A Black teenager in suburban Virginia who plays field hockey on weekends and wonders what it means to be Black and Christian will rarely see himself in a Sunday school lesson. Rev. Brandon Harris, a Protestant chaplain at Georgetown University, argues that this is a matter of design. Much of the discipleship material available to Black churches quietly treats being Black and being poor as the same thing. Closing the gap takes churches willing to learn who is actually sitting in their pews. It also takes a gospel large enough to meet a suburban student’s questions about identity without shrinking faith into private comfort.
Harris speaks from inside the question. By his own account, he was raised in the Church of God in Christ and educated in Reformed and evangelical schools from fourth grade through twelfth. As he puts it, “On one hand, folks are speaking in tongues. On the other hand, I’m reciting the Westminster Catechism.” He went on to Lincoln University and then to Candler School of Theology at Emory University. His seminary research, in his words, “focuses on preaching to the Black middle class.”
What Exactly Is the Claim?
Harris’s thesis has two parts. The first is historical: “Black middle class congregations have their own history and practices and theology.” The second follows from it. If those congregations have their own history, formation cannot simply be borrowed from another setting and expected to fit. Not every Black Christian grew up poor. Some, in his phrase, “grew up wearing J.Crew” and listening to Bach. The preacher’s task is to speak “to folks who know Tupac and Bach,” people who move between those worlds rather than living in only one.
That history has institutional roots. Harris describes Lincoln as a school founded by the Presbytery of Chester when African Americans could not study for ministry at Princeton. It had its own Presbyterian church on campus, where students served as ruling elders. Black Christian formation outside the stereotype is not a new niche.
The absence shows up on the resource shelf. Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, says she has found ministry material for what gets called the inner city and material for white evangelical settings. What she has not found is a “curriculum for Black middle class college students that fits their unique needs about struggling with identity.” Harris describes the same split in church-based resources for Sunday school, discipleship and Christian formation.
Who Is the Curriculum Picturing?
Harris puts the problem into a single name. In the congregations he has served, he says, there are “two different types of Jamals.” The first is the young man the curriculum is written for: a teenager from a broken home in the inner city. Harris introduces that description with a qualification, “I hate to stereotype,” and the qualification matters. He is not only pointing out that a second Jamal is missing. He is admitting that the first Jamal is also a composite, a picture assembled from assumptions about who a young Black churchgoer must be.
The second Jamal is the student who actually comes to Harris’s office. In Harris’s retelling, this young man says, “I live in suburban Virginia,” adds that “I play field hockey on the weekends,” and then names his real concern: “I’m trying to figure out what it means to be Black and Christian.” The question goes deeper still: “I’m trying to figure out who am I as a human being.” These words are Harris voicing his students as a group, not a transcript of one young man. But the questions are precise, and none of them concerns rescue from poverty.
The assumption beneath both Jamals does the damage. If a curriculum takes Black experience to mean inner-city experience, a middle-class Black student registers as a deviation. The material written for his race does not describe his life. The material that describes his circumstances was written for white families and says nothing about his race. He falls between the two categories.
Fields meets the same assumption from the other side. In some white settings, she says, people respond to her work with “Oh, wow, you’re doing inner city ministry?” Her reply is that her work is “not limited to that because I’m Black.” She also asks what “inner city” even means as gentrification reshapes neighborhoods like U Street in Washington, D.C. The label often does not describe a place at all. It works as a polite synonym for Black, and a ministry category built on a racial assumption misreads the suburban student and the urban one alike.
Double Consciousness in Two Rooms
Harris draws on W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness. It names the experience of seeing yourself through the eyes of a society that watches you with suspicion, and of carrying two identities the world treats as at odds. His question for young adult ministry is how to “live in a world that is both Black and white” and still, as he says, “preach to their souls.”
The measuring happens in two places. At school, Harris’s Jamal faces microaggressions every day. At church, he gets picked on for how he talks, or because he plays lacrosse or soccer. Here class changes the shape of Du Bois’s idea. Du Bois described Black people measured by a white gaze. This student is measured by that gaze at school and then by a second one at church, where his class position itself becomes evidence that he is less authentically Black. The church should be the one room where he is not judged by someone else’s picture of him. Instead it often supplies its own. A curriculum that knows only one Jamal is the formal version of that teasing. It tells the second Jamal, without saying so, that his questions are not church questions.
That cost is real. A teenager working out who he is will get answers somewhere. If the church cannot speak to his weekdays, classmates, coworkers and whatever he scrolls through will shape his sense of himself, and faith will shrink to a Sunday habit. Harris states the goal plainly: Christian formation “in a way that helps ’em to understand their day-to-day lives.”
Isn’t the Middle Class the Group That Needs Help Least?
This is the strongest objection. Middle-class families have education, income and options. Spending scarce ministry energy on them can look like serving the comfortable while the poor wait.
The objection misreads what Harris is asking for. Discipleship is not charity, and it is not distributed according to material need. Every believer needs to be taught how to follow Christ in the life he or she actually has. For the second Jamal, that life includes being the only Black student in some rooms and being called not Black enough in others. Money does not answer those questions. The objection also repeats the assumption under examination. If Black ministry means ministry to the poor, Black families who are not poor are treated as already handled, presumably by the white evangelical material. Harris is not calling for abandoning ministry in poor neighborhoods. Both Jamals sit in the pews he describes. His complaint is that the church built for one and assumed it had reached both.
The claim has an honest limit. Harris and Fields report what two practitioners found when they went looking for material, not a survey of every curriculum in print. Their point is also narrower than it first sounds. Fields mentions an existing book on preaching to the Black middle class, and Harris says it informed his research. The subject has received attention in the study of preaching. The gap lies in formation material, the resources that reach students week to week. Readers should treat it as a well-placed observation they can test in their own churches.
How Would a Church Know It Has This Gap?
Few churches will find the problem in their own mission statement. Harris notes that “Black middle class congregations wouldn’t go, ‘We’re a Black middle class church,’” and then adds, “But you can identify them.” His examples come from where members spend their time: a large share of families involved in Jack and Jill, the Links and the Boulé. The point is not status. A congregation’s social world shapes what its young people bring into a Bible study.
Harris describes a discipline that answers this, learned from mentors at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta: “Always put your ear to the ground in a new ministry context.” He first applies it to church planters who arrive in a neighborhood announcing that they have brought the gospel. His instruction is to walk the neighborhood: “See where the gospel is already at work.” What he wants is “the willingness to learn a community before we come in.”
The same habit applies inside an established church. Choosing a curriculum is a decision about who you think is in the room, and a church that has never asked its students what Monday is like has made that decision by default. When Harris says, “There’s no one way,” the implication for curriculum is concrete. No single default resource can stand in for knowing the particular students a church serves.
Does Middle-Class Discipleship Risk Becoming Comfortable Religion?
It could, and Harris’s theology works against that drift. He describes himself as an old-school Baptist who holds that “salvation in Jesus Christ is both personal and social.” Personal faith alone fails, in his view, if “I don’t have a horizontal one that transforms the world.” Formation that addresses a suburban student’s anxieties but never his neighbors would fail by Harris’s standard.
Harris supports this with 1 John:
“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 writes to a community and tests its claim to love God by how its members treat the people in front of them. The verse states a principle, not a curriculum plan, but the principle cuts two ways here. The second Jamal should be taught to see the first Jamal as his brother, not as a mission project. And a church that never learns who the second Jamal is cannot claim to love him well. Harris says as much about outsiders who preach in Black neighborhoods: “I can’t preach the gospel to you if I don’t care about you.”
Where Does Black Identity Fit?
The second Jamal’s question assumes that being Black and being Christian belong together. The Jude 3 Project holds that African-descended believers do not have to choose between their heritage and their faith. It also states an order: before we are Black, we are Christian. Some will hear that as asking Black believers to mute their Blackness, the very pressure Harris’s students already feel. Read against his account, it does the opposite. When Christ, rather than a vocabulary or a sport, is the first thing said about Jamal, no room gets to grade his Blackness. And his faith is not a borrowed white possession he must apologize for.
Paul offers a model for adapting the method while keeping the message:
“To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22).
In context, Paul is explaining why he gave up rights he could have claimed so that nothing would hinder the gospel. The verse does not approve every cultural habit. It describes a messenger who adjusts himself to his hearers, which is what Harris asks curriculum to do: keep one gospel and present it to the lives actually receiving it.
Who Speaks First
The most revealing detail in Harris’s account is the one he apologized for. A curriculum that pictures only a broken-home teenager has decided what a Black young person is before any young person speaks. Closing the gap means reversing that order. Jamal describes his own life first, and Scripture is brought to the life he describes.
