What Is the Black Church’s Witness to Grace

Most people who call their survival grace did not see it as grace while it was happening. Rev. Dr. W. Franklyn Richardson, pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, New York, is candid about this. Looking back over more than 50 years of ministry, he concluded that “I had been a recipient of the favor of God.” He gives the same word, favor, to the long endurance of Black people in a country built on their inequality. Yet about one disappointing season of his life he admits, “I was not aware of it.”

That gap between living through something and recognizing it is where this guide works. You will practice reading one stretch of your history for unearned favor, naming honestly where you cannot see it yet, bringing that doubt to God as worship, and deciding what you owe. Work alone over two sittings, or with a group over one long session. You need paper and a pen, and nothing you write has to be shown to anyone.

Before you read anything: draw the line

Start with your own material, before Richardson’s story shapes what you look for.

Draw a long horizontal line across a page. The left end is your earliest memory; the right end is today. Mark four to six turning points: a move, a loss, a school, a person who showed up, a door that shut. Under each mark, write one honest phrase for how you understood that moment at the time, such as “I thought it was over,” “I didn’t notice,” or “I was furious.” Not how you see it now. That comes later.

If you know some of your family’s or community’s story, draw a shorter line above the first and mark what you know: a migration, a church founded, a generation that got further than the one before. If you don’t know much, write that down too. Set the page aside. You will come back to it.

Three texts that read history backward

Each of these passages looks back at events and names God in them. Read each slowly, out loud if you can, and answer the prompts before moving on.

One person’s story: 1 Corinthians 15:10

“But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).

Just before this, Paul calls himself the least of the apostles because he persecuted the church. This is a man with a record he cannot boast about.

• How many times does grace appear, and what does it do each time?
• Does Paul treat his labor as competing with grace or as something grace produced? Which words tell you?
• What would the sentence lose without his labor? Without grace?

A people’s story: Psalm 124

“If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, now may Israel say; If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, when men rose up against us:” (Psalm 124:1-2).

Read the whole psalm. Notice the instruction tucked into the first line, now may Israel say. A community is being taught to say this together.

• The psalm names real enemies. Does it soften them anywhere?
• Who receives credit for the escape, and who receives blame for the danger?
• Was the closing confession of help in the name of the LORD (Psalm 124:8) reached during the danger, or after it?

A complaint inside the book of worship: Psalm 13

“How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?” (Psalm 13:1-2).

Now read to the end: “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with me” (Psalm 13:5-6).

This is a lament, poetry that gives voice to experience rather than laying out doctrine.

• Nothing says the situation changed between verse 2 and verse 5. What did change?
• The complaint is spoken to God, not about him to someone else. Why might that matter?
• Side by side, what do the three passages share in how they relate the past to God?

How Richardson reads his own story

His book opens with a chapter called Mad at God, about a time he was disappointed in how the Lord let things unfold. The recognition came only later: “I look back over my shoulder and I see that it was the grace of God.”

The story he tells fits that pattern. In Philadelphia, a high school counselor told him he wasn’t college material. Richardson says the counselor was probably right, because “they had not prepared me to be college material.” He flunked out of community college in his first year. His pastor told him to apply to Virginia Union University, which admitted him conditionally, with a year of remediation, because he had graduated from high school without learning to read well. He went on to Yale and a doctorate. Decades later he chaired Virginia Union’s board, and his signature appears on every degree. His verdict on the whole arc: “it’s the grace of God.”

Read closely and three habits show up in that account. He never credits the school system that failed him; grace attaches to what came in spite of it. He keeps the people in view, a pastor, a college that took a risk, mentors, and treats their work the way Paul treats his labor, as part of what grace did. And he reads in hindsight, interpreting a pattern he can see now rather than offering proof to someone outside faith. Those three habits become your tests.

Return to the line and test it

Take out your page. Choose one turning point you would now be inclined to call grace, and answer these in writing.

1. Is the harm still named as harm? If something unjust was done to you or your people there, call it unjust in one sentence. Then locate the favor: in the injury, or in what came through it or in spite of it. If this brings up harm someone did to you, grace language must never be used to excuse that person. Take that to a trusted pastor or a trained counselor, not a worksheet.
2. Are the people still in the story? List everyone who had a hand in that turning point, including those who got it wrong. Does calling it grace make any of them disappear, or make you more grateful to them?
3. Am I claiming more than I know? Grace means favor nobody earned. If you came through and someone beside you did not, what does the word unearned forbid you to conclude about yourself or about them? Write down the question you still cannot answer, and leave it open.

There is a harder objection behind the first test. Talk of grace can pacify people, teaching them to be thankful for survival instead of angry about injustice. Richardson’s own framing pushes the other way. He believes “God is on the side of the oppressed.” On that view, the God who carried a people is not neutral about what was done to them, so recognizing his favor commits you to oppose the harm, not to make peace with it. Whether your own grace story does that is something only your next test, the debt, can show.

Now pick a turning point you cannot yet read as grace. Do not force it. Write “not yet” beside it, or nothing. Richardson’s pattern gives you permission to leave it unresolved. Some stretches only make sense from further down the road, and some may never make sense this side of eternity.

Bring the complaint into worship

Richardson’s grandmother told him his whole life never to question God. He does not dismiss her; he says “she had authentic faith.” But he came to a different conclusion: when you have a question and a frustration, “the only one who can answer is God.” So “we don’t have to protect God, and we don’t have to hide God from our questions.” Indeed, “God is big enough to handle our questions, to handle our doubts, and to speak to our needs.”

Lisa Fields answered that “that’s how we deepen our relationship with him,” adding that “your relationships thrive when you’re able to ask questions of the person you’re in relationship with, and it deepens the relationship.”

Take your “not yet” point, or another honest frustration, and write a short prayer in the shape of Psalm 13:

• The complaint. Address God directly with your own “how long” or “why.” The real version, not the polite one.
• The request. Ask for what you actually want, as the psalmist asks God to consider and hear him.
• The turn, if it comes. Does anything else on your line let you say, even partly, “I have trusted in thy mercy” (Psalm 13:5)? If not, end at the request. An unfinished prayer is still a prayer.

In a group, no one should be asked to read this aloud. Invite people to describe what writing it was like without sharing what they wrote.

Grace that comes with a debt

For Richardson, recognizing favor is not the end. He calls his book a way of passing on what he received: “the book is paying it forward, an obligation to leave a reference to my pilgrimage.” He tells college graduates the same thing: “You never paid for your degree.” Their “tuition was only a contribution to the cost of your education,” because churches, corporations and grandmothers covered the rest, so the obligation is “to pay back, to pay forward.”

He carries that into justice, calling it “the highest form of worship,” the effort to “bring the world in line with what I understand Christ and God to want the world to be.” The standard in that sentence is what God wants, not what a party wants. He also warns those who take up the work: “don’t internalize your anger because that will defeat you.” He has won and lost, he says, but “I’ve never been defeated.”

Go back to the people you listed beside your grace turning point. Choose one thing they did for you that you could do for someone else: a student without a guide, a newcomer without a contact, an elder whose story no one has written down. Make it specific enough that you will know whether you did it, and put a date on it. If the person who carried you is still living, consider telling them what you now see.

Questions for conversation

1. Compare what you wrote “at the time” with how you see those moments now. What changed, the facts or your angle on them? What else besides grace might explain the change?
2. Where do you tend to give all the credit to effort, and where all of it to luck? What would holding both, as Paul does, look like in your story?
3. Psalm 124 teaches a community to say one sentence together. What is lost, and what gained, when a people’s story of survival is told only in the first person singular?
4. What did the people who formed you teach about doubt? What did that teaching protect, and what did it cost?
5. Can grace language ever make people too patient with injustice? Where have you seen it do that, and where have you seen it do the opposite?
6. Does calling justice work worship make it more demanding or less? Does it change who the work is finally answerable to?
7. Is there a “not yet” point you are willing to keep bringing to God without demanding an explanation by a certain date? What would that look like in an ordinary week?

Leaders: when someone offers a grace story, it is fair to ask gently whether the harm in it is still named as harm. When someone says they cannot see grace anywhere, do not argue them into it; Richardson could not see it at the time either. Questions 2, 5 and 7 tend to draw the most honest disagreement, so give them room.

One more look at the page

Mark one place on your lines where you are now willing to write the word grace that you were not willing to write when you started, and one place where you still are not. Both marks are faithful.

When the pandemic delayed his book, Richardson did not announce what it meant. He asked, “could it be that the pandemic was an exercise of God’s grace?” Then he left his readers with a choice: whether we will “start over or will we start again?” Carry a version of that into the coming week. Having seen some of the favor that carried you, will you return to the way things were, or begin again as someone who owes it forward?