Christopher Bonner asked an excellent question in his recent post, “What can we truly know about men and women who were self-consciously making history?” Certainly, scholars do argue that past people of color did self-consciously make history. However, this is not an obvious conclusion as demonstrated by debates concerning the consequences of Christian conversion for Africans and their descendents throughout the Black Diaspora. Recent work from an array of excellent scholars in a variety of academic disciplines presents different approaches... Read more

Pastors spend a lot of time solving problems, and that means asking questions. Unfortunately, most of those questions are unimportant, even trivial. I know this because I’ve wasted plenty of my own time wondering about these same things. In fairness, many of these questions are forced upon pastors by their job description as the leader of an organization and have little to do with their real work as shepherds of God’s flock. But a pastor has to earn a living... Read more

by Andre E. JohnsonR3 Editor *Read part 1 here. Read Part 2 here. Read Part 3 here.  Get your copy of the Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition American Prophetic Tradition in paperback. Turner’s activities in helping freed people understand their rights did not please everybody—especially the ones who appreciated Turner’s preaching. Turner admitted that there was some “grumbling with a few of our fastidious church members owing to the fact, as they say, that elder Turner don’t preach as well as... Read more

It’s not easy being a celebrity pastor these days with that pesky Internet around. Consider the struggles of Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Faced with mounting accusations circulating online –plagiarism, misusing church funds to prop book sales, silencing anyone in his church with the temerity to question him — Driscoll has urged his followers to stay off the Web. “It’s all shenanigans anyway,” he explains. Steven Furtick, a megachurch pastor in North Carolina, and Dave Ramsey, an... Read more

I’ve been thinking a lot about privilege lately. Well, not just lately. I overheard that conversation at a Starbucks in Washington, D.C. more than a year ago, and it still haunts me. The Oxford Dictionary defines privilege as “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group”. Simply put, privilege has to do with how groups in society accommodate and cater to you. Over the past few months I’ve had several conversations with... Read more

When Philadelphia’s St. Paul Baptist Church hired the Rev. Leslie Callahan as its first female pastor, in 2009, she was nearing her 40th birthday and the tick-tock of her biological clock was getting hard to ignore. She delighted in her ministry but also wanted a husband and children in her life. The husband she couldn’t do much about — he just hadn’t stepped into her life. “But it was clear to me that I was going to do everything in... Read more

My heart jumped when I saw the poster at the entrance to the Muslim community center in Central Java, Indonesia, in 2009. I didn’t need to speak Indonesian to understand the photo of dead and injured Gazan children. Still, I asked for a translation. Uneasily, our group’s translator explained that the poster reported the amount of money the community group had raised in relief funds after Operation Cast Lead, just a few months before, and prayed for the health and... Read more

For someone seeking a full-time job as a church pastor, Justin Barringer would seem to have the perfect résumé. He’s a seminary grad, an author and book editor, and a former missionary to China and Greece. But despite applying to nearly a hundred jobs over the course of two years, Barringer, who lives in Lexington, Kentucky, could not secure a full-time, salaried church position. So he splits his time among three jobs, working as a freelance editor, an employee at... Read more

When a congregation has to leave its church building, it’s like moving away from home. Members remember all the things that happened there. They think of fun and funny anecdotes, and the crises they weathered. They recall what the church meant to the community. All that is even more intense when the church is 152 years old, as is Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta. Which makes a New York Times story on its last service all the more puzzling. The... Read more

Debate about religion in American public life existed well before America’s independence. Many talk about religious freedom, the First Amendment, and mistakenly argue that the U.S. Constitution delineates a “separation of church and state.” Yet, the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court has never formally defined what actually constitutes “religion.” Nor has the Court ever defined “God.” In fact, its standards for referring to “religion” evolve, change, and remain inconsistent. For example, in 1890, the Court referred... Read more