The question usually comes as a suspicion. If there is one Lord and one faith, why would defending that faith need a different sound in a Black congregation? Doesn’t a separate approach imply a separate gospel? It does not. Apologetics in the Black church carries the same gospel in a different voice, with different illustrations and a different set of questions to answer. Lisa Fields, founder of Jude 3 Project, put the distinction plainly: “it’s not that the content necessarily has to be different, but the illustrations and the presentation has to be different.”
Elder Ansen Goyens grew up in that church. His grandfather was a pastor, he was raised Baptist, and he later moved into non-denominational settings. He argues that the work starts further back than most people expect, with reading and writing. It takes seriously questions that history has made sharp, and it reclaims a Bible that was once used as a weapon. None of that changes what the gospel is. It changes whether a young believer hears the gospel as an answer to the question they actually brought.
Is a different voice a different faith?
The letter of Jude, the source of Jude 3 Project’s name, already points toward the answer. The writer says he wanted to write “of the common salvation” and urges his readers to “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3). The salvation is common, shared by everyone who belongs to Christ, and the faith was delivered once. The contending is done by real people, in real places, for real listeners.
Goyens builds his case on that distinction. He insists that “the word of God wasn’t just written to Caucasians,” or to any single group, but to all peoples. Then he adds a second conviction: “I do not believe that God strips us from our personalities.” His example is Peter, the impulsive disciple who carried a sword. Jesus used that temperament, and after the ascension Peter’s own voice preached the sermon that brought a crowd to Christ. The gospel came through Peter without becoming Peter’s gospel.
That is what Goyens means when he says apologetics has to look different “in the color.” He heads off the obvious misreading right away: “when I mean color, I’m not talking about skin tone, but the way we flavor it, the way that we express it, it can be conveyed to us in a way that’s a little bit different and it can be received in that manner.” Flavor, for him, is a word about delivery.
He even adjusts the familiar label. He understands where the phrase “Black church” comes from, pointing to the founding of the AME church after Richard Allen was barred from worshiping alongside white Christians. But he reads Galatians and Colossians as removing the barriers race builds inside the body of Christ. Paul writes, “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” (Galatians 3:28). So Goyens prefers another description: “the term that I like to use is the arm of the church that’s most populated by African Americans.” The wording keeps one body in view while being honest about which part of it you are standing in.
What keeps flavor from becoming a new message?
The fair objection is that “contextual” can become a polite word for drift. If every community tunes the gospel to itself, a hundred private versions of Jesus would seem to follow.
Goyens answers with a test of authority. He describes reaching a point where he wanted “to defend the Bible with the Bible,” and he admits why. Growing up, he saw things in church he was not sure were good: “you want to defend it with scripture, but then you come to scripture, it’s like, oh, I can’t defend it.” That is a striking confession for a pastor’s grandson. When the tradition and the text pulled apart, he let the text judge the tradition.
He holds the same line on experience. Discussing the authority of the Bible, he set aside his own story as the final word: “Not what I’ve been through.” He spends much of the conversation on history and pain, so this is not indifference to either. It is a ranking. A voice that answers to Scripture can sound different and still carry the same message, because something outside the culture can correct it. A voice that answers only to its own culture has no such check, whatever its accent.
The conversation also has limits worth naming. It gives two people’s observations from inside the tradition, and neither offers a measurement of how common these patterns are. Fields says as much at one point, declining to say “most” because she does not know the statistics. Their account of the Black church should be read as an informed diagnosis, not a survey. Its strength is the reasoning behind it, which a reader can test against Scripture and against their own congregation.
Why the questions themselves are different
Part of the difference has nothing to do with tone. It concerns which questions come up. Fields observed that “in the African American community, the existence of God is not really in question as much as in the Caucasian community.” Much classic apologetics spends its energy proving that God exists. That work has value, but it often misses what a young Black believer actually brings home.
Fields named those questions: the claims of Hebrew Israelites and Jehovah’s Witnesses, the prosperity gospel, and above all the problem of evil. People may never have heard the technical term for it, but they know what it is to watch bad things happen to good people. Goyens tied this to the shooting of worshipers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, which was fresh when they spoke. People were asking, in his words, “where is this God” who is called all-powerful. He treated that as an apologetic question and widened it: “racial relations are apologetic issues.” If the Bible speaks to race, a believer needs to be able to show from the Bible what it says.
This is where many young believers get lost. They bring a hard question to church and get an answer that amounts to because the pastor said so. Goyens wants something sturdier: “it’s just not what my pastor said.” His aim is a person who can open the Bible, show what it says, and build a defense from it. When the church skips that step, the asker usually concludes the faith has no answer, when the real gap was in the teaching.
Why reading comes before arguing
Asked what the Black church has to do first, Goyens did not name a debate topic. “The first thing that we need to address is reading.” He remembers teachers telling him to read more because reading would make him write better, and he applies the lesson to faith: “I think we’ve gotten away from the reading aspect of being a Christian.” What he proposes is modest, book clubs and summer reading with children in Sunday school, a church treating books as friends again.
Writing is the second step, and he insists it is a separate discipline. Putting your thoughts on paper forces you to be more intentional and methodical about what you claim. Feeling sure about the faith is one thing. Stating a reason clearly enough that someone else can test it is another. First Peter calls believers to be ready to give “a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). A reason is something you can say out loud and defend.
Illustrations are where this pays off. Goyens says “those illustrations are where we connect the dots” between what is written in a book and what people already know. A good illustration carries a true claim across to a listener who has not yet reached it. Fields made the same point from the other side: miss people with the illustration and they miss the content.
Goyens names a cost here too. In his view the tradition prizes the pulpit and the title of apostle, but “we don’t aspire to write.” As a result, “we are left to read what somebody else is writing.” Borrowed writing brings borrowed examples, chosen for other readers.
What do you do with a Bible that was used against your ancestors?
This is the hardest question in the conversation, and neither speaker shrinks it. Fields recalled a story from Howard Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited. Thurman’s grandmother let him read her the Psalms and the Gospels but not Paul’s letters, because her enslaver had used Paul’s words against her. When that memory passes through a people, Fields said, “part of the Bible becomes your enemy.” Her concern is practical. People who trust only the parts of Scripture that feel safe lose the parts meant to heal and correct them.
Goyens answers with an illustration about tools. Someone invented the hammer to build houses. Later someone used it to crush a skull. “Do we despise the inventor of the hammer, or do we look at the use of the hammer in a way that it was not intended to be used?” He applies it to the Bible directly: “there is nowhere in scripture that will justify a group of people that are being beaten,” and using it that way is “somebody taking a hammer and busting somebody’s head in.”
He also argues that American chattel slavery differs from the servitude described in biblical times. That is his claim, and readers should study those passages closely rather than repeat it as a slogan. But the shape of his reasoning holds. An honest defense of the Bible admits that people used it to do evil, then asks whether the evil follows from the text or contradicts it, and reads the text to find out.
Fields presses one step further. Some forms of Black liberation theology, she noted, lift up the Gospels and set Paul aside, because his words were used to justify slavery and because of how teaching on submission has been applied to women. Her response is to train people to receive all of Scripture as authoritative. She takes the wound seriously and still will not let the enslaver decide which pages belong to his victims’ descendants.
Reading voices you will not fully agree with
Fields urged Black Christians who want to do apologetics to read Black scholars trained in liberal seminaries, naming James Cone and Howard Thurman. Part of the reason, as she tells it, is history: many Black students went to liberal schools because conservative evangelical seminaries would not admit them. She gave the resulting distrust one sentence: “How can I trust your theology when you don’t even love me?” These thinkers, she said, are “people who have a lot to say that we need to hear,” though some of what they say should be set aside where it conflicts with Scripture.
Goyens gave her point a picture from his family’s kitchen. When he grabbed hot fried fish as a boy, his mother stopped him because “she knew that I was not mature enough to be able to eat the meat and spit out the bones.” A reader who knows Scripture well can sort meat from bone in any book, conservative or liberal. That brings the argument back to reading. Discernment is a skill built by practice on real arguments, and only a reader gets the practice.
The same habit lets Goyens hold together two emphases that young believers often think they must choose between. He reads prophets like Micah and books like Nehemiah and Isaiah as written for social reform, and insists there is “more to the gospel than just the redemptive side,” and more than the social side as well. Fields summed it up: “We are not saved by our works, but we are saved to work.” For Goyens this is why suffering belongs inside apologetics. A God who is “not a God outside of your problem” has to be defended in front of people who are in one, which is why he says “proper apologetics does not tear people down, it actually builds their hope.”
That returns us to reading and writing, which is where Goyens’s case is sharpest. A church that never writes its own illustrations will keep answering questions others chose. It will prove God exists to young people who never doubted it, while the questions they did bring, about Charleston, about the enslaver’s Bible, about why their pastor never explained anything, go unanswered. Writing its own explanations is how a congregation lets those questions set the agenda and then answers them from Scripture. The gospel is the same either way. What changes is whether that young person is the one being spoken to.