Someone told you who you were before you were old enough to argue back. A parent, a coach, a pastor, a song, a crowd on a corner. For many young Black men, the first voice that spoke seriously about their history and their people was not the church. Movements like the Black Hebrew Israelites have filled that silence, and they mostly draw people through identity, not argument. This study takes up a personal question: where have you let someone other than Christ tell you who you are, and how do you become rooted in him? The hunger for heritage is not sin, and Scripture does not ask you to stop wanting it. It tells you who named you first.
Work through it alone with a notebook over several days, or with a small group over one or two meetings. Some prompts are for private writing and others are for conversation. Nothing here requires you to share what you write. Expect your first answers to change by the end.
Start with the voices that named you
Before you open Scripture, take an honest inventory. Draw a line down the middle of a page. On the left, list the voices that have told you who you are: family, teachers, a pastor, an artist you play on repeat, a movement, a group chat, a stranger who said something cruel. On the right, write in a few words what each voice said about you. Some will be kind and some harmful. Some you will barely remember until you write them down.
Then mark three things:
- Put a star next to the voice that spoke to your ethnicity or your people’s history first. Was it the church, or someone else?
- Circle any voice whose words you still repeat to yourself without thinking.
- Underline any place where you felt seen and someone then asked something of you in return.
Keep this page. You will come back to it at the end.
Read the texts that do the naming
Read four passages slowly. For each, answer three questions from the text before you answer from anything you have heard preached: Who does the naming? What is given? What is kept, and what is set aside?
Genesis 1:27. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” What has the person done before this is said about them? Write what that suggests, or does not suggest, about how the image is received.
Acts 17:26. Paul tells the philosophers at Athens that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” List every action God takes in this verse. Which of those actions do you tend to forget?
Galatians 3:28-29. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” Circle every word that describes belonging. What does verse 29 name as the condition for being Abraham’s seed? Verse 28 lists three pairs. Which of them still exist in the world after someone believes, and what does that tell you about what the verse is and is not claiming?
Revelation 7:9. “After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb.” What can John still tell apart in this crowd? Where are they standing, and whom are they facing? Using only what the verse says, write what you think unites them.
When you finish, write one sentence that begins, According to these passages, the first word about me is… Do not polish it.
How the pull actually works
In a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation with Lisa Fields, D.A. Horton describes how movements like the Five Percenters and the Black Hebrew Israelites reach young men, including men who already follow Jesus. The Five Percenters, he says, drew young African Americans and Latinos “because we were being affirmed in our ethnic identity.” He recounts the sequence. First they took apart the version of Christianity a young man only loosely knew. Then came the offer: “Now we’ll put you up on the real way of life.” And then the line that carries the weight: “And this is who you are. This is your identity.”
Horton heard a version of this pitch himself as a teenager. What stayed with him was the silence it filled. In his words, “they would just break down all these things that I never heard a sermon talk about.”
Notice the order. Affirmation came first, and a teaching came attached to it. A person can accept a whole set of claims because the package began by telling him he mattered. That pattern is not limited to one movement. It can work through a political tribe, a brand, a church culture or a friend group.
Go back to your inventory and look at what you underlined. For each, write two short lines: What it affirmed in me and What came attached. You may find that something good was affirmed and something false came along with it. You may also find that the church said something true and you never heard it because it came too late.
Give the lineage claim its best case
Before testing anything, be fair to it. Write a short paragraph, in the strongest terms someone drawn to the movement would use, explaining why lineage matters. Do not write a caricature. Think about what such a person carries: a history taken from his people, names lost in slavery, a church that rarely spoke of Africa, and the hope that proving descent from Israel would restore dignity no one could take away. If you know someone in this place, write it the way they would want it written.
Now set your paragraph next to Galatians 3:29 and Acts 17:26 and work through these:
- Which concerns in your paragraph do these verses take seriously? Look for words about family, inheritance, nations and places.
- According to Galatians 3:29, what makes someone an heir of Abraham? Does the verse make that standing depend on proving a genealogy?
- Acts 17:26 says God set the times and boundaries of the nations. What would it mean for your paragraph if a people’s history is already God’s work, whether or not every link in its family tree can be traced?
- Is there anything in your paragraph that these texts do not answer? Write it down honestly. An unanswered question is something to take into further study, not something to hide.
Testing where the weight rests
Horton names two opposite mistakes in one sentence: “Don’t idolize it, don’t ignore it, but at the same time celebrate it.” He grounds ethnicity in God’s purpose: “God has sovereignly elected you to be the ethnicity you are.” When he says this to Black men, he reports, some who have walked with God since their teens break down. He recounts one man telling him, “Because this whole time I’m thinking I gotta flush my faith down the toilet because it doesn’t speak to me as a black man in America.”
Horton holds two belongings together. In Christ, he says, “now you are a part of a spiritual ethnicity, which is the body of Christ.” Jude 3 Project states the order plainly: before we are Black, we are Christian. That order does not cancel the ethnicity God gave. It answers the question of which identity carries the most weight.
Draw a horizontal line. Label the left end ignore and the right end idolize. The middle is where your heritage is received and celebrated as a gift, with Christ holding the deepest place. Mark where you stand in three settings: on a Sunday, in conversations about race or history, and alone with your phone. The marks may not line up. Then answer privately:
- If you lean toward ignore: when did you learn that a good Christian should leave his culture at the door? Who taught you that, out loud or by example?
- If you lean toward idolize: what would you be afraid of losing if your heritage became your second-deepest identity instead of your first?
- Either way: what would it look like to celebrate your people this month in a way that also honors Christ?
Some of the hurt behind the pull is earned. Horton says that for generations “even if there was a proclamation of the gospel, the practice of the gospel was withheld” from African Americans. Lisa Fields, drawing on Howard Thurman, points to how a child shown only a white Jesus can grow up feeling outside the image of God. Writing that history down is not bitterness. The question is whether a wound gets the final say over your name.
Roots that go down
Horton makes an uncomfortable comparison. The Five Percenters he talked with had been taught their system and could argue it. Many believers can quote favorite artists and preachers. Then he asks, “But can they quote the Apostle John?” His summary: “it’s grown wide, but not deep.” A hunger for identity that is never fed with Scripture will be fed by someone else. For the next seven days, try this rhythm, about fifteen minutes a day.
- Read one passage. Use the four from this guide, plus Ephesians 2:11-22 and Colossians 3:1-11. Read it twice, once silently and once aloud.
- Memorize one line. Pick a single verse and say it each morning until you can say it without looking.
- Check one piece of your faith’s history. Horton notes that many young adults were never told that Augustine and Athanasius were North African. Start with the text itself: read Acts 8:26-39 and write down what it says about the Ethiopian official, where he came from and what he did after his baptism. Then pick Augustine or Athanasius and read about him in two independent sources, such as a library encyclopedia and a scholarly history. Note where they agree, where they differ, and what evidence each one cites. Jude 3 Project holds that Christianity is not foreign to Africa and that African and African-descended believers do not have to choose between their heritage and their faith. Test that claim with what you find.
- Notice whose voice is talking. Once a day, when a thought about who you are crosses your mind, ask where you got it. Write the source in one word.
Working through this with a group
Protect the private parts. The inventory page and the ignore-to-idolize line belong to each person unless they choose to share. Invite people to share one thing they learned rather than one thing they wrote. Do not ask anyone to speak for a whole race or for a movement a relative joined. Horton says many of the young men being swayed love God, so assume the same of anyone in the room who feels the pull. He also says, “it’s not just a gospel proclamation that the church has to give, it’s a gospel presence.” Before you close, have each person name one thing about someone else’s background they want to learn, and arrange to ask about it over a meal before the next meeting.
Questions for conversation
- Reading Genesis 1:27 and Acts 17:26 together, what did you notice about when and how people are named?
- When you wrote the best case for lineage, what was hardest to put fairly? What did Galatians 3:29 answer, and what did it leave open?
- Horton describes affirmation arriving first and teaching arriving attached to it. Where have you seen that pattern in places that feel safer or more normal than a street corner?
- When the church has been silent about your history, what has that silence cost you or people you love? What would it look like for that silence to end in your congregation?
- Which mistake does your church culture tend toward, ignoring ethnicity or idolizing it? What evidence would you point to?
- What is one honest measure of depth you could use on yourself, other than how much you know?
- Revelation 7:9 shows the nations still distinct before the throne. How, if at all, does that picture change the way you think about your own heritage now?
Back to the first page
Return to the inventory you made at the start and read it again with the week behind you. Next to each voice, write one of three words: keep, question or release. Keep what told you the truth about your people. Test the rest against the passages you have read. Let go of any voice that said you had to earn your name, defend it, or leave Christ to find it.
Then rewrite your sentence that began According to these passages, the first word about me is… and compare it with the first version. Keep both on the page. The next time a voice tells you who you are, you will have something to measure it against.