Who disciples the young believer who grew up in a professional Black family, sat in mostly white classrooms, and still cannot find himself in the church’s Sunday school material? The following sessions work on that question in practice. A group will name the two worlds its members move between, read Scripture with both in view, and design one concrete change to how it forms young people. Use it in one long sitting or across two or three meetings. Each section also works for someone reading alone with a notebook.
The material comes from a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Rev. Brandon Harris, a Protestant chaplain at Georgetown University whose seminary research centered on preaching to the Black middle class. Harris argues that middle-class Black young people fall between the two kinds of discipleship material most churches use, and that closing the gap starts with listening before teaching.
Start with two sketches
Give each person a sheet of paper folded in half. On the left side, describe in words the young person your church’s Sunday school, youth or college material seems to be written for. Where does this person live? What does home look like? What problems does the lesson assume they have? On the right side, describe a real young person you know from your church, or yourself at sixteen or twenty, using the same three questions. Set the sheets aside until the end of the guide.
Facilitators: some people will find the right-hand sketch easy and the left-hand one hard, because they have never looked closely at what the curriculum assumes. That difficulty is useful information.
Two Jamals
Harris’s thesis is that “black middle class congregations have their own history and practices and theology.” Formation borrowed from another setting will not simply fit. “Some of us grew up wearing J Crew and listening to Bach,” he says, and his research asks “how do you preach to folks who know Tupac and Bach,” people whose lives hold both at once.
Lisa Fields named the gap: discipleship guides tend to be written for what gets called inner-city ministry or for white evangelical churches. What she has not found is “curriculum for black middle class college students that fits their unique needs about struggling with identity.” Harris gave the gap a face. In the congregations he has served, he says, there are “two different types of Jamal’s.” The first is the teenager the curriculum targets, a young man from a broken home in the inner city. Harris hedges as he describes him: “I hate to stereotype.”
The second Jamal is the student who comes to see him. Speaking for these students as a group, Harris describes a young man who says, “I live in suburban Virginia,” and “I play field hockey on the weekends.” Then comes his real concern: “I’m trying to figure out what it means to be black and Christian.” This student faces microaggressions every day at school, then gets picked on at church for sounding white or for playing lacrosse or soccer. Harris connects this to W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness, seeing yourself through the eyes of a society that sets your identities against each other. His question: “How do you live in a world that is both black and white and preach to their souls?”
Stop and work with these two pictures before moving on.
- Which of Harris’s phrases do you recognize from your own church, as something said, assumed or left unsaid?
- Harris hedged before describing the first Jamal. What does that stereotype leave out about real young people from poor or urban neighborhoods? Name at least two things it misses.
- Harris’s second Jamal is also a sketch, drawn from many students. What might it leave out?
Reading 1 Corinthians 12 with both Jamals in the room
Paul wrote 1 Corinthians to a divided congregation. In chapter 12 he addresses believers who were ranking one another by spiritual gifts, treating some members as more truly part of the church than others. His answer is the image of a body. Read 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 aloud together, slowly. The argument opens in 1 Corinthians 12:12:
For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.
A few verses later, Paul writes, “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).
- Observe. List every phrase in verses 12-27 that describes how one member treats another. Mark the places where a member is told it does not belong, and the places where one member dismisses another.
- Interpret. Paul’s subject is spiritual gifts in a local church. Class and culture are not his topic. Why does he say the members that seem weaker are necessary? Does that claim rest on their usefulness, or on the fact that God placed them in the body?
- Test the application. Applying this passage to the two Jamals extends Paul’s principle beyond his original topic. Discuss whether a church telling a young man he talks wrong or plays the wrong sport resembles the eye telling the hand it has no need of it. Where does the comparison fit, and where does it strain?
Facilitators: let the group disagree about step three. A careful reader might say the extension should be held loosely, since Paul is speaking about gifts. That is a fair reading. Reason from the text and let it limit the conclusion.
Mapping your own two rooms
This exercise is personal, so disclosure is optional throughout. People may write privately and share nothing, share one line, or simply listen. Say this aloud before you begin, and mean it.
Draw two large circles on a page. Label one with the place where you spend most of your week: a school, an office, a campus. Label the other church. In each circle, write what that room expects you to be: how you speak there, what you hide, what you emphasize, what earns approval or suspicion. In the overlap, write what you carry into both rooms unchanged.
Now look at the church circle by itself. Harris’s second Jamal hoped church would be the one room where he was not measured by someone else’s picture, and found a new picture to fit. Ask yourself whether your church circle holds expectations that have more to do with culture or class than with Christ.
Jude 3 Project holds that African-descended believers do not have to choose between their heritage and their faith, and it keeps an order: before we are Black, we are Christian. Neither room gets the final word on who you are. Write one sentence in the overlap about what follows for you if your first name, before any adjective, is Christian.
Then turn to Psalm 139, a prayer of praise in poetic form. Read verse 14 aloud: “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well” (Psalm 139:14). Make three short columns on the back of your map. In the first, write one thing your weekday room says about you. In the second, one thing your church room says. In the third, what the psalm says. The psalm makes no promise that the rooms will stop measuring you. Look at the columns and ask which voice you have treated as the one that knows you first.
A test: does this turn into comfortable religion?
A fair objection deserves time. Middle-class families have education and options. Someone might ask whether ministry energy aimed at them serves the comfortable while poorer neighbors wait, and whether formation built around identity questions slides into private self-improvement.
Harris’s own theology pushes against that drift. He describes himself as an old-school Baptist and says “salvation in Jesus Christ is both personal and social.” In his words, “it’s no good if I’ve got a vertical relationship with Christ, and I don’t have a horizontal one that transforms the world.” He grounds this in 1 John, which reads: “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” (1 John 4:20). John tests a community’s claim to love God by how its members treat the people in front of them.
Hold whatever your group designs against both sides of that verse. Formation for the second Jamal should teach him to see the first Jamal as his brother. And a church that never learns who the second Jamal is cannot claim to love him well.
Ear to the ground: a two-week listening practice
Harris learned a discipline from his mentors at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta: “always put your ear to the ground in a new ministry context.” He first applied it to people arriving in a neighborhood to start churches, telling them to “See where the gospel is already at work.” The habit transfers inside an established church, where the unfamiliar context may be the young people already in the pews.
- Week one: listen. If you lead, ask three young people one question each, and do not correct or teach in response: What did your Monday ask of you that church never talks about? If you are a young adult yourself, ask two peers, or answer it honestly in writing.
- Look at the material. Pull the last lesson your class or group used. Underline every assumption it makes about the listener’s home, neighborhood, money or problems. Compare those underlines with what you heard.
- Week two: change one thing. Rewrite one illustration, question or application in that lesson so that both Jamals could recognize their week in it. Keep the Scripture and the gospel unchanged. Change only the bridge to the listener’s life.
Harris states the goal as Christian formation “in a way that helps ’em to understand their day-to-day lives.” The test of your rewrite is whether a student could carry it into Tuesday.
Facilitators: protect what people hear in week one. Anything a young person says stays with the person who heard it unless that young person agrees it can be shared. Report patterns, not names.
Questions for the group
- Harris notes that these congregations “wouldn’t go, we’re a black middle class church,” and adds, “But you can identify them.” How would someone recognize your congregation’s social world from the outside, and how does that world shape what young people bring to Bible study?
- In your reading of 1 Corinthians 12, where did the extension to class and culture feel faithful to Paul, and where did it feel stretched?
- If the church circle on your map carried expectations unrelated to Christ, where did they come from? Which would you keep, and why?
- What would change if you treated a student’s ordinary week as the material for formation, rather than as background to the lesson?
- How could formation for comfortable families keep 1 John 4:20 in view without turning neighbors into projects?
- After the listening week, what surprised you, and what did it show about the assumptions in your curriculum?
Back to the two sketches
Unfold the paper from the beginning. Draw a line from any detail on the left that your listening confirmed, and cross out any detail that turned out to be assumption. Then compare the left side with what you said the first Jamal’s stereotype leaves out. Fields put the basic fact simply: “there’s so many different types of African Americans.” Harris answered, “There’s no one way.”
The question to carry out of these sessions is whether your church will let its young people describe their own lives before it decides what they need. Harris closed the conversation with an instruction that fits the work: “be open to whoever and wherever God places you.” For a discipler, that begins with the student across the table, whichever Jamal he turns out to be.