For decades, believers in other countries have put the same question to Bishop David Perrin, the founder overseer of the National African American Missions Conference: “where are the blacks? Where are the African Americans? Do they care about us?” This guide asks what that question reveals, how the history behind it should change the way you see yourself and your church in God’s work among the nations, and what one step you can take this week. It ends with a practice you can finish in seven days.
Work through it alone in one or two sittings with a Bible and a notebook, or as a group in about an hour. A group can also split it across two meetings with the practice in between. No one has to share personal history. Every prompt can be answered privately.
Start with your first answer
Before reading further, write down your honest first answer to the question Perrin keeps hearing. Then write a second line: what do you think caused the answer you gave? Keep both lines. You will come back to them at the end.
Notice that the question mixes two things. One is a count of who is present. The other is a guess about who cares. Lisa Fields voiced the common version of that guess in her conversation with Perrin, wondering whether so much is happening to African Americans at home that “we might not see a need to go overseas.” Hold that possibility in mind. The rest of the study tests it.
Read the commission slowly
Read these passages one at a time. After each, write a single sentence answering one question: Who is sent, and to whom?
First, Matthew 28:19: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Look at the scope. The command does not name a region, a race or a budget line. It names all nations.
Second, Acts 1:8: “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” The witnesses do not have to finish Jerusalem before they are allowed to think about the ends of the earth. The places are joined with “and.” If you want a third text, Romans 10:14-15 places the one who sends inside the chain that leads to faith, so sending is part of obedience too.
Now compare your sentences. Did any of them assume who the sent people usually look like? If so, where did that picture come from? Perrin says the conference he founded began because the word missionary had become “synonymous with white Anglo-Saxon,” so that people overseas who heard missionaries were coming expected white faces. That expectation is not in the texts you just read.
Who was already there
The picture of the missionary as a white outsider hides an older history. Jude 3 teaches that Christianity is not foreign to Africa and has deep, ancient African roots, so African and African-descended believers do not have to choose between heritage and faith. Two passages in Acts let you see a piece of that for yourself.
Read Acts 8:26-39. An official from Ethiopia, responsible for the queen’s treasury, has traveled to Jerusalem to worship and is reading Isaiah on the road home. Philip explains the passage, the man is baptized, and he goes on his way rejoicing. Write down two observations: where was this man before Philip met him, and where is he going afterward? The text says nothing about what he did once he arrived home, so resist filling in that gap. What it does show is enough: an African believer carrying the good news southward within the first years of the church.
Then read Acts 13:1-3. The church at Antioch lists its prophets and teachers, and two of them carry African connections. Lucius is from Cyrene, a city in North Africa. Simeon is called Niger, a Latin word meaning dark or black. Many interpreters take that nickname as a reference to his complexion, though the text does not explain it, so hold that reading as likely rather than certain. Then notice what this leadership does in verses 2-3: they fast, pray, lay hands on Barnabas and Saul, and send them out. Paul’s missionary journeys begin from a church whose leaders included a man from Africa.
Perrin’s summary of the biblical pattern fits what you just read: “God has always sent people from everywhere to everywhere.” Jerusalem sent to Ethiopia. Antioch, with African leaders among its teachers, sent to Asia Minor. The direction has never run only one way.
Sort the history before you draw a conclusion
Perrin calls the question of missing Black missionaries “a challenging historical kind of question,” and he offers a historical answer. Read it the way a careful investigator would: noting what he claims, what kind of evidence it is, and what it would take to confirm it.
- Doors closed by others. During segregation, he says, sending agencies and denominations, at times working with the government, opposed African Americans going. In his words, “there were many African Americans that wanted to go, but because of racist tendencies within the country could not go.”
- Attention held at home. When the civil rights struggle began, the church turned toward equality, voting and citizenship, and because that struggle has never ended, pastors kept their hearts there.
- Money directed elsewhere. He rejects the idea that the problem is poverty: “It’s not that we don’t have money, it’s how we choose to use money and churches choose to use money.”
- A different meaning of short term. In mission circles a short-term assignment can mean one to two years, but, he says, “generally when we say it as African Americans, we mean one to 10 days.” Those trips happen far more than people realize. Long-term, vocational service is what is thin.
Make two columns on a sheet of paper. In the first, list what Perrin reports from his own experience: his travels, the question he hears, the trips churches take. In the second, list historical claims a reader could check in other records, such as agencies refusing Black candidates. Perrin gives one example, a founder he names as Bethune Cook, who he says was denied a mission assignment and established a school instead. The name may be imperfectly captured in the recording, so search for the founder of a school with a similar name, or for accounts of Black missionary candidates turned away by mission boards, and compare what reputable biographies and histories say with his account. The point is not suspicion. A claim you have checked becomes something you can stand on when someone challenges you.
Then return to the guess Fields voiced. If Perrin’s account holds, what does a low count of long-term missionaries actually measure? Write your answer in one sentence. Many people land somewhere like this: the count shows who was able to go and stay, not who cared. You may land elsewhere, and that is fine if you can say why.
Perrin’s own story separates caring from going. He describes himself early in his pastorate this way: “I was wholeheartedly mentally committed to the great commission. I wasn’t committed to going.” When a member of his church, Gail Peters, came back from Jamaica urging him to go, he offered to pay for her to go again. If care and presence could come apart in one pastor’s life, they can come apart in a congregation’s.
Test it: isn’t the need at home enough?
The strongest objection to this whole study is simple. Injustice and spiritual need are real in American communities. Why should a Black church feel any pull overseas when its own neighborhood needs it?
Perrin does not answer by belittling the work at home. He names the civil rights struggle as a reason, not a failure. He also agrees that the United States itself needs outside help, describing empty European cathedrals turned into museums and similar thinking now taking hold in America, and concluding, “we need missionaries.” On his view, the nations are both here and there.
He adds a consideration from his travels: “The mission field is really wide open and very receptive to African Americans coming and sharing the gospel.” He speaks of a kinship he has felt in African and diaspora settings, where he realized “we are of this people, this people is of us,” and he grieves that a crisis in Nigeria or Senegal so rarely feels like a crisis in the family. His own stance is plain: “I’m proud to be African.”
Keep in mind that this is one experienced leader’s reading of the history. Historians may weigh the causes differently, giving more or less weight to exclusion, to church priorities, or to factors he does not name. Short-term trips also carry their own questions about whether they serve the people receiving them. Write one reason a church might rightly keep most of its energy local, and one thing that would be lost if its care stopped at the city limits. You do not have to resolve the tension tonight. You do have to name it accurately.
This week: trace one sending line
Perrin’s history points to a specific gap. Ten-day trips happen. What rarely happens is a sustained line of support that keeps one person on the field for years. This practice asks you to trace and strengthen one such line.
- Find one person who stays. Within two days, identify one long-term missionary or one pastor serving abroad. Ask your church office whom it supports, ask someone who has been on a mission trip whom they still know, or contact a missions organization you trust. You are looking for a name, a place and how long they have served.
- Learn what staying costs. Write or call them, or read their most recent update. Find out what they are working on now and what keeps them there, whether that is monthly support, prayer, supplies for a program, or schooling for their children. Perrin names raising support, educating children and learning languages among the questions his conference helps people face.
- Do one thing that lasts past the week. Set up a small recurring gift, however modest; commit to praying for them by name on a set day each week and tell them so; or ask your pastor or missions team for ten minutes to share what you learned.
- Look at your church’s own pattern. If you can, find out how your congregation’s mission giving is divided between short trips and long-term support. Do not use the answer to accuse anyone. Use it to understand where a door could open.
If you are weighing a call to go yourself, this practice is a safe first step. Talking with someone who has stayed for years will tell you more than any study can, and training from a trustworthy source is worth seeking before a long commitment.
Questions for conversation
- Look at the two lines you wrote at the start. Which one changed, and what in this study changed it?
- Perrin distinguishes trips of one to ten days from vocational service. What does a church gain from short trips, and what can short trips never provide?
- Reread Acts 13:1-3. What would it mean for your church to be the kind of church that lays hands on someone and sends them, rather than the kind that only receives updates?
- Perrin says the money question is about how churches choose to use what they have. What would have to change in your church’s decision-making for a multi-year commitment to win out over a visible local project? What might be lost in that change?
- When Perrin says “we are of this people, this people is of us,” do you recognize that sense of kinship, resist it, or feel unsure? What shaped your response?
- For those who traced a sending line: what surprised you about what it costs someone to stay?
For anyone leading a one-hour session, a workable rhythm is about ten minutes on the opening lines, fifteen on the Scripture, fifteen on the history and the objection, and twenty on four of these questions, with the practice assigned for the week. If you meet twice, open the second meeting with the last question. Some people will feel guilt as they hear this history, and others will feel anger at those who closed the door. Neither reaction is the goal. If the conversation stalls in either one, bring it back to the passages in Acts, which show African believers receiving the gospel and sending it on from the start, and to the practice, which turns the history into an action. Let people pass on any question without explanation.
The question asked abroad was where the African Americans are. The history explains much of why the answer has so often been that they are not there. It does not fix the answer in place. So carry a smaller question into next week, one only you can answer: whose name is on the sending line you traced, and will they still be hearing from you a year from now?