Now that I have theological training, should I leave the Black church that raised me? Pastor Charlie Dates, senior pastor of Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago, answers no, and then turns the question around. In his account the Black church has a long record of faithful biblical preaching, and what often needs examining is the lens the training handed the student. His counsel to Black students in evangelical schools is short: finish the degree, and stay grounded in a Black church while you do.
Where the disdain comes from
Dates arrived at this through a specific conversation. A young man he had known for years, raised in a vibrant Chicago church, went to a small, largely white evangelical Bible college and came home with what Dates calls “an awkward disdain for the black church.” The awkwardness came from his own history. “He grew up in it, got saved in it.” Now he questioned its preaching of the gospel, its witness in the community and its ability to disciple, and yet, Dates adds, “he doesn’t feel totally at home doing that.”
The church had stayed the same while he was away. His ear had changed. He absorbed categories in one setting and applied them as a verdict in another. Out of that conversation Dates put into one line a thought he had carried for years: “don’t let your newfound training turn you away from the black church.”
So the first honest step is to name the objection precisely. Does your home church teach something that contradicts Scripture? Or does it simply sound unlike the books you have been reading?
A vocabulary test and a faithfulness test
Dates insists he is not picking a fight, and he has no interest in trading blog posts. Still, he names what he sees: “a sort of theological imperialism from some of our black neo reform friends.” The word fits. An empire takes its own categories and rules territory that never belonged to it. Here the territory is a church tradition, and the categories come from one theological system.
Lisa Fields has watched the same pattern among friends, where Black church teaching gets dismissed for lacking the terms newly trained believers found in their reading. Her point is that the church is often already living out the doctrine. “They just might not use the word you use.”
Faithfulness is measured against the text, and vocabulary measures only familiarity. Dates is candid that he would not chart the Black church as Reformed or trace its roots to Jonathan Edwards. That observation concerns lineage. His claim about substance is separate: “the black church has been solidly biblical.”
Reading each passage in its own lane
Dates describes the tradition’s method this way: “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 illustrates it with a passage he had just preached.
Romans 8:29-30 reads, “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.” Dates calls it a marvelous description of the sequence of salvation, and he preached its emphasis on God’s choosing and calling.
Two chapters later Paul writes, “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:13). Dates plans to preach that verse with its own full force when his series reaches it, without bending either passage to fit the other. On this side of heaven, he says, you hear the open invitation; on the other side you will see more clearly that God was drawing you to respond. His summary of the tradition: “black preachers have been faithful at preaching the emphasis of scripture as they come up.”
His own conclusions on election are his. He says he does not hold double predestination, and Reformed and non-Reformed interpreters both appeal to these chapters in good faith. The argument here concerns method. Dates contrasts his tradition with one that requires every passage to be read as a committed Calvinist or a committed Arminian would read it, when “we could just read the Bible in whatever lane it’s speaking in that moment.”
Here is the strongest objection, stated plainly: passages have to fit together, and refusing to say how they fit can look like avoiding the hard work systematic theology exists to do. Dates does believe they fit. He locates the final coherence in God and declines to flatten the text in the pulpit to make the fit look tidier than it is. Letting Romans 8 say what Romans 8 says, and Romans 10 what Romans 10 says, takes real discipline, because a grid applied to every passage tends to end up as the thing being preached.
One limit should be kept in view. This is Dates’s account of the preaching tradition he belongs to, given from inside it. It is a pastor’s testimony about a stream he knows well, and it does not amount to a survey of every Black congregation. Lisa Fields makes the related point that the Black church is so diverse that caricatures of it fail, which cuts both ways: it rules out blanket praise as firmly as blanket dismissal.
Why the theology looks thin on paper
Lisa Fields raises the point many seminarians feel. Few Black preachers have written books that readers would shelve beside the most famous evangelical scholars. If theology lives in books, the Black church can seem to have little.
Dates answers with history. Black scholars have never been few, he says, but access to publishing houses 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.” He adds that many evangelical institutions with strong doctrine opened their faculties and boardrooms to African Americans only recently.
That tells you where to look. A tradition that stored its theology in sermons shows it to listeners, and the bibliography will miss it. Lisa Fields recalls her student years at Liberty, when she attended Alfred Street Baptist Church in the Washington area. Its Tuesday night Bible study was taught by a Yale-trained Old Testament scholar, and seminary professors taught classes there in systematic and biblical theology. Her advice is to go past Sunday morning, sit in the Bible study, and learn what a church actually teaches before deciding what it lacks.
What about the real weaknesses?
Your home church probably has some, and Dates takes that seriously. He hears constantly that a person’s neighborhood has no upstanding pastors, and he rejects it: “don’t reach for the excuse.” He continues, “Look, nobody’s perfect,” and anyone who goes searching elsewhere “you will find out how imperfect other communities are as well.”
His guidance asks for discernment inside a flawed church: “just put up with what you have to put up with, learn what to do and what not to do, how to embrace what’s good from a leader, and how to not repeat what’s not good from another leader.” Imperfection alone cannot justify leaving, because every church you could join would fail that test.
He applies the same honesty to every kind of school. Black students at liberal institutions, he warns, can graduate skilled at reading culture and systems yet weak at handling the text, because “it’s hard to have an emphasis on executing a text if you don’t ascribe or submit to the authority of the text.” He wants rigorous training. He doubts that any institution doing the training is free of blind spots.
He names one blind spot directly. It grieves him that, in his view, many who think rightly about God got questions of race and society wrong, while many who got race right drifted from biblical doctrine. Lisa Fields draws out the cost: when a church’s doctrine is correct and its practice does not match, “you’re going to push people to where they see the right practice, and they’re going to throw away your right doctrine, which in fact, we need both.” The training that sharpened your eye for gaps at home may have dulled it to gaps in the place that trained you. A Black church that preached the text and stood with its people under pressure may be holding together what your school kept apart.
What knowledge does to the one who has it
Lisa Fields reaches for Paul. In 1 Corinthians 8:1 he writes, “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.” The setting matters. Corinthian believers knew, correctly, that idols are nothing and that food offered to them could not harm a Christian. Paul grants their facts. He faults their use of them, because it wounded believers with weaker consciences (1 Corinthians 8:4-13). Accurate information, used without love, did damage.
A returning seminarian’s knowledge may be largely accurate too. Paul presses a different question: does it build up the people around you, or only lift you above them? Lisa Fields calls the remedy a habit of mind: “we have to have a humble hermeneutic.” She means entering a conversation willing to be wrong and remembering that a favorite scholar is fallible. She also observes that “people who study a lot, sometimes don’t pray a lot,” and that the reverse holds, so “we kind of need each other.”
Dates presses the point toward fellowship. He does not know where “this eagerness to declare people heretics” came from, and he does not consider it biblical. At its best, he says, the Black church holds a different instinct: “we talk to people we don’t agree with.” His reason is practical, “I think if you’re gonna win a brother, you gotta talk to ’em,” and it costs nothing essential, since “you don’t have to relinquish orthodoxy.”
Staying as an active choice
Dates’s instruction is plain: “stay grounded in a black church somewhere.” A home congregation, he says, keeps a student out of the ivory tower and able to serve the church once the degree is done. The church keeps the learning useful.
He pairs that with broad reading, a habit he credits to his tradition: “In the African American scheme of education, we historically read everybody. That doesn’t necessarily mean we agree with everybody, but we read everybody.” He points to Bishop College, which he credits with training a generation of Black preachers who went on to lead major congregations, combining solid orthodoxy with exposure to scholarship outside it, and “there’s no fear in that.”
What keeps breadth from sliding into relativism is the anchor Dates names explicitly: “the authority of scripture trumps everything.” You can read anything and sit in any class, he says, yet “the only arguments that stand are those that are made from scripture.”
That anchor reframes the original question. If Scripture outranks every system, it outranks the one you learned in school as surely as it outranks the habits of your home church, and neither gets to sit in judgment over the other. Dates and his congregation are working toward residency programs that grow out of Black churches, where students receive solid biblical education and are then supported in serving an African American church. In his picture, the classroom and the congregation were meant to work together from the start.
So the choice is larger than lowering your standards to stay or keeping them and going. You can bring the standards home, apply them to yourself first, and place them, beside the church that first gave you the gospel, under the Scripture that judges you both.