Theological training can make the church that raised you look smaller than it used to. Before you decide what that means, it helps to see the church clearly. The steps below teach the Black church tradition in order: what the name covers, how the tradition reads Scripture, and where it keeps its theology. Only then do you weigh it. The last step turns to what your knowledge is doing to you. You can work through this alone with a notebook or with a group over one or two sessions. Each step ends with a short task, and a practice and discussion questions come at the end.
The starting point is a line Pastor Charlie Dates, senior pastor of Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago, says he had carried for years before he tweeted it: “don’t let your newfound training turn you away from the black church.” He wrote it after a conversation with a young man who had grown up in a Chicago church and came home from a largely white evangelical Bible college critical of nearly everything about it. Dates noticed something odd. The young man had been saved in that church, and while he questioned it, “he doesn’t feel totally at home doing that.” That discomfort is worth examining. These steps ask what it signals.
Step one: learn what the name actually covers
Most confusion starts with a grammar mistake. “The Black church” sounds like one institution, a denomination with a single statement of faith. It isn’t one. The phrase names a family of congregations, conventions and histories. They share a story and a great deal of conviction, but you cannot grade them with one score.
The two people in this conversation show this. Dates pastors a Baptist church whose history is tied to the founding of the Progressive National Baptist Convention. Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, says she grew up in a non-denominational, Pentecostal church, then studied at Liberty while attending Alfred Street Baptist Church, a National Baptist congregation. That is three streams in one conversation. Describing Alfred Street’s Bible study and theology classes, Fields draws the lesson: “you can’t just go off of these kind of caricatures of the black church because the black church is so diverse.”
Here is the first distinction to hold. A tradition is a living community that hands faith down over generations. A system is an organized set of doctrinal conclusions a reader brings to the text. A system can be described on paper. A tradition has to be met in actual congregations, and they differ.
Task: Write down the picture of “the Black church” you currently carry. Then list the congregations you have actually belonged to or attended more than once. Is your picture drawn from all of them, from one, or from none?
Step two: learn how the tradition reads the Bible
If the tradition is plural, what holds it together? Dates gives one answer about method. He says “the black church has been solidly biblical,” and explains how: “we don’t impose a theological system on our reading of scripture so much as we allow the reading of scripture to speak its own theology.” He admits this can look untidy to a trained eye, since Scripture “doesn’t always fit into some of these neat categories that we’ve made.”
He shows the method with Romans. Read these two passages slowly, in order.
“For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.” (Romans 8:29-30)
“For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Romans 10:13)
Dates says that in his tradition “we preach the emphasis of whatever passage we’re at.” On Romans 8, the preacher gives God’s choosing and calling their full weight. On Romans 10, he preaches the open invitation with full force. Neither passage is bent to fit the other in the pulpit.
This step does not ask you to settle the debate about election. Faithful Christians, Reformed and non-Reformed, read these chapters differently and in good faith, and this guide takes no side. It teaches only a method: let each passage say what it says before you decide how the passages fit together.
Task: Read Romans 8:28-39 and Romans 10:8-17. For each, write one sentence stating its main emphasis in your own words. Were you tempted to soften one of the two sentences? Which one, and why?
Step three: learn where the theology is kept
A trained reader often asks a fair question here. Where are the books? Fields raises it herself, granting that many preachers have not written works readers would place beside the best-known evangelical scholars.
Dates answers with history. Black scholars have never been few, he says, but access to publishers and academic platforms was limited. So “the pulpit has been our platform. It has been our publishing house in large part because those other doors had not been open.” That changes where you look. A tradition that stored its doctrine in preaching will look thin if you only check a bibliography.
The obvious objection is that sermons are harder to evaluate than books. One sermon can be careless, and spoken words leave no footnotes. The fair answer is to judge a pattern, not a single Sunday. Listen across many sermons and classes for what keeps recurring: how a church speaks of Christ, sin, grace and the authority of Scripture. Fields’s practical counsel points the same way: go past Sunday morning, “sit in the Bible study and see what these churches are teaching their congregants.” Then she adds, “’cause you may be surprised.”
The predictable mistake, and its mirror image
Now you can name the error these steps are built to prevent: treating vocabulary as if it were faithfulness. Fields describes friends who throw out Black church teaching because it lacks the terms they found in their reading. Her answer is short: “They just might not use the word you use.”
One comparison helps. A child raised in a language speaks it correctly long before she can name a rule of grammar. A grammar course gives her labels for what she already does. In the same way, a congregation can trust God’s sovereignty, live by grace, and confess Christ crucified and risen without a seminary’s terms.
The comparison breaks in two places. Native speakers can speak badly, and congregations can teach error. And in language the speakers’ usage sets the standard, while in the church the standard stands outside every congregation. Dates is explicit: “the authority of scripture trumps everything,” and “the only arguments that stand are those that are made from scripture.” Set the comparison aside there.
That exposes the mirror-image mistake: treating the tradition as beyond question. Dates does not do this. To those who say they cannot find a faithful pastor nearby, he says, “Look, nobody’s perfect,” and warns that other communities are imperfect too. His counsel is to learn “how to embrace what’s good from a leader, and how to not repeat what’s not good from another leader.” The goal is not to stop judging. It is to judge by Scripture, and accurately, which means seeing the tradition clearly first.
A word for groups: Some people may have stepped away from a church because they were harmed there, not because its theology seemed thin. That is a different question. Do not use this session to press anyone back toward a place that hurt them. Follow up privately, and help them find a trusted pastor or a counselor.
From the head to the life
Fields points to Paul.
“Now as touching things offered unto idols, we know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth. And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know.” (1 Corinthians 8:1-2)
Read the chapter’s context before applying it. The Corinthians were correct that an idol is nothing. Paul does not dispute their facts. He faults the way they used them, because it harmed believers with weaker consciences. “Charity” is the KJV’s word for love. Accurate knowledge, used without love, can still do damage.
Fields turns this into a habit of mind: “we have to have a humble hermeneutic.” In practice, you “go into the conversation with the mindset, I could be wrong.” That applies to your teachers too: “just because your favorite scholar said something doesn’t make it right.” She names a pattern that keeps either side from feeling superior: “people who study a lot, sometimes don’t pray a lot.” And then: “sometimes people who pray a lot don’t study a lot. So we kind of need each other.”
Dates puts that need in terms of the body: “we do need each other. ’cause we are each other.” Paul’s image fits: “And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you” (1 Corinthians 12:21). Dates describes the tradition at its best as one where “we talk to people we don’t agree with,” because “if you’re gonna win a brother, you gotta talk to ’em.” It costs nothing essential: “you don’t have to relinquish orthodoxy.”
A practice: the translation notebook
This practice puts all three steps to work over the next two weeks.
- Attend a midweek Bible study or teaching class at a Black congregation, your home church or another. Go at least once, twice if you can.
- Divide a notebook page into three columns. In the first, write what was taught, as close to the teacher’s own words as you can. In the second, write the doctrine you think it expresses, in your training’s terms. In the third, note anything you believe Scripture would correct, with the passage that shows it.
- Afterward, ask one older member: what did this church teach you about Jesus that you still lean on? Listen without correcting.
- Read your columns back. Where did the first two say the same thing in different words? Where does the third hold a real concern? A real concern is worth raising later, humbly and with the people involved.
- Add one preacher or writer from a stream of the church you have tended to dismiss to your reading this month. Dates credits the tradition with this habit: “we historically read everybody. That doesn’t necessarily mean we agree with everybody, but we read everybody.”
Questions for discussion
- When you say “the Black church,” which congregations do you actually mean? What changes when you name them one by one?
- In your Romans exercise, which emphasis was harder to state at full strength? Compare that with the method Dates describes. Does letting each passage keep its own emphasis strike you as faithfulness or as avoidance, and what in the text supports your answer?
- If a tradition kept its theology in the pulpit, what would a fair test of its teaching look like? What would an unfair one look like?
- Think of a notebook entry where your term and the teacher’s words meant the same thing. Was anything lost in the translation, or gained?
- Fields says people who study a lot sometimes pray little, and the reverse. Which way do you lean, and who in your life balances you?
- What is one real concern you have about a church you know? How could you raise it under the authority of Scripture rather than the authority of your training?
Jude asked his readers to “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3). The faith reached you through particular saints in particular congregations. Before your next judgment about the church that delivered it to you, go back and listen once more, with your notebook open and your own column ready for correction too.