before the understanding, so make room for honesty before correction. If someone shares that they have explored ancestral or occult practice, respond with curiosity, not alarm. Ask what they were hungry for. That hunger is usually the door.
If anyone is carrying deep church hurt or wrestling with despair, slow down and care for the person before the topic. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) is available any time, and a trusted pastor or counselor is worth naming out loud.
Go deeper
This study draws on the Jude 3 Project podcast conversation with Bishop Emilio Alvarez, who leads a network of Afro-Latino charismatic churches recovering the historic Christian tradition. For the African-roots history in fuller depth, see the companion conversation with Dr. Vince Bantu in the Race Faith and Identity collection. For the pull toward African spirituality, see Mahlatse Mashua's 'Is African Spirituality Bad?' and Justice Okoronkwo's 'Can a Christian Practice African Spirituality.'
A charge to close
You were not handed a borrowed faith. Go back far enough and you find your own family at the foundations, an African bishop defending the deity of Christ, an Ethiopian carrying the gospel home. But Alvarez would not let you stop at the history. The record clears the lie. The encounter is what changes you. So this week, learn one true thing about where this faith came from, and then ask the God of that faith to meet you the way he met a young man in Paterson who had already given up on him. It was yours first. Come home and stand like it. One more thing before you close the page. Reclaiming this faith is not a performance for the people who doubted you. It is for you, so the next generation in your family hears the story straight. Tell a child where they come from. Tell a friend who walked away. The record is enough to take the lie off the table, and the God behind the record is enough to take the ache out of your chest.