The word came to me in a vision. I saw myself dressed in a white tunic and turban, running across a grassy savanna until I came upon a mountain. Above that mountain hung a great basin, pouring water over its peak. As the water cascaded down the mountainside, it carved rivers into the landscape below. Many of those rivers ran off on their own courses. But many others converged, becoming tributaries that fed into one massive river. The next day, I heard the voice: you shall gather my waters. I understood the meaning was not vague. It was a vision of the many streams of the body of Christ, running their separate courses, converging into one mighty river. And I heard it as a description of the assignment I had been given, not something I would merely do, but something I would be.

It is worth pausing on the fact that I am from Mississippi, a name that itself means Father of Waters. To have received a call to gather the waters, and then to have spent the bulk of my ministry doing that gathering from the banks of the mightiest river state in the country, feels less like coincidence and more like a signature God left on the assignment from the beginning.

I did not understand then how literally that word would prove true, or how long the gathering would take, or how many rooms it would run through before arriving at this one. Now, as the founding director of the Office of Ecumenical Engagement for the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship International, I see another moment of this vocation of gathering waters.

A Gospel Gumbo

I grew up Missionary Baptist. That was home, the first language of my faith, the cadence I learned to pray in before I could explain what I believed. But faith is rarely tidy, and mine took a detour in my teenage years when my father united with a Black United Methodist congregation, where I was confirmed and later baptized by immersion. Then came an encounter that reordered everything: a life altering, trajectory shifting experience with the Lord inside an independent charismatic church, the very place where my call to ministry was began to take shape.

By the time I was seventeen, I had already lived inside three distinct streams of Black Christianity: Missionary Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal-Charismatic. I did not choose that hybridity. It chose me. And for years I wrestled with what it meant to carry all three inside one body, one calling, one theological imagination. I have come to call this inheritance my gospel gumbo, a phrase that captures something true about the Black church tradition itself. We have never been as denominationally pure as our church marquees suggest. We have always been simmering together, borrowing from each other, feeding each other, even when our official bodies kept a polite and sometimes not so polite distance.

College deepened the flavor of that gumbo rather than resolving it. I encountered Reformed theology, Anglican and Episcopal liturgy, Catholic sacramental imagination. I returned to my Baptist roots, but I returned as someone who had traveled and could not unsee what I had seen. I came home affirming women in ministry and every operation of the Spirit’s gifts, while also believing deeply in structure, order, and the discipline of a written prayer alongside the fire of an extemporaneous one. I was, by then, thoroughly unwilling to be a denominationalist while still loving my denomination. The Lord’s church is bigger, richer than that.

It was also at the University of Mississippi that I met one of my most formative mentors, a Bapticostal clergy couple. They carried deep ties to the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship International, and their mentorship became the first current in what I now recognize as a series of increasing waves, each one pulling me closer to a shore I would not reach for another two decades.

Duke Divinity School gave that conviction a scholarly home. Under the shadow of Karl Barth and the neo-orthodox tradition, I found language for what I had been living intuitively for years: that the church catholic is bigger than any single household within it, and that fidelity to one tradition does not require blindness to the gifts of another. Duke also gave me something more embodied than language. I sat under a New Testament scholar who prayed in tongues in the quiet of his own devotion, and I studied under a professor who had come up in the United Holy Church before becoming Missionary Baptist, a walking archive of the Sanctified church tradition. Watching serious, credentialed scholars hold that kind of hybridity without apology or explanation gave me further permission to do the same. They did not just teach me about the wider Spirit-filled tradition. They helped me embrace it as my own.

Coming Home to Bridge Work

My first job after divinity school was with Mission Mississippi, a racial and denominational reconciliation ministry working across the state. It was not incidental training. It was providence, preparing my hands for the work they would do for the next two decades.

When I became pastor of Mt. Helm Baptist Church, I inherited a congregation whose very walls carried an ecumenical inheritance. Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason commenced a holiness revival there that was, from its very inception, interdenominational in spirit and development. The Spirit that gathered saints across denominational lines in that sanctuary over a century ago was the same Spirit that had been gathering me since I was a teenager. I did not choose Mt. Helm’s ecumenical DNA. I inherited it, and it recognized something in me that I recognized in it.

From there the assignments multiplied, each one a further widening of the gathering. I served as ecumenical affairs lead for the General Missionary Baptist State Convention of Mississippi (GMBSC). I created an ecumenical affairs commission for the National Baptist Convention USA. I now serve as third vice president of the GMBSC, where ecumenical engagement remains part of my portfolio. Our fight to change the Mississippi state flag, and other social and political moments besides, became occasions to organize across denominational lines toward a broader Kingdom agenda, because the truth is that the powers we are up against have never respected our internal boundaries, and neither should our resistance.

One moment stands out as a kind of signpost. One hundred twenty five years after the Holiness revival that began at Mt. Helm, I had the privilege of bringing leaders from the Church of Christ Holiness USA, the Church of God in Christ, and the General Missionary Baptist State Convention/National Baptist Convention back home to Mt. Helm for a commemorative service honoring that shared legacy. Watching those traditions, born from one Spirit and scattered by history, gather again under one roof, I understood that I had been rehearsing for this my whole ministry.

The Office This Was Always Building Toward

The waves kept increasing. Seven years ago, I formally joined the Full Gospel and serve its Young Pastors Division, decades after my mentor at UM had first pulled me toward that shore. What began as an influence on my formation became, in time, a fellowship I could claim as my own.

All of it, the gospel gumbo of my youth, the mentorship that pointed me toward Full Gospel before I had words for it, the reconciliation work in Mississippi, the ecumenical commissions, the commemorative gathering at Mt. Helm, has culminated in this new assignment as founding director of the Full Gospel’s Office of Ecumenical Engagement. Bishop Joseph Warren Walker III leads a fellowship that sits, quite naturally, at the intersection of the very traditions that formed me: Baptist and Pentecostal, structured and Spirit-filled, charismatic and intellectual, rooted and reaching. I am not being asked to become someone new for this role. I am being asked to finally be fully myself in service to the wider body of Christ.

A Second Convergence

Full Gospel itself was born from this same impulse to gather. Thirty three years ago, Bishop Paul S. Morton had the courage to build a fellowship that said they did not have to choose. That founding was its own convergence, following in the footsteps of Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason a century earlier, another generation refusing to let denominational walls outlast the Spirit’s movement.

I believe we are arriving at another such moment. Millennials and Gen Z believers are hungry in a similar way. They are seeking spiritual renewal and revitalization, and they are deeply resistant to being boxed in by inherited categories that feel smaller than the God they are encountering. Full Gospel has an extraordinary opportunity here, the chance for a kind of resurgence of what happened three decades ago, this time carried by a new generation of leaders who, like Jones, like Mason, like Morton before them, are declaring that the kingdom is bigger than our denominational maps and that the Spirit is doing something that refuses to be boxed in.

I share all of this not to recount an autobiography but to speak a word to anyone who has ever felt like a spiritual mutt, an ecclesial in between, too Pentecostal for the Baptists and too Baptist for the Pentecostals, too structured for the charismatics and too free for the traditionalists. I want to say to you plainly: you are not odd. You are not weird. You are not confused. You are a trailblazer, and the very hybridity that has made you hard to categorize may be the exact instrument God intends to use to gather what has been scattered.

The church has spent centuries building walls between traditions that were never meant to be strangers to one another. Somebody has to be willing to stand in the doorway. Somebody has to be able to speak Baptist ecclesiology and Pentecostal pneumatology in the same breath without feeling like a traitor to either. Somebody has to remember that Baptist pastors nCharles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason once gathered as one before history and human frailty pulled them apart, and that what was divided can, by the same Spirit, be gathered again.

Charles Price Jones himself said it best when he declared that denominationalism is slavery. Not denomination itself, which can be a faithful house for the Spirit to dwell in, but denominationalism, the hardened insistence that one’s house is the only house. The historian Jaroslav Pelikan made a kindred observation about tradition more broadly, noting that tradition is the living faith of the dead, while traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Jones was naming in ecclesial terms what Pelikan named in historical ones. The line between a tradition that lives and a tradition that has calcified into a prison is not the tradition itself. It is whether the Spirit is still free to move within it.

That has always been my assignment, to stand in that line and insist the Spirit remains free. Now it has an office, a title, and a fellowship wide enough to hold it. I step into this work as a bridge, a reconciler, an ambassador, grateful for every tradition that shaped me, and I believe we are on the edge of a revival, a restoration, a renewal that neither Baptist nor Pentecostal alone could carry, but that a gathered and convergent church might. The prophet Isaiah gave us the picture toward which all of this bends: for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9). That is the river I saw cascading down the mountain all those years ago. That is the river I am still being gathered into, and still gathering others toward, until the waters cover the earth and the glory is unmistakable.

In February 2010, Princeton scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr. published a provocative essay in the Huffington Post titled “The Black Church is Dead.” The piece ignited a firestorm. Some praised it as a long-overdue hard truth, while others condemned it as elitist and out of touch. Nearly everyone on both sides, however, made the same mistake: they read it as a death certificate for Black church engagement with social struggle.

That is not what Glaude actually argued, however. His thesis was more precise and, I would contend, more useful. What had died, he wrote, was not Black churches themselves, but the idea of the Black church as a singular idea. What remained were Black churches in the plural, in all their diversity, contradiction, and vitality.

He was right about that. Unfortunately, the misreading of his eulogy has done real damage by feeding a narrative that was already well entrenched. That narrative goes something like this: once, not so long ago, the Black church was the moral backbone of a movement. It marched. It organized. It sheltered freedom riders and launched voter registration campaigns. It produced prophets. And then, somewhere around April 4, 1968, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it got prophetic laryngitis and retreated into respectability, prosperity, and political quietism. The Black church, this narrative insists, abandoned its calling as an agent of social transformation and has never fully returned.

I am writing not to romanticize the Black church and not to excuse its failures, but to interrogate this revisionist narrative and insist on the historical record, which is considerably more complicated and considerably more hopeful than the eulogy suggests.

The Problem of the Monolith

Before we can honestly assess what the Black church has or has not done, we must reckon with a foundational problem of definition. “The Black church” is not a naturally occurring institution. It is a social scientific construct, a term forged by scholars studying African American religious life as an institutional specimen rather than as the extraordinarily complex constellation of congregations, denominations, doctrines, cultures, and regional traditions it actually represents.

This is not a new observation. W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in The Souls of Black Folk and later in The Negro Church, for instance, grappled with the diversity and internal tension within Black religious life even as he attempted to describe its common features. Carter G. Woodson, in The Miseducation of the Negro, pressed further still. He lamented the ways Black intellectuals educated in white or more liberal institutions had distanced themselves from Black churches rather than investing in their development. Woodson’s critique was not that the Black church had failed the community. It was that the community, especially its educated class, had in many ways failed the church.

More recently, Raphael Warnock, in his essential work The Divided Mind of the Black Church, maps the deep and persistent internal tension within Black religious life between the tradition of prophetic protest and the tradition of personal piety. Warnock’s deeper question is whether these streams must remain in conflict or whether piety and protest might be held together as a unified, Spirit-empowered witness. His framing matters precisely because it resists the urge to flatten the Black church into a single story. There have always been multiple Black churches, with multiple theologies, multiple politics, and multiple understandings of what faithful witness requires.

When we ignore this complexity and treat the Black church as a monolith that either heroically marched or shamefully retreated, we commit an act of intellectual dishonesty that sets us up for the very myth we most need to dismantle.

The Golden Age That Never Was

Here is the hard truth at the center of this conversation: the civil rights era Black church was never as uniformly engaged as our collective memory insists. Research suggests that only approximately 3 percent of Black congregations were institutionally active in the civil rights movement. That does not mean there were no activists in Black church pulpits or pews; there were, in enormous numbers. As institutions committing their buildings, their budgets, and their corporate witness to the movement, however, only a small minority were fully enrolled.

The evidence is not abstract. Consider the National Baptist Convention, the largest Black Protestant denomination in the country. Its president for decades, Joseph H. Jackson, did not support Dr. King’s nonviolent direct action campaigns. His approach was more conservative or nationalist and more focused on institution-building than on confrontation. The conflict between his vision and King’s grew so acute that King’s allies eventually broke away to found the Progressive National Baptist Convention in 1961, a denomination born in direct protest of the dominant model of Black Baptist social engagement.

Or consider Chicago, where Pastor Clay Evans invited King to speak and organize at his congregation and was subsequently blackballed by other Black pastors for doing so. The movement was never monolithic, and neither was the church’s response to it.

We have constructed a golden age that, upon closer inspection, was always a far more complicated picture. The period from Reconstruction through the civil rights era certainly produced extraordinary prophetic witnesses. It also produced accommodation, division, and active resistance to the very movements we now celebrate. To pretend otherwise is not to honor our legacy. It is to distort it and to use that distortion as a blunt instrument against the churches of today.

A Spectrum, Not a Standard

Robert M. Franklin, in his landmark work Crisis in the Village: Restoring Hope in African American Communities, offers a framework that cuts through the mythology with precision. He describes Black churches as existing along a spectrum of five phases of ministry: charitable relief, midterm support, social services, justice advocacy, and comprehensive community development. The crucial insight is that no congregation and no denomination operates across all five phases at all times. Some churches focus primarily on charitable work, meeting immediate needs with food, clothing, and emergency assistance. Others invest in social services including counseling, youth development, and housing support. Still others organize economic action, pursue legislative change, or develop land and housing through community development corporations. Many engage several of these at once, in different proportions, across different seasons.

This spectrum is not a hierarchy. A congregation faithfully running a food pantry and a GED program is not failing to be prophetic. It is doing the priestly and servant work its community requires, with the resources it has, in the tradition it has received. The question has never been whether every Black church does everything. It has been whether the full range of ministry across the full spectrum is present and active. It is. It has been. As it relates to justice work specifically, by almost any honest measure, the scope of that engagement is broader today than it was sixty years ago.

More Churches, More Engaged

Here is the argument that almost never gets made: there are probably more Black churches actively engaged in civic and justice work today than there were during the era we romanticize. Consider the mathematics. If only approximately three percent of Black congregations were institutionally active in the 1950s and 60s, and if the overwhelming consensus among Black pastors and denominational leaders today is alignment with the Kingian tradition rather than the Jacksonian one, then the landscape of engagement has genuinely shifted.

More pastors preach justice from the pulpit. More congregations participate in civic coalitions. More denominational bodies have adopted justice platforms as official positions. The National Baptist Convention under President Boise Kimber, for example, has reasserted its commitment to social justice advocacy. The Progressive National Baptist Convention has never wavered from its founding prophetic mandate. Across the COGIC, AME, AME Zion, CME, the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship International, Black Apostolic denominations, and Disciples of Christ communities, among others, you will find bishops, pastors, and congregations who are not apostates from a justice vision but its active inheritors. They show up at city halls, courthouses, and state legislatures. They organize clergy cohorts around criminal justice, health equity, voting rights, housing, and economic justice. They are not waiting to be discovered. They are already there.

The Work Is Being Done

I can speak to this from the ground, not from a distance. In Mississippi, one of the most structurally unequal states in the nation, Black clergy and congregations are active on multiple fronts simultaneously. Through Clergy for Prison Reform, which I founded, Black pastors across the state have organized around the dignity and humanity of incarcerated people and their families. Clergy joined the successful campaign to change the state flag, which bore the Confederate battle emblem for over a century. We have pushed for Medicaid expansion and advocated for the restoration of voting rights for returning citizens. As 3rd Vice President of the General Missionary Baptist State Convention of Mississippi, I can tell you every year we are engaging in those five phases of ministry.

Mississippi is not exceptional. It is representative. Black churches throughout the nation are doing work collaboratively with the NAACP, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, National Urban League, National Action Network, the Poor People’s Campaign, the Black Church PAC, Faith Out Loud, Conference of National Black Churches, among others. When people ask where the Black church is, I want to ask them back: where are you looking? The work is not hard to find. It is only hard to see if you have already decided it is not there.

An Altar Call

Dr. King himself said it plainly: it has never been everybody. It has always been a dedicated, creative minority that moves history forward. The civil rights movement was not carried by all Black churches. It was carried by a committed few, supported by many, and opposed by some. That is the record, and that has always been the record. By that same standard, the work being done today by faithful Black congregations across this country is not a disappointment. It is a continuation.

The answer to “where is the Black church?” is not a eulogy. It is a geography lesson. The Black church is on the corner, in the statehouse, at the jail, in the classroom, at the ballot box, and in the streets. It is imperfect, diverse, sometimes frustrating, and absolutely irreplaceable. What we do not need is another obituary written by someone who has not attended a church board meeting, a denominational convention, a clergy organizing session, or a legislative hearing where Black pastors showed up again to speak truth to power.

What we do need is more amplification of those doing the work, more resources flowing toward those in the fight, and more scholars, writers, and public intellectuals willing to stop critiquing from a distance and start investing in the communities they claim to care about. As Woodson urged, write and teach among the people rather than simply lamenting them.

And if you are already in the work, if you are the pastor organizing your clergy cohort, the deacon chairing the housing committee, the layperson running the prison ministry, know this: the narrative of the fallen Black church is not about you. Do not let it demoralize you. Keep going.

Say your prayers. Roll up your sleeves. Connect with the congregation, the coalition, the denomination doing the work in your community. And let us get it done.

The Black church never left the fight. Quit writing its obituary.

There is a fire that warms the cold and illumines the dark. It draws the wandering eye and steadies the trembling hand. It is the kind of fire you lean toward rather than flee from, the kind that does not destroy what it touches but instead reveals what has always been there, waiting to be seen. I have felt that fire this week across two states, in prayer meetings and press conferences and silent marches and thunderous rallies. And on the eve of Pentecost Sunday, I find I cannot separate what I witnessed in the streets from what happened in that upper room. I am persuaded, more than ever, that this is precisely the point. What we are experiencing in the Deep South is a kairotic moment akin to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, which was, at is core, a kind of revival aflame with divine power. What we are sensing is a Pentecostal power and the politics of the Spirit.

Tabernacle

It began for me last Saturday in Selma, Alabama, at Tabernacle Baptist Church for a Day of Action.

The name alone carries weight for those who know the history. In 1894, while Charles Price Jones served as its pastor, he encountered something he would spend the rest of his life trying to describe: an empowerment for life and ministry that carried him beyond everything his scholarly formation and cultural development had yet provided. That encounter marked him permanently. One year later, he came to Jackson, Mississippi, to pastor Mt. Helm Baptist Church, and from the movement that eventually emerged through Jones and his colleague Charles Harrison Mason, came the tradition I have come to call Bapticostalism, a stream of Spirit-empowered witness whose roots run far deeper than most people know.

I did not sit in Tabernacle last Saturday as a tourist. I was there as an heir.

The gathering that assembled there was a convergence of the ecumenical Black church in all its varied streams — AME, COGIC, National Baptist, and more. And what was remarkable was how quickly those streams recognized one another. Different polities, different liturgies, different vocabularies for the same fire. Rev. Traci Blackmon of Faith Out Loud set the tone with a declaration that cut through all the strategic conversation: We begin in worship because worship is an act of resistance. This was not a pep rally with a religious opening. This was a mass meeting in the full historical sense where the Spirit of God is understood to be not merely an honored guest but the commanding presence, the one whose power alone makes any of this possible.

When the prayer meeting ended, we marched in silence toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We tend to think of Pentecost in terms of noise. The sound of a mighty rushing wind. The cacophony of tongues. The bewildered crowd. We associate the Spirit with volume, and there are moments when that is exactly right — when the shout is the only appropriate response and the body can no longer contain what God is doing. But there is another register of the Spirit’s work. Elijah, exhausted after Carmel, did not find God in the wind or the earthquake or the fire. He found God in the sound of sheer silence. And it was there that he received his commission. Walking across that bridge in silence, I felt something I had known theologically but experienced freshly in my bones: contemplative silence is not the absence of the Spirit. It is the condition under which the Spirit’s whisper becomes audible. It is what allows us to see the flickering of the flame before the conflagration comes. The marchers of 1965 crossed that bridge were met with clubs and tear gas. We crossed it in silence and were met with something harder to name; a weight, a presence, a sense that the ground itself had been hallowed by those who bled there, and that we were walking on holy ground.

Outpour

Five days later, I was in Jackson, Mississippi — my city, my home — and the skies were threatening rain for our Day of Action. The forecast had forced a shift in plans. Instead of the route we had anticipated, we marched from one of the museums through the downtown streets, circumventing the city’s center as the clouds gathered overhead. The rain didn’t came, not then, at least. But something else did. Sixty-five hundred people from across Mississippi and the Deep South had gathered, and as we moved through those streets under that heavy sky, there was an energy that had nothing to do with the weather. The outpouring the heavens withheld, the people provided. The rain came later, in a deluge, as if the sky finally caught up to what had already happened on the ground.

The day unfolded in waves. Hundreds gathered for the morning press conference, where I was asked to offer a moral centering message. I traced the arc of Mississippi history — first Reconstruction and its promise, the violent backlash that dismantled it, the second Reconstruction of the Civil Rights Movement era, and the long backlash we are still living through. I wanted people to understand that this moment is not an aberration. It is a recurring pattern, and it requires not only political analysis but prophetic memory.

I ended by reaching back 61 years, to another state capital, to the steps of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood before the crowd that had completed the Selma-to-Montgomery march and declared: My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He was not engaging in rhetorical flourish. I believe he was making a theological claim that the Spirit of God was visible to those with eyes trained to see it, that the freedom movement was not merely political but apocalyptic in the original sense, a pulling back of the veil to reveal what God is doing in history. Sixty-one years later, standing in Jackson, I was trying to say the same thing.

Thousands filled the rally that afternoon. When I opened it in prayer, I was told later something moved through that crowd that I am careful not to claim credit for. I brought myself, my voice, my theology, my love for Mississippi and for the people who had gathered. But what happened was not mine to manufacture. People began to shout. Some wept. The earth shook, one observer testified. Afterward, people spoke of an anointing in every syllable prayed and every breath carrying. To God be the glory! This is what Ephesians 6 is gesturing toward: our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, against spiritual forces that no amount of strategy and organizing alone can overcome. You cannot defeat a spiritual force with only material weapons. The movement forgets this at its peril.

That evening, two hundred and more gathered at Mt. Helm Baptist Church — the congregation Charles Price Jones came to pastor after his transformative season in Selma, the congregation I have been privileged to serve since 2010. From Tabernacle to Mt. Helm. From Selma to Jackson. The Spirit seemed to be drawing a line across the geography, reminding everyone present that we are not starting something new. We are continuing something very old.

It felt, unmistakably, like a movement.

The Upper Room

Between the ascension and Pentecost, Jesus told the disciples to wait. Not to strategize. Not to elect officers. Not to draft a mission statement. But to wait for the promise of the Father, for the power from on high that would make all their subsequent action genuinely effective rather than merely busy.

There is a discipline in that waiting that we have largely lost. We are so trained toward action and output and measurable results that a community gathered in sustained, expectant prayer for ten days before doing anything sounds almost irresponsible. And yet it was precisely in that communal, contemplative, Spirit-attentive waiting posture that the conditions were created for everything that followed.

When the fire fell, it fell on all of them. Not only the apostles. Not only the men. It fell on the 120, a motley gathering of the committed and the confused. And it transformed them. Cowardly Peter, who had denied Jesus three times in the cold courtyard, who had fled when the soldiers came, stood up and preached with a boldness that arrested thousands. This fragile, frightened community became the movement that would later be accused of turning the world upside down.

They did not turn it upside down in their own strength. They turned it upside down in the power of the Spirit. And that is the word that must be recovered: power. Not performance. Not platform. Not the mere appearance of spiritual vitality. The dunamis Jesus promised in Acts 1:8 is a power for witness that is embodied, enacted, costly, and ultimately irresistible.

We come from power. We come with power. Pentecost is the reminder that this has always been true.

Pentecost and the Black Church in This Moment

Around this time each year, a familiar and beloved conversation surfaces in Black Pentecostal and charismatic circles about Pentecost Sunday. And I want to be clear: I am not here to diminish any of it. The praise break, the holy dance, the fervor, the fire — these are not embarrassments to be explained away. They are the body’s witness that something real has happened, that the Spirit of the living God has actually shown up and done something to a person that their composure cannot contain. I am for all of it.

But Pentecost must mean more than a shout.

Pentecost must mean the claiming of the empowerment part — the power to bear witness to the gospel in the public square, to stand up and speak truth to power with love, to reclaim the fire and the passion and the pathos and the purpose that made the Black church, at its very best, the conscience of America. The shout that does not send us into the streets is an incomplete Pentecost. The tongues that do not eventually translate into prophetic speech before principalities and powers have not yet fulfilled their vocation.

What we cannot afford either is a quiet accommodation to the Reformed cessationism and disenchanted deism that characterizes so much of modern American Christianity: the functional belief that God has largely stepped back from history, that the Spirit’s more dramatic movements are safely in the past, that faith is primarily a matter of right doctrine and right behavior rather than living encounter with the living God. The Black church did not survive slavery and segregation via dead orthodoxy. It survived because it knew, in its bones, that there is a power beyond us and that power was available, present, and on the side of the bound and the broken.

Some evangelical scholars are careful to note that Pentecost was an unrepeatable event — a singular inauguration of the age of the Spirit, the once-for-all fulfillment of what Joel prophesied and Jesus promised. They are not entirely wrong. But we must insist with equal force on what they sometimes underemphasize: while Pentecost as historical event is singular, Pentecost as ongoing reality is the very atmosphere the church is meant to inhabit. The promise, as Peter declared that day, is for you and for your children and for all who are far off.

The fire is still available.

What we need in this moment, with all our learning and with burning, is to know that the Spirit of God is at work among us, in us, through us, and by such we are empowered to bear witness and ultimately to overcome the world. With both Holy Ghost heat and light, we can make turn the world upside down and bend the long arc of the moral universe toward justice.

Most architects of Black disenfranchisement in post-Reconstruction America preferred the cover of civic neutrality. Poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, residency requirements: none of these named race explicitly. All of them operated with racial precision. The genius of that grammar was its deniability, the capacity to do deliberate racial harm while insisting, before any judge or journalist, that one was merely protecting the integrity of the ballot. James K. Vardaman, Mississippi state senator and later governor, understood all of this. He simply refused to pretend.

There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter.... Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics. Not the ‘ignorant and vicious’, as some of the apologists would have you believe, but the nigger.... Let the world know it just as it is.... In Mississippi we have in our constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the Negro.... When that device fails, we will resort to something else.

Vardaman did not invent anything. He narrated what the men in that convention hall already knew and had carefully encoded into constitutional language. What makes his statement worth returning to is that last sentence. When that device fails, we will resort to something else. It was not a threat born of frustration. It was a statement of settled methodology: the goal was fixed, and the mechanisms were interchangeable. Whatever neutral-sounding instrument could be fashioned to accomplish Black political erasure would be fashioned and deployed. Race was the constant. The constitutional device was merely the variable.

That sentence describes not only 1890. It describes 2013. It describes 2026. It describes the living tradition we are contending with right now.

II. What the 1890 Constitution Destroyed, and What It Exported

The Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890 did not emerge from a vacuum. It was a direct assault on the 1868 Reconstruction Constitution, which had extended full political participation to Black Mississippians and produced one of the most politically engaged Black electorates in American history. Under Reconstruction, Black Mississippians had served as sheriffs, legislators, judges, and United States senators. Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce had both represented Mississippi in the Senate. The 1868 Constitution made this possible. The 1890 Convention was convened specifically to make it impossible again.

The mechanisms were familiar in form and devastating in effect. A poll tax of two dollars, substantial for families living on the margins of sharecropper subsistence, had to be paid before one could register. A literacy test, administered by white registrars with unchecked discretion, could disqualify any Black applicant regardless of actual education. An understanding clause required voters to interpret any section of the state constitution to the satisfaction of the registrar, a requirement that could be failed by any Black voter and passed by any white one, on the same text, on the same day, at the registrar’s sole discretion. Residency requirements and a two-year waiting period added further layers.

The results were not ambiguous. In 1867, during Radical Reconstruction, approximately 67,000 Black men were registered to vote in Mississippi. By 1892, two years after the new constitution, that number had collapsed to fewer than 9,000. By 1898, the Black electorate had been functionally reduced to nothing. The 1890 Constitution accomplished in less than a decade what outright terror alone had not been able to accomplish: the legal disappearance of Black political life in Mississippi.

The delegates in Jackson in 1890 knew they were making history of a particular kind, and the rest of the South was watching. Within a decade, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina had all adopted versions of the Mississippi template, each tailoring the specific instruments to local conditions while preserving the essential architecture: facially neutral mechanisms targeting constitutionally protected rights, deployed with surgical racial intent and defended in the language of civic order. The Mississippi Plan became the South’s most successful legal export of the Reconstruction era.

It traveled further than the American South. Scholars of comparative colonialism have traced the structural logic of the Mississippi Plan to the architecture of South African apartheid, which borrowed the grammar of racially targeted disenfranchisement dressed in administrative neutrality. The poll tax, the literacy test, the pass system: different instruments, same logic. The goal was always the exclusion of a people from political power through mechanisms that could be defended in the language of orderly governance. What Mississippi refined in 1890, South Africa systematized in 1948. The Mississippi Plan was not a regional embarrassment. It was a global export with a long afterlife.

III. How Black America Answered Jim Crow: Divergent Responses to the Crisis

The consolidation of Jim Crow did not produce one Black response. It produced a spectrum of strategies, each rooted in a different assessment of where power lay, what the Church and community could realistically accomplish, and what the long-term survival and flourishing of Black people required. Understanding that spectrum is essential for reading our own moment, because the same diversity of response is visible among Black institutions and leaders today.

Booker T. Washington offered the strategy of accommodation and industrial self-sufficiency. Accept, for now, the political realities of disenfranchisement. Build economic independence through vocational training and demonstrated competence. Cultivate the goodwill of white philanthropists and business leaders. Earn recognition through productivity rather than demand it through agitation. Washington’s Tuskegee model was not without genuine accomplishment, and his reading of the raw power differential facing Black communities in the 1890s was not naive. But the strategy carried a cost that W.E.B. Du Bois named precisely: accommodation is not the same as strategy, and accepting second-class citizenship as a temporary concession has a way of becoming permanent.

Du Bois answered with the demand for full civic equality and the cultivation of what he called the Talented Tenth: a vanguard of educated Black leaders who would press, without negotiation or apology, for the complete rights of citizenship. The Niagara Movement and, eventually, the NAACP were built on this refusal of any bargain that accepted disenfranchisement as a workable starting point. Du Bois understood that the state would not grant what the community did not demand, and that demand required organization, intellectual clarity, and the willingness to name racial injustice by its name in every available public forum.

Ida B. Wells chose investigative exposure and international shame. Her anti-lynching journalism, carried to audiences in Britain and beyond, was built on the conviction that documented truth wielded publicly was a form of power the state could not simply legislate away. If American institutions would not hold the architects of racial terror accountable, the court of international opinion might. Wells understood that sunlight was a disinfectant, and she applied it with a courage that cost her nearly everything, including her life in Memphis, which she was forced to flee under threat of death after her office was destroyed.

The Black Church was not one thing in this season either. Some congregations aligned closely with Washington’s posture, prioritizing institutional stability and relationships with white denominations and philanthropists. Others became centers of organizing, resistance, and prophetic witness, understanding the Church not merely as a spiritual refuge but as the primary institution through which Black civic life could be sustained when the state had closed every other door. The question Jim Crow forced on every Black institution was the same: What is your posture when the state has declared you politically nonexistent? And the answers differed, sometimes sharply, across denominations, congregations, and generations.

IV. The National Baptist Convention and the Theology of Institutional Resistance

The founding of the National Baptist Convention in 1895, the same year Charles Price Jones arrived at Mt. Helm, was itself a political act as much as an ecclesiastical one. Its first president, Elias Camp Morris of Arkansas, understood that the formation of an independent Black Baptist institution represented a declaration: that Black Christians would govern their own theological and spiritual life, would train their own ministers, publish their own literature, and support their own missionaries, without the oversight or benevolence of white denominations. At the moment when the Mississippi Plan was being copied across the South, Morris and the NBC were building the alternative infrastructure that Black communities would need to survive and resist.

Morris was clear-eyed about the relationship between spiritual formation and civic resistance. He did not believe that the Church’s role was to retreat from the public crisis into private piety. He believed that the formation of a spiritually serious, educationally equipped, institutionally grounded Black community was the precondition for any other form of resistance. The NBC was, in his hands, an instrument of both evangelical conviction and racial uplift, and he did not experience those as competing commitments.

Nannie Helen Burroughs is indispensable here, and she is too often reduced to a footnote in narratives where she deserves a chapter. Her founding of the Woman’s Convention auxiliary to the NBC and, in 1909, the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C., was a theological-political statement of the first order. At the precise historical moment when Black women were the most thoroughly disenfranchised Americans, denied the ballot by race and by sex, excluded from most professional institutions, and rendered nearly invisible in public life, Burroughs built an institution premised on the conviction that they were capable of the fullest intellectual, vocational, and civic formation. Her motto, “We specialize in the wholly impossible,” was not motivational rhetoric. It was a theological claim about what the Spirit makes available to people the world has written off. Burroughs understood that education was liberation, that formation was resistance, and that the institution of the Church was the primary site at which Black human dignity could be cultivated and defended when the state offered nothing but its systematic diminishment.

Taken together, Morris and Burroughs represent the National Baptist tradition at its most prophetically serious: institution-building as spiritual discipline, education as liberation theology, and the conviction that the Church’s response to political erasure is not retreat but the construction of alternative structures of dignity, power, and formation that the state cannot reach.

V. Mt. Helm, Charles Price Jones, and the Fire That Jim Crow Could Not Contain

Into this landscape, in 1895, came Charles Price Jones to the pastorate of Mt. Helm Baptist Church in Jackson. The church was already historic: founded in 1835, it was Jackson’s oldest historically Black congregation, a community anchor through slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. But by the time Jones arrived, it had been weakened by years of pastoral instability and internal division. The congregation that had once been a pillar of Black religious life in the city was in need of renewal at every level: spiritual, organizational, and theological.

Jones arrived from Selma, Alabama, already carrying a fire that the ordinary rhythms of Baptist church life had not produced and could not contain. This was not Wesley’s doctrine of sanctification per se imported into a Baptist framework, as if Jones had simply read the Methodist divines and decided to adapt their conclusions. What Jones carried was a homegrown Baptist hunger for the fullness of the Spirit, rooted in his own encounter with Scripture and in the revivalist streams already moving through Black Baptist churches across the Deep South: a hunger for victorious sanctification, for the manifest power of God, for the experiential reality of the Holy Ghost available not only to clergy or to the theologically trained but to every believer, including the sharecropper who could not read and the domestic worker who had never seen the inside of a seminary.

The theological claim was radical in its social implications. If ordinary Black people, the same people the 1890 Constitution had declared politically nonexistent, could be filled with the very power of God, could prophesy and heal and speak and lead under the anointing of the Spirit, then the state’s account of their humanity was simply wrong. Not merely unjust, not merely cruel, but ontologically mistaken. The Spirit’s presence in a community constituted a counter-testimony about the nature and dignity of that community that no constitutional convention had the authority to overrule.

Jones was not only a revivalist. He was a theologian, a hymn writer of extraordinary gift, a race man whose pan-Africanist instincts linked Spirit-empowerment directly to Black dignity, Black institution-building, and Black self-determination. His uplift theology was never mere accommodation: he did not counsel Black Mississippians to earn their way into white recognition. He insisted that Black people already possessed, by virtue of the Spirit’s indwelling, everything they needed to build, to lead, to create, and to resist. His more than one thousand hymns, including “Deeper, Deeper,” “Jesus Only,” and “I’m Happy with Jesus Alone,” and “The High Place” were not the music of people who had made peace with their diminishment. They were the sound of people who had found, in the depths of God, a dignity that no legislature could touch, and a power the world cannot give or take away.

Charles Harrison Mason, born to formerly enslaved parents in Tennessee, came alongside Jones as a co-laborer and kindred spirit. Together, in 1896, they gathered a circle of ministers similarly aflame with the hunger for Spirit-fullness and co-founded at Mt. Helm what would become the Church of God in Christ. It is interesting to note that Jones was mentored by Morris, and that both he and Mason had attended Arkansas Baptist College, of which Morris was once the president. The later break between Morris and Jones, et al., should be understood as the Baptist quest for freedom and ultimately Jones and Mason taking the Baptist tradition they inherited to its logical biblical ends. Together, these various streams of Black Baptist resistance were a divine no to the doctrine of demons promulgated in law by white supremacy. The state of Mississippi had spent six years perfecting the legal instruments of Black political disappearance. Jones and Mason were planting a Holiness movement in the same soil, at the same moment, among the same people yearning for multidimensional liberation.

VI. Toward a Bapticostal Political Theology of Resistance

I have argued elsewhere that Charles Price Jones is the father of Bapticostalism: that synthesis of Baptist theological seriousness and Pentecostal-charismatic pneumatology that is not a compromise between two traditions but a third way with its own integrity, its own genealogy, and its own genius. The Mississippi context does not merely provide background for that argument. It provides its essential logic. Bapticostalism was not born in a comfortable theological negotiation between denominations or in some ivory or ebony tower. It was born under the full weight of Jim Crow, in the years when the Mississippi Plan was doing everything constitutionally possible to render Black life politically invisible. The pneumatology at the center of the Bapticostal tradition was not developed in the abstract. It was developed by people for whom the Spirit had to be real because everything else had been taken from them.

What does that tradition instruct, now that Louisiana v. Callais has struck the second major blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, following the gutting of Section 5 preclearance in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013? What does it say to the Church in the week that the Roberts Court rewrote Section 2’s operative standard, effectively restoring the intent-based test that Congress specifically rejected and overruled in its 1982 amendments, leaving partisan gerrymandering, already immunized from federal challenge since Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, as the new constitutional cover for racially discriminatory maps? What does it say about Project 2025’s proposed restructuring of the DOJ Civil Rights Division, its voter roll purge mechanisms, its criminalization of voter assistance, the whole operational architecture of the new Mississippi Plan dressed in the grammar of administrative neutrality?

The Bapticostal tradition, read carefully, offers the beginnings of a political theology adequate to this moment. It rests on several interlocking convictions.

The Spirit is political. Not partisan, but political. The Holy Spirit’s presence in a community produces people who cannot finally accept the state’s account of their dispensability. Pentecost itself was a political event: a colonized people under Roman occupation, gathered in an upper room, filled with a Power that overran every boundary the empire had drawn, that made unlearned fishermen into articulate leaders and produced a community in which the ordinary markers of human hierarchy were relativized by the presence of the living God. To be filled with the Spirit is to be constituted as a people whose ultimate identity is not issued by the state and therefore cannot be revoked by the state, but found fully in the crucified, resurrected, and ascended Jesus of Nazareth. This is not escapism. It is the foundation of a resistance that does not depend on favorable court rulings to sustain itself.

The Word anchors the resistance. The Baptist commitment to Scripture is not separable from the political witness; it is its source. The same Bible that declares every human being made in the image of God, that commands justice to roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, that records the Spirit of the Lord anointing the servant to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound: that Bible will not permit a quietist Church. The Bapticostal response to Callais is not merely outrage. It is theological obligation. We are not simply angry citizens. We are a people under a Word that has never made peace with the legal architecture of human diminishment. We know who and whose we are, that we are citizens of a heavenly country and already seated royally and victoriously with Christ in heavenly places.

Howard Thurman named what Jones and Mason had already demonstrated. In Jesus and the Disinherited, he argued that the religion of the disinherited was not the opiate that critics described but an encounter with a Power that relativized every earthly power, including the power of the state to define who you were and what you were worth. Prathia Hall called it freedom-faith: the conviction that God’s domain exceeded the state’s domain, that the Spirit’s empowerment was preparation for, not flight from, the work of justice. Neither Thurman nor Hall was counseling withdrawal from politics. They were describing the formation of people whose political engagement could be sustained across generations of defeat because its root system ran deeper than any court could reach.

Institution-building is a spiritual discipline. Jones built. Mason built. Morris built. Burroughs built. The NBC, COGIC, the National Training School: these were not merely pragmatic responses to exclusion. They were acts of Spirit-led community formation, the creation of alternative structures of dignity, education, and power precisely because the state’s structures were designed to destroy. In the aftermath of Callais, the Church is called not only to protest but to build. Voter registration infrastructure. Civic education. Redistricting litigation coalitions. Advocacy networks. Community institutions that outlast any single administration or court term. The tradition we have inherited is not merely a tradition of preaching. It is a tradition of construction, and the present moment demands both.

Divergent responses will come again, as they always do. Some will counsel accommodation to the new legal reality: accept the maps, work within the constraints, preserve institutional relationships that require a certain quietude. Some will invest entirely in electoral strategy and litigation, placing their hope in the next congressional majority or the next court appointment. Some will withdraw into congregational life, deciding that the political world is too corrupt to engage. The Bapticostal tradition, at its best, refuses all three of these as inadequate. It insists on Spirit-empowered engagement: politically serious, institutionally committed, exegetically grounded, and ultimately rooted in a confidence that does not depend on Washington’s good faith because it was forged in the years when Washington’s good faith was nowhere to be found.

VII. A Word from Mt. Helm

I write this from Jackson, Mississippi, where I serve as the twenty-third pastor of Mt. Helm Baptist Church, the same congregation Charles Price Jones led in 1895 when he was laying the foundation of everything described in these pages. I am aware, with a weight that is not easy to name, of what it means to stand in that place. The building has changed. The city has grown. But the congregation is still here, still gathered, still worshipping on the ground where the Holiness revival that would seed two global movements first took root in Mississippi soil.

The priestly-prophetic call I carry at Mt. Helm is not separable from this history. The priest stands before God on behalf of the people, interceding, consecrating, declaring the holiness and mercy of the One in whose presence all earthly arrangements are relativized. The prophet stands before the people on behalf of God, naming what is true, what is unjust, what the Word demands that the present moment acknowledge. Jones held both. Burroughs held both. Mason held both. The tradition I have inherited insists that you cannot have one without the other, that the priest who will not prophesy has abandoned half of what the people need, and that the prophet who will not intercede has forgotten where the power comes from.

In this moment, with Callais freshly handed down and the new Mississippi Plan operating with the blessing of six justices, the Black Church is being asked the same question the 1890 Constitution asked of Jones: What will you do when the state says no? The answer the Bapticostal tradition has always given, and the answer I believe this hour requires, is not silence, not despair, not accommodation, and not mere outrage. It is the freedom-faith that organizes and builds and preaches and prays and litigates and teaches and refuses, Spirit-filled and exegetically serious and institutionally committed, to be finally erased.

Vardaman promised something else when the devices failed. The devices have been rebuilt, refined, and now constitutionally blessed again. But the something else that Jones and Mason and Morris and Burroughs built in the shadow of the original Mississippi Plan has crossed every boundary that plan tried to draw. It has outlasted every iteration of the architecture of disappearance. And it is still here, still burning, still being poured out on sons and daughters, still producing people who know, in their bones and in their Spirit, that the state does not have the last word.

The Mississippi Plan lives on. So does the movement of the Spirit it could never contain.

It’s a fair question on its surface posed my many readers. But it misreads the history — and, more importantly, it misidentifies the mechanism. What looks like abandonment is actually something far more complex: a convergence of intellectual, racial, and institutional pressures that suppressed ecstatic, Spirit-driven worship from elite Black Baptist spaces, while it survived — sometimes quietly, sometimes defiantly — everywhere those pressures couldn’t reach.

The question assumes that majority practice is the measure of theological authenticity. But that’s a sociological argument, not a historical or theological one. Majority practice doesn’t tell us what is native to a tradition; it tells us what was powerful enough to dominate it. The better question isn’t why did many Black Baptists abandon the pneumatic stream but what forces were powerful enough to suppress a deeply rooted spiritual practice, and did it ever actually disappear?

Before we get to the forces of suppression, the framing itself deserves scrutiny. When we ask “why did Black Baptists abandon X,” we’re already conceding ground we don’t have to concede. We’re accepting that there was a clean break and that something vital was simply let go.

But traditions don’t work that way. They stratify. They go underground. They migrate geographically and socially to the communities least subject to the dominant pressures. What gets recorded and celebrated in denominational histories, seminary curricula, and convention minutes is not the whole tradition; it is the tradition as filtered through its most credentialed and institutionally powerful voices.

The question is: who had the microphone, and who was controlling the room?

I submit, then, that we should explore some of the factors contributing to suppression. What follows is an attempt at a genealogy of sorts.

Force One: German Liberal Theology and the Rationalization of Protestant Faith

The 19th century reshaped Western Protestant Christianity in ways that are still underappreciated in conversations about Black church history. The theological academy — from Schleiermacher’s turn to religious feeling as inward and private, through Albrecht Ritschl’s reduction of Christianity to ethical community, through the broader trajectory shaped by Kant’s critical philosophy — was systematically demystifying Protestant faith.

Anything ecstatic, pneumatic, spectacular, or embodied was increasingly coded as primitive, pre-modern, or epistemically suspect. Miracles became metaphors. The Spirit became conscience. Genuine encounter with the living God became, in the academic mainstream, a theological embarrassment.

This was not neutral scholarship. It was a Europeanizing of theological norms — a thoroughgoing rationalism that privileged interiority, decorum, and intellectual respectability over embodied, Spirit-driven encounter. And it traveled through seminaries, educated clergy, and the theological journals that shaped how educated ministers thought about God and worship.

Black Baptist leaders seeking academic credibility — especially post-Reconstruction, as they were building seminaries, conventions, and national institutional infrastructure — were absorbing these norms, often through the very institutions that trained them. This was not simple capitulation; it was the price of intellectual access. But the result was that a generation of Black Baptist leaders began to treat the ecstatic and pneumatic dimensions of their tradition with at best ambivalence, and at worst shame.

What German liberalism did, in short, was provide an intellectual framework in which shouting, Spirit possession, tarrying, and miraculous encounter were not just unsophisticated but deemed heathenism and that framework had enormous downstream consequences for how Black Baptist elites or progressives thought about and shaped their worship.

Force Two: Respectability Politics and the Weaponization of the White Gaze

German liberal theology was damaging enough on its own. But what made the suppression specifically racial was the politics of racial survival under Jim Crow.

In the context of systemic racial terror, legal disenfranchisement, and the constant white gaze that pathologized Black bodies and Black behavior, Black ecstatic worship was not simply embarrassing to elites. It was dangerous. It fed the racist narrative that Black people were emotionally ungovernable, intellectually primitive, and crucially , unfit for civic life, political participation, or spiritual leadership.

The strategic response by many Black progressives influenced by the logic that Du Bois’ Talented Tenth framework was to prove otherwise. They endeavored to adopt the forms of worship that looked recognizably “civilized” by white Protestant standards. By demonstrating capacity for ordered, reasoned, dignified religious life, so they thought, they would be seen as less of a target white supremacist violence.

Du Bois himself captures the agonizing complexity of this in The Souls of Black Folk. He honors the Sorrow Songs and what he calls the “Frenzy” — the ecstatic dimension of Black religious life — as the authentic spiritual expression of a people who had survived the unsurvivable. And yet his own prose around these moments is shot through with a protective ambivalence, an anxiety about how they will be received, a desire to translate them into terms that educated, cosmopolitan readers can appreciate without condescending to them.

That ambivalence is respectability politics in real time. It is the double consciousness applied to worship itself. This is the layer that makes the suppression not just intellectual but existential. It wasn’t only that ecstatic worship seemed theologically unsophisticated. It was that it seemed to confirm what white supremacy was already saying about Black people. And under those conditions, the pressure to restrain, regulate, and eventually eliminate those expressions from polished Black Baptist worship was not merely cultural preference — it was a survival strategy.

Force Three: Institutional Consolidation and the Grammar of Convention Culture

The third force is more structural and perhaps more insidious because it is harder to name as oppression. As Black Baptist conventions consolidated — the National Baptist Convention USA forming in 1895, with its enormous institutional gravity — polity, decorum, and credentialed leadership became the markers of legitimacy.

The convention model rewarded formal preaching, structured worship, parliamentary procedure, and academic pedigree. These are not inherently bad things. Order and excellence have always been part of the Black Baptist tradition. But the grammar of convention culture was increasingly defined in ways that marginalized the more charismatic, spontaneous, and pneumatically charged expressions of the tradition with the exception, maybe, of the whoop.

Rural, folk, and independent Black Baptist communities didn’t disappear. But they didn’t set the agenda. The denominational center of gravity had shifted to urban elites, seminary-trained clergy, and nationally prominent preachers whose gifts were shaped by, and whose reputations depended on, the conventions. And those conventions — like most large institutional bodies — were not fully hospitable to the ecstatic stream.

What gets written into denominational histories, preached at national gatherings, and taught in seminary classrooms is the tradition as seen from the convention center and not the mourners’ bench or the all-night prayer meeting. The center wrote the story, and for a long time, the margins weren’t in the room.

Never Fully Abandoned: The Counterevidence

Here is where the argument turns from defensive to constructive. Because even if we grant the full weight of these three converging forces the pneumatic stream was never fully suppressed. It survived. In some places, it thrived.

The Low Country

The Gullah and Geechee communities of coastal South Carolina maintained African-retentive spiritual practices well into the 20th century and in many ways to the present. Ring shouts, Spirit possession frameworks, embodied prayer, the integration of African cosmological assumptions into Christian worship didn’t disappear when the denominational conventions moved toward respectability. They continued in communities that were geographically insulated, culturally distinct, and less subject to the pressures bearing down on urban Black Baptist elites.

Mechal Sobel’s Trabelin’ On and Albert Raboteau’s Slave Religion document this continuity with scholarly rigor. These communities were Baptist. Many of them maintained their Baptist identity across generations while also maintaining pneumatic and ecstatic worship practices. They are not an anomaly or an exception to Black Baptist history.

Delta Religion in Mississippi and Arkansas

The Black Baptist world of the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta maintained a raw, embodied, Spirit-saturated worship culture that was continuous with the antebellum pneumatic tradition. The mourners’ bench. The tarrying room. Shouting that was not performance but encounter. Prayer that assumed the Spirit would move visibly and tangibly. The kind of worship that produced both the blues and a fierce, uncompromising expectation of divine presence.

These weren’t Pentecostal churches, at least not in the early 20th century institutional sense of that word. They were Black Baptist communities that had never been told — or had never accepted — that the Spirit’s dramatic movement was incompatible with Baptist identity. They simply kept worshipping the way their grandparents had worshipped, because nobody with the authority to stop them had reached them yet. Or because they refused to be reached.

This is living in my own backyard. The Delta pneumatic tradition is not ancient history. It is within living memory, and its echoes are still felt in Black Baptist congregational life across Mississippi and Arkansas today.

The Charles Price Jones / Charles Harrison Mason Reformation

This is the most powerful historical exhibit of all — and the one most directly relevant to the Bapticostal framework I’ve been developing.

Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason did not import something foreign into Black Baptist life at the turn of the 20th century. They retrieved and formalized what was already latent and suppressed within it. Jones — a Black Baptist pastor, hymn writer, and theologian of the first order — articulated a pneumatology rooted in the theology of sanctification that the convention world was pushing to the margins. His insistence on the Spirit’s ongoing, active, transforming work in the life of the believer was not borrowed from Pentecostalism — it preceded Azusa Street. It was a Black Baptist pneumatology, indigenous to the tradition, that the respectability-driven convention could no longer contain.

Mason’s encounter at Azusa Street in 1906 took the trajectory further, leading to the eventual founding of the post-Jones Church of God in Christ — the largest Black Pentecostal denomination in the world. But the root was Baptist, and the impulse was retrieval, not innovation. Mason and Jones were not importing something alien. They were refusing to let go of something that was being taken from them.

This matters enormously for the historical argument. If the pneumatic stream had truly been abandoned — truly let go — there would have been no energy behind the Jones/Mason reformation. There would have been no groundswell of ordinary Black Baptist people who recognized in their pneumatological preaching something they had been hungry for, something that felt like home. The reformation worked because it was resonating with a memory that had not been erased, only suppressed.

What “Abandonment” Actually Looks Like

Let me be precise about what the historical record shows. What happened in 20th century Black Baptist institutional life is stratification.

The convention-educated urban elite moved toward respectability. This was, in many ways, a painful and pragmatic choice under conditions of racial terror and the need for institutional legitimacy. We should not romanticize the costs they were paying or dismiss the pressures they were navigating.

But rural, low-country, and Delta communities, along with the reformation stream represented by Jones and Mason, maintained and in some cases intensified the pneumatic inheritance. They were not doing something different from the tradition. They were doing the tradition, in the face of forces that were trying to reshape it.

The charismatic Black Baptist stream was systematically pressured out of elite Black Baptist spaces by a convergence of German liberal theological norms, racial respectability imperatives, and the gravitational pull of institutional consolidation. And even under all of that pressure, it wasn’t fully let go. It survived in geographic pockets, in folk practice, and in the reformation movements that retrieved it and gave it new institutional form.

The Bapticostal tradition I’ve been describing and defending is not a novelty. It is not a borrowing from Pentecostalism, or a theological hybrid created by people who couldn’t make up their minds. It is the retrieval of what was always there — the Spirit-soaked, pneumatically alive, ecstatically expectant stream of Black Baptist life that was suppressed but never extinguished.

In previous essays in this series, I have been making the case that what I call Bapticostalism — the Word and Spirit identity recovered and institutionalized most visibly through the ministry of Charles Price Jones is not a theological novelty or a cultural borrowing from twentieth-century Pentecostalism. It is, rather, a retrieval. It is the reassertion of something older, deeper, and more indigenous to Black Baptist faith than the respectable, restrained, cessationist piety that came to dominate Black Baptist institutional life over the course of the twentieth century. To make that case fully, however, requires us to reckon honestly with a question that often goes unasked: how did cessationism become so dominant in the Black Baptist world in the first place? And what happened to the charismatic stream that it displaced?

The Baptist tradition has never been theologically uniform. From its earliest formations in seventeenth-century England, Baptist life has contained multitudes. General Baptists and Particular Baptists, Arminian Baptists and Calvinist Baptists all make up the family. On the specific question of pneumatology Baptists have likewise been divided between cessationists, who hold that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit ceased with the apostolic age, and continuationists or charismatics, who insist that the Spirit’s gifts remain available to the church in every generation. Cessationism has never been a formal article of faith for Baptists as a whole. It is a theological tradition within a tradition, one that gained dominance through specific historical pressures rather than through confessional consensus.

In the Black Baptist context, those pressures have a name. They go by the name of respectability.

Defining the Sanctified Church: Hurston, Gilkes, and Sanders

To understand what was suppressed, we must first understand what it was. The charismatic stream within Black Baptist and broader Black Protestant life did not exist in a vacuum. It belonged to a wider ecosystem of Spirit-accented faith that scholars have come to identify under a single evocative label: the Sanctified Church.

No one gave that tradition a more precise or more prophetic definition than Zora Neale Hurston. Writing from her unique position as both an insider to Black Southern religious culture and a trained ethnographer, Hurston described the sanctified church as a revitalizing phenomenon that had arisen among various groups of “saints” across America. Crucially, she insisted that it was not a new religion. Cheryl J. Sanders, drawing on Hurston’s work in her landmark study Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture, renders Hurston’s definition this way:

[Zora Neale Hurston] defines the Sanctified church as a revitalizing phenomenon that had arisen among various groups of “saints” in America. It is not a new religion and “is in fact the older forms of Negro religious expression asserting themselves against the new.” Moreover, the Sanctified church is a “protest against the high-brow tendency in Negro Protestant congregations as the Negroes gain more education and wealth.”

— Cheryl J. Sanders, Saints in Exile, pp. 3–4

Hurston’s definition is worth sitting with. She is not describing a marginal or deviant movement. She is describing something prior — something that predates the highbrow tendency and that refuses to be absorbed by it. The sanctified church, on this reading, is not a departure from authentic Black religious tradition. It is authentic Black religious tradition pushing back against a more recent and socially constructed version of respectability.

Sociologist Cheryl Townsend Gilkes sharpens this historical picture considerably. Sanders also cites Gilkes’ definition:

Sociologist Cheryl Townsend Gilkes has defined the Sanctified church as a segment of the black church that arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, beginning at the end of Reconstruction, in response to and largely in conflict with postbellum changes in worship traditions within the black community. Its distinguishing mark is adherence to the traditions of oral music and ecstatic praise associated with slave religion. The label “Sanctified church” emerged within the black community to distinguish congregations of “the saints” from those of other black Christians, especially the black Baptists and Methodists who assimilated and imitated the cultural and organizational models of European-American patriarchy.

— Cheryl J. Sanders, Saints in Exile, pp. 3–4

Gilkes’ precision is invaluable here. She gives us a dateable origin — the end of Reconstruction — and a legible social mechanism: assimilation to European-American patriarchal models of church life. The suppression of ecstatic, oral, Spirit-accented worship was not, at its root, a theological conclusion. It was an assimilationist strategy. It was the price that upwardly mobile Black Protestant institutions were willing to pay for social legitimacy in a post-Reconstruction world.

It is Sanders herself who brings these threads together with her framing of the Sanctified Church tradition as a community living perpetually in exile — exiled not from America only, but also from the mainstream of Black Protestant respectability. Her work recovers the integrity, the depth, and the ecclesial coherence of a tradition that has too often been dismissed as emotionalism or enthusiasm. For Sanders, these saints were not simply expressive. They were resistant. Their worship was not disorder. It was defiance.

The Genealogy of Suppression

How, then, did cessationism and the suppression of charismatic expression become so entrenched within Black Baptist life specifically? The answer requires us to trace two converging streams — one flowing from outside the Black Baptist world, and one flowing from within.

The first stream originates in the Princeton theological tradition. Charles Hodge and his successor Benjamin B. Warfield constructed what became the dominant intellectual architecture of cessationism in American evangelical life. Warfield’s Counterfeit Miracles (1918) argued that miracle-working power passed away with the apostles and could not be transmitted beyond those upon whom the apostles had personally laid hands. For Warfield, miracles belonged exclusively to what he called the revelatory period — the biblical era — and any subsequent claim to miraculous gifts was, by definition, suspect. His cessationism was not merely a theological position. It was, as scholars have noted, a Protestant polemical move designed to draw a clear boundary between orthodox Protestantism and what he regarded as the heterodox openness to contemporary miraculous gifts shared by Roman Catholics, proto-Pentecostals, faith healers, and theological liberals alike. John MacArthur’s Strange Fire conference of 2013 is only the most recent and most public expression of the tradition Warfield consolidated.

What is crucial to note, however, is that the Hodge-Warfield cessationist stream was never the only respectable option available within the white Protestant world — not even in Warfield’s own era. Charles Spurgeon, arguably the most celebrated Baptist preacher of the nineteenth century, was no cessationist. A close reading of Spurgeon reveals someone who spoke openly of direct Spirit impressions in his own ministry — well-documented accounts of his naming specific sins of specific individuals during sermons with an accuracy he attributed to the Spirit’s immediate operation. Spurgeon belonged to an experiential Baptist piety far more pneumatically alive than anything Princeton theology produced.

And A.J. Gordon, the Baptist minister who founded what is now Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, wrote The Ministry of the Spirit in 1894, one of the most important continuationist texts of the nineteenth century from within a Baptist framework, arguing explicitly for the ongoing availability of spiritual gifts in the life of the church. Spurgeon and Gordon were not theological outliers. They represented a genuine and academically credible stream of Baptist pneumatology that stood in direct contrast to Hodge and Warfield.

We would do well to reach further back still. The Sandy Creek Baptist tradition, rooted in Shubal Stearns and the Separate Baptist movement of the mid-eighteenth century in the American South, was explicitly and enthusiastically continuationist in practice. Sandy Creek Baptists were known for ecstatic worship experiences, immediate Spirit impressions guiding ministry decisions, and an evangelistic fervor marked by physical and emotional manifestations of the Spirit’s presence. The Sandy Creek tradition is, in fact, the direct ancestral stream of much of Southern Baptist and Black Baptist life in the American South. Which means the charismatic inheritance being retrieved today is not peripheral to Baptist history in America. It is close to the root of it. The cessationism that displaced it was a later importation, not the original soil.

The question that haunts Black Baptist history is this: what would it have looked like if the Black Baptist reformers who were constructing the institutional and theological frameworks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had imbibed more of Spurgeon and Gordon than of Hodge and Warfield? The road not taken was not some exotic Pentecostal path. It was a fully Baptist, fully respectable, academically credentialed continuationist tradition — available, being argued, and embodied in towering figures of the same era. The choice to move toward Princeton rather than toward Gordon was not theologically inevitable. It was socially and institutionally shaped.

And that shaping leads us to the second stream flowing from within Black Baptist life itself. The post-Reconstruction Black church, particularly among its educated leadership class, was profoundly anxious about the association of Black religion with what its critics called fanaticism or enthusiasm. E. Franklin Frazier documented this anxiety with characteristic precision. The formation of the major Black Baptist conventions was shaped in no small part by a middle-class ecclesial vision that defined itself against ecstatic religious expression. Holiness and Spirit-accented worship were coded as lower-class, uneducated, and emotionally unstable. To embrace them was to risk confirming every caricature that white America had leveled against Black religion. Respectability demanded distance from enthusiasm and cessationism, absorbed from Princeton, provided the theological language to justify that distance.

These two streams — external Reformed influence and internal respectability politics — converged to produce a Black Baptist mainstream that was increasingly inhospitable to the charismatic inheritance it had once carried. And the contemporary moment only sharpens the indictment. Today, even within the white Reformed evangelical world, cessationism is far from settled. Craig Keener’s two-volume Miracles (2011) mounts the most exhaustive scholarly defense of continuationism available in any language. Sam Storms argues for the ongoing gifts from within a rigorously Reformed framework with books like Understanding Spiritual Gifts and The Language of Heaven. John Piper’s very public disagreements with MacArthur on this question have demonstrated that the continuationist position is not the property of theological enthusiasts — it is a position being argued with exegetical seriousness by some of the most credentialed scholars in the evangelical academy. If the white Reformed world can debate the perceived cessationist consensus, the question must be pressed: why must Black Baptist institutions treat the matter as closed?

Tributaries of Survival

Black Baptists who have defended a more charismatic tradition have often been exiled. But exile is not extinction. And the charismatic stream in Black Baptist life, though suppressed, was never silenced.

It survived in tributaries. It survived in the work of Charles Price Jones, whose insistence on the fullness of the Holy Spirit as an experiential reality for Baptist believers led to his expulsion from the Black Baptist mainstream and ultimately to the formation of what would become the Church of God in Christ and Church of Christ (Holiness) USA — a Bapticostal institution that preserved the Word and Spirit identity when the conventions would not. It survived in pockets within state conventions, in individual congregations that maintained a more pneumatically alive worship culture even while formally aligned with cessationist institutional bodies. It survived in the quiet charismatic renewal that moved through Black Baptist churches throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century, often unnamed and untheorized but unmistakably present.

And it survived, most visibly and institutionally, in the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship International. When Paul S. Morton led the formation of the FGBCFI in 1994, it can be contended he was not importing something foreign into the Baptist tradition. He was giving institutional expression to something that had always been there — something that had been pushed to the margins, exiled from the conventions, but never fully extinguished. The FGBCFI became a home for Black Baptist believers who had felt the fire and refused to pretend they hadn’t.

What we see in the contemporary moment — the blurring of worship aesthetics between Baptist and Pentecostal congregations, the prevalence of charismatic preaching and prayer forms in churches that remain formally Baptist in polity and theology, the growing discomfort among younger Black Baptist believers with a cessationism they have never found convincing — is not a crisis. It is a homecoming. The stream that went underground is rising again.

The Retrieval Call

The argument here is not that all Black Baptists should become charismatics. Baptist pneumatological diversity is real, and it deserves to be honored rather than flattened. There is a legitimate Reformed Baptist tradition, and it has produced genuine theological fruit. Cessationism is a coherent position, even if I do not ultimately find it persuasive.

The argument, rather, is this: the dominance of cessationism in Black Baptist life is not a theological inheritance. It is a social and historical formation with a dateable origin and an identifiable set of causes. It was produced by the convergence of external Reformed influence and internal respectability politics in the postbellum and early twentieth-century Black church. And it came at a cost — the exile of a Spirit-accented tradition that was, as Hurston insisted, older than the highbrow tendency that displaced it.

To retrieve that tradition is not to abandon Baptist identity. It is to recover a dimension of Baptist identity that was suppressed but never destroyed. Charles Price Jones was not out of step with Baptist tradition. He was arguably more in step with the actual diversity of Baptist pneumatological history than the reformers who exiled him. The Sandy Creek Baptists knew something about the Spirit that the Princeton theologians never taught. Spurgeon felt something in the pulpit that Warfield’s cessationism could not account for. And Gordon wrote it all down for anyone willing to read.

The saints were sent into exile. But exile, as the biblical tradition consistently reminds us, is not the end of the story. The Spirit was not silenced. The stream kept flowing. And the river, as the old song says, is rising still.

The same white church that prayed on Sunday morning to a crucified Savior largely refused to see the crucifixion being enacted in its own backyard. White theologians wrote elaborate doctrines of the atonement. White preachers extolled the suffering of Christ. White hymns filled sanctuaries with lyrical meditation on Calvary’s hill. And yet, almost universally, white Christianity looked away from the lynching tree. It did not draw the connection. It did not see what it meant that a people who claimed to follow a lynched God were themselves doing the lynching. Cone writes with controlled grief that this theological blindness was not accidental but was the cost of comfort. To see the lynching tree clearly would have required seeing the cross clearly. And to see the cross clearly would have demanded repentance that white Christianity was not prepared to make.

This is the prophetic edge of Cone’s work, and it must be named plainly on Good Friday: the avoidance of the lynching tree was the avoidance of the cross. They cannot be separated. To love Jesus and ignore the lynching tree is to love a Jesus of one’s own making. Cone writes, “Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”

But there is another side to Cone’s argument, and it is the side that most deeply illuminates the spiritual genius of the African American Christian tradition. Because while white Christianity was looking away, Black Christianity was looking straight at it and finding something white theology had not yet understood.

Black Christians in America did not come to Jesus through comfort. They came to him through the cotton field, the auction block, the whip and the chain and the tree. And when they encountered the crucified Christ, something happened that was not merely sympathy or historical identification. It was recognition. They knew this Jesus. Not abstractly. Not doctrinally. They knew him the way you know someone who has been where you have been, who has felt what you have felt, who has survived — or not survived — what you have survived.

This is what the Sorrow Songs carry. W.E.B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, called the spirituals the singular gift of Black America to the world’s musical inheritance. The spirituals were born in suffering, shaped by sorrow, and saturated with a longing that had nowhere earthly to land. And among the most elemental of those songs is this: Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen / Nobody knows but Jesus.

Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen / Nobody knows but Jesus.

That “but Jesus” is doing enormous theological work. Not merely a lyric, it is a Christological confession of the highest order saying Jesus knows, hears and sees. This Jesus isn’t impassible but is touched by our infirmities, acquainted with grief, a man of sorrows. Jesus knows from inside the experience of abandonment, false accusation, state-sanctioned execution, of a death that looked, from every external vantage point, like defeat.

This is what Cone means when he says that the cross and the lynching tree must be brought together. Not as a rhetorical move, but as an act of theological clarity. Black Christians who sang “Nobody knows but Jesus” were not being sentimental. They were identifying their suffering with a suffering that God had already entered, already inhabited, already refused to merely observe from the outside. Jesus did not watch the crucifixion. He endured the cross, despising its shame. The crucified God is God with us.

This is why African American faith in Jesus has historically been so radical, so resilient, so resistant to the forces that tried to break it. The enslaved were told, by those who held the whip and the Bible simultaneously, that Christianity meant submission, that heaven was the reward for docility, that God had ordained their suffering. But by the power of the Spirit and the clarity that only the suffering can see they found a different Jesus in those same pages. They did not make Jesus Black to suit a grievance. They recognized him as One who had been made nothing, who had, as Paul writes in Philippians 2, emptied himself of divine privilege and taken on the form of a servant, becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. That “even the death of the cross” is not decorative. In the Roman world, crucifixion was reserved for the lowest, the most despised, the most dangerous to the order of empire. It was a death designed to say: you are nothing, you are nobody, you have no power here. And it is precisely that death — that particular, socially specific, politically laden death — that God chose to enter.

Good Friday is the day that Black faith makes its deepest sense.

It is not in spite of the cross that African Americans have clung to Jesus with such ferocity across four centuries of suffering. It is because of it. The cross is not an embarrassment to be explained away or a transaction to be understood primarily in legal terms. It is the place where divine solidarity with human suffering was made irrevocable. Cone argues that this is not a cheap comfort. It does not resolve the suffering. It does not explain it. On Good Friday, we do not pretend that Sunday has already come. We sit with the darkness. We stay with the cry of dereliction. We resist the urge to rush past the cross to the empty tomb, because the resurrection means nothing if we do not take the crucifixion seriously.

But we stay at the cross not in defeat. We stay because we have learned from those who have suffered most that this is where Jesus can be found, not in the halls of imperial power, nor in the sanitized liturgies that refuse to name the lynching trees still standing in our land. He is found among the condemned, the cry that goes unanswered, in the strange solidarity of a God who refused to remain above it all.

Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.

Nobody knows but Jesus.

And that — on this dark and holy Friday — is enough.

Matthew 20:26–28 (NKJV)

Before Robert Greenleaf wrote a word about it, before any organization enshrined it in a motto, before any leadership theory gave it a name, Jesus of Nazareth defined it. He defined it not with a lecture but with a life. He defined it not with a policy paper but with a towel and a basin, with a cross and an open tomb. If we want to understand what servant leadership truly means, we do not begin with a framework. We begin with a Person.

Matthew 20 captures a moment of raw ambition among the disciples. The mother of James and John comes to Jesus with a request that any leader in any era would recognize immediately: secure my sons a place at the top. Jesus does not rebuke the aspiration for greatness. He redirects it. You want to be great? Then become a servant. You want to be first? Then kneel down, put on an apron, and give your life away. This is not sentiment. This is the architecture of the Kingdom. Jesus is not merely a model for servant leadership. He is its source, standard, and its everlasting summons. If we are to follow Jesus, we must follow his example of servant leadership.

In his 1970 essay “The Servant as Leader,” Robert Greenleaf offered a formulation that remains magisterial in its clarity: the servant-leader is servant first. The impulse to lead does not precede the impulse to serve. It flows from it. Greenleaf distinguished the servant-leader from those who lead first and serve later, if at all. The servant-leader’s first question is not “How can I advance?” but “How can those around me grow?” His best test, he wrote, was this: do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? That test is not organizational but profoundly personal and theological.

Greenleaf was reaching, consciously or not, toward what Jesus had already revealed in Matthew 20. Servant leadership is not as much a management style as it is a moral posture. It is the decision to locate your greatness not in what you receive but in what you pour out.

Why Servant Leadership Is Critical to Black Legacy Organizations

As a pastor, HBCU chaplain, and member of a BGLO, I am aware that servant leadership is critical to our organizational survival. The Black church, the HBCU, the fraternity and sorority, the civic league and mutual aid society were founded by men and women who gave far more than they received, who served without guarantee of recognition, who planted trees under whose shade they would never sit. Unfortunately, the heirs of this legacy of service sometimes fail to emulate this virtue. Instead, we sometimes think leadership is about being served as opposed to being about service.

When servant leadership erodes in these spaces, something deeper than organizational effectiveness is lost. The founding covenant is broken and the mission calcifies into machinery. What was once a movement becomes a monument, and what was once a table where the community gathered becomes a stage where a few perform. Black legacy institutions cannot afford this mission drift. The stakes are presently too high for anything less than service before self.

The health of these organizations depends, in every generation, on leaders who remember that they were called to the work before the work called them to a title. We need leaders who grab a towel before they grasp for a title, and who know that oil is always superior to office.

I say this as a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated. Our motto is layered with gospel logic: First of All, Servants of All, We Shall Transcend All. It is not incidental that service precedes transcendence in that sequence. You do not arrive at transcendence by pursuing it. You arrive there by humbling yourself under God’s mighty hand and being exalted in due season. The fraternity’s Jewel Founders understood the Christ of Matthew 20 declared the road to the first position runs through the servant’s door.

Anybody Can Be Great

It was the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. who preached, in one of the final sermons of his life, the democratizing power of servant leadership. He said: everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.

Dr. King understood what Jesus had placed at the center of the Kingdom economy. Greatness is not rationed to the credentialed, celebrated, or the connected. It is available to anyone willing to be servant of all. That is the radical democracy of servant leadership. It does not flatten all roles or pretend that every contribution looks the same. But it insists that greatness is measured not by what you gather but by what you give. Not by who applauds you, but by who is lifted because you showed up.

To Serve This Present Age

Isaac Watts captured the weight of this calling in verse, and the church has carried it faithfully for centuries. The first stanza of his 1762 hymn stands as one of the most clarifying statements of purpose ever written:

A charge to keep I have,

A God to glorify,

A never-dying soul to save,

And fit it for the sky.

To serve the present age,

My calling to fulfill —

O may it all my pow’rs engage

To do my Master’s will.

Servant leadership, rightly understood, is not a diminishment of ambition. It is its purification. It takes the natural human drive toward significance and redirects it toward something that will outlast every title and survive every organizational chart. I believe the charge to serve the present age ultimately is the charge to make lives and communities better through our leadership. That is what Jesus was after in Matthew 20. That is what Greenleaf observed in the best leaders he ever witnessed. That is what the founders of our legacy institutions gave their lives to embody. That is what Dr. King declared from the mountaintop.

And that is the charge that remains before us today. Not vainglory. Not self-aggrandizement. Not the pursuit of the first chair for its own sake. But the deep, costly, glorious work of service. When we place mission above ambition, principle above preference, and purpose above personal gain, God is glorified, people are edified, and the enemy is horrified. The charge has not changed. To serve this present age with humility is still the greatest thing we can do for our communities.

It was, at the same time, an act of worship.

And it is precisely this — the insistence that those two things belong together — that makes the Triumphal Entry one of the most theologically loaded moments in the Gospel narratives and one of the most illuminating passages for the ongoing conversation about the soul of the Black church in America.

Warnock’s Divided Mind and Our Undivided Lord

In his formative study The Divided Mind of the Black Church, Raphael Warnock argues that the Black church has historically held two instincts in persistent tension: piety and protest. The piety tradition emphasizes personal holiness, spiritual transformation, otherworldly hope, and the cultivation of interiority. The protest tradition emphasizes prophetic engagement, social witness, this-worldly justice, and the confrontation of power. Warnock is not uncharitable to either stream. He recognizes that both are present in the tradition, both are rooted in Scripture, and both have been generative. But he names what many practitioners already feel in their bones: these two instincts have too often lived in separate houses, producing churches that are either spiritually warm but socially quietist, or prophetically bold but pneumatically thin.

What Palm Sunday does, however, is refuse that division at the level of Christology. The one riding into Jerusalem is not a Jesus who must choose between heavenly devotion and earthly confrontation. He is the Word made flesh, which means every gesture he makes is simultaneously theological and political, spiritual and structural. The Triumphal Entry is not a detour from the Passion. It is the Passion beginning in public, on the street, in the middle of the city, with a crowd that has opinions.

Jesus did not choose between worship and witness. He embodied both, and the crowd followed suit.

Piety: This Is What Worship Looks Like

Let us not rush past the devotional substance of this moment. What the crowd does on that road is, at its core, an act of worship. They spread their garments before him, which in the ancient world was a gesture of radical deference, the body itself becoming a carpet for the one deemed worthy. They cut branches and waved them, invoking the memory of the Feast of Tabernacles, that great Jewish celebration of God’s provision and presence. And they cried out, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”

Hosanna. It means, literally, “save now.” It is a cry born not in triumphalism but in need. The crowd was not performing confidence. They were performing desperation with hope mixed in, which is the truest description of worship I know. They had been waiting for a long time. Roman occupation was not theoretical. The taxation, the humiliation, the violence, the erasure of dignity — these were daily realities. And yet here they were, not rioting, not plotting, but singing. They were rehearsing, in the body, a reality they could not yet fully see.

This is piety in its deepest form: not the avoidance of struggle, but the insistence on praise in the middle of it. Howard Thurman wrote that the spiritual songs of enslaved Africans were not escapism. They were an act of interior freedom, the soul staking its claim against every force that said it did not matter. The Palm Sunday crowd was doing something structurally similar. They were singing the future into the present, with their coats on the ground and their voices in the air.

The Black church at its piety-best has always known how to do this. The old mothers who wept in the amen corner were not being naive about the world outside the church doors. They were refusing to let the world outside the church doors have the last word. There is a profound theology in that refusal. And Palm Sunday names it.

Protest: This Is What Confrontation Looks Like

But we must not spiritualize what was also a political act. Jesus made choices in this moment that were deliberately and publicly confrontational. He chose Jerusalem. He chose Passover week, when the city was swollen with pilgrims and Roman soldiers were on high alert for any sign of insurrection. He chose to ride on a colt, directly fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9, which announced a coming king, gentle yet victorious, whose dominion would stretch from sea to sea. He chose the road that descended from the Mount of Olives into the city, the same route that Roman governors would have used when entering the city with horses and armor to project imperial power.

Jesus’s entry was a counter-procession. It was a deliberate visual argument, staged in the same civic space where Caesar’s representatives staged their own, and it said, by its very form: there is another kingdom coming, riding on different terms, by different means, for different ends.

Scholars like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan drew this contrast sharply, noting that Pilate likely entered Jerusalem from the west that same week with full military display, while Jesus entered from the east on a borrowed donkey with a crowd of ordinary people. The juxtaposition was not accidental. It was the whole point.

This is what protest looks like when it is theologically grounded: not chaos, but clarity. Not mere reaction, but proclamation. The Palm Sunday procession announced something. It named who Jesus was and, by implication, who Caesar was not. It told the truth in public, in the street, with the body, at a moment when that truth was inconvenient and potentially dangerous. Luke tells us that some Pharisees in the crowd told Jesus to rebuke his disciples. Jesus answered that if they were silent, the very stones would cry out (Luke 19:40). The protest could not be stopped. It was cosmic. It was necessary. The creation itself was ready to join the demonstration.

“If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” — Luke 19:40. Sometimes silence is not holiness. It is complicity.

A Christology That Holds Both Together

What Warnock correctly diagnoses as a problem in the Black church is not, at root, a problem with the Black church. It is a problem of truncated Christology. When we divide piety from protest, what we have actually done is divided Jesus, and a divided Jesus cannot save anyone, because the salvation he brings is whole.

The incarnation itself is the union of the spiritual and the material. God did not send a disembodied idea into the world. He sent a body. A Jewish body in first-century Palestine under Roman occupation. A body that got tired and hungry, that wept at tombs, that touched lepers and called tax collectors by name, that turned over tables and told stories about lost coins. The Gospel of John declares that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), and the word for “dwelt” is literally “tabernacled.” God pitched his tent in the neighborhood. He moved into the community. And the community included its social structures, its power arrangements, its suffering and its longing.

This means that a Jesus who is only concerned with the soul and not the city is not the Jesus of the Gospels. And equally, a Jesus who is only a social reformer and not the Lord of heaven and earth is not the Jesus of the Gospels either. Palm Sunday holds the tension beautifully because the same crowd that is crying “Hosanna” — a prayer, a petition, a song of praise — is also making a political statement by their very presence in that procession, by the road they chose to walk, by the king they chose to acclaim.

The Black church at its best has always understood this intuitively, even when it has struggled to articulate it systematically. When the saints gathered in the brush arbors and invisible churches of slavery, they were practicing piety. When those same saints later gathered in Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham or in Dexter Avenue Baptist Church or in churches across the Mississippi Delta to plan marches and absorb beatings and sing “We Shall Overcome,” they were practicing protest. But it was the same community. The same Spirit. The same Lord. The division Warnock identifies is real, but it is a pathology, not a destiny.

Palm Sunday calls the Black church, and the whole church, back to an integrated Christology, one in which the Lord we worship on Sunday is the same Lord whose kingdom rearranges power, liberates captives, gives sight to the blind, and sets at liberty those who are bruised (Luke 4:18). The Magnificat is not metaphor. The Year of Jubilee is not poetry. The Triumphal Entry is not pageant. These are proclamations of a kingdom that is already coming and has not yet fully arrived, and the church’s task is to live in that tension without collapsing it in either direction.

The Road Ahead of the Crowd

There is one more thing Palm Sunday shows us, and it is perhaps the most sober gift the text offers. The crowd that praised him on Sunday was, within the week, largely silent or actively hostile. The same voices that cried “Hosanna” may well have cried “Crucify him.” This is not incidental to the story. It is the story.

Real piety and real protest are both costly. They require more than a parade. They require a willingness to follow the Lord past the crowd’s enthusiasm and into the harder places, through the Garden of Gethsemane, up the hill of Golgotha, and into whatever form of death faithfulness requires. The Black church has known this cost. The movement that sang in the streets also buried its children. The preachers who stood at the pulpit and told the truth also faced the dogs and the fire hoses and the assassin’s bullet.

Palm Sunday does not promise that integrated discipleship will be safe. It promises that it will be true. And that the Lord who enters the city is the same Lord who will, in three days, exit the tomb, having taken on every power that opposes the kingdom and having defeated them all, not by force, but by faithfulness. Not by the sword, but by the cross.

That is a Christology worth living. Worth worshiping. Worth marching for.

For the uninitiated, the Baptist fit can be understood as that moment in worship when something breaks open beyond the veil. The sermon has been building, or the choir has hit a note that didn’t come from rehearsal, or the congregation has been moaning through a prayer and the moan becomes something otherworldly. The Spirit takes the body takes over. The feet dance, the hands punch the air. There may be a shout, or a run, or a deep and wordless cry. There may be a stillness so total it looks like collapse. The ushers move toward the person, fans in hand, white gloves steadying a trembling form.

What many people do not recognize — and what I want to name clearly here — is that the Baptist fit is not a derivative. It is a source. When you see the holy dance in a Church of God in Christ (COGIC) service, when a praise break erupts in a neo-Pentecostal congregation, when a contemporary worship gathering gives way to something unplanned and uncontainable, you are watching streams that flow from a river that Black Baptist Christianity has been carrying for generations. The holy dance that Bishop Charles Harrison Mason reclaimed and institutionalized in COGIC was not foreign to his Baptist formation. It was native to it. What Mason did was refuse to let the broader Black Baptist establishment surrender what it always had. The praise break that now appears across denominations and traditions is, in many of its deepest instincts, a Baptist fit that has found new language and new rooms.

What underpins all of it — the fit, the dance, the break, the shout — is a pneumatological and cosmological understanding of human beings, worship, and divine encounter that runs deeper than any single denominational tradition. It is this understanding that the Bapticostal theological vision I have been developing seeks to name, retrieve, and articulate as a theological accent within the broader Christian inheritance.

To make that case, I want to bring two essential witnesses to the stand.

Du Bois and the Three Marks of the Black (Baptist) Church

The first witness is W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1903 — three years before William Seymour opened the doors at Azusa Street — Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk. Chapter X, “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” is one of the most searching and honest accounts of Black religious life ever written by a Black intellectual, and it is all the more remarkable for the ambivalence Du Bois brings to it. He is not a churchman. He is a sociologist shaped by Harvard. And yet what he sees in Black Baptist worship in the rural South stops him cold.

He opens the chapter recounting his first encounter with a Southern Black revival as a young New England schoolteacher, and his description is unforgettable:

“A sort of suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to seize us, — a pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lent terrible reality to song and word. The black and massive form of the preacher swayed and quivered as the words crowded to his lips and flew at us in singular eloquence. The people moaned and fluttered, and then the gaunt-cheeked brown woman beside me suddenly leaped straight into the air and shrieked like a lost soul, while round about came wail and groan and outcry, and a scene of human passion such as I had never conceived before.”

Du Bois reaches for classical distance — “pythian madness,” the oracle at Delphi, the language of ancient possession — because his intellectual training has not given him a better category. But he does not dismiss what he has seen. He confesses: those who have not witnessed this “can but dimly realize the religious feeling of the slave; as described, such scenes appear grotesque and funny, but as seen they are awful.”

From this encounter, Du Bois draws one of the most important analytical claims in all of American religious history. Three things, he argues, define Black religious life: the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy. His third mark carries the most theological weight. He writes:

“Finally the Frenzy of ‘Shouting,’ when the Spirit of the Lord passed by, and, seizing the devotee, made him mad with supernatural joy, was the last essential of Negro religion and the one more devoutly believed in than all the rest. It varied in expression from the silent rapt countenance or the low murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physical fervor, — the stamping, shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro and wild waving of arms, the weeping and laughing, the vision and the trance. All this is nothing new in the world, but old as religion, as Delphi and Endor. And so firm a hold did it have on the Negro, that many generations firmly believed that without this visible manifestation of the God there could be no true communion with the Invisible.”

The Frenzy came before Azusa. Du Bois is writing in 1903 and thusly is not describing a Pentecostal church. He is describing Black Baptist churches across the rural American South, a tradition that formed the overwhelming majority of Black Christian life in America at the turn of the twentieth century. When the Holiness and early Pentecostal revivals swept through the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were not introducing Black Christians to something new. They were, in large measure, drawing from what was already present in Black Baptist worship — the same embodied, ecstatic, Spirit-expectant practice that Du Bois had watched with his own eyes.

Mason and the Reclamation of the Holy Dance

No one understood this more clearly than Charles Harrison Mason. Before he was the cofounder Church of God in Christ, Mason was a Black Baptist. He was formed in Black Baptist spirituality, shaped by what he described as deep admiration for his parents’ prayer ritual, their spontaneous singing, and their shouting. The Baptist fit was not foreign to him. It was home.

When Mason and Charles Price Jones began preaching a greater emphasis on Holiness in the 1890s, they were operating from within the Black Baptist world, not outside of it. Answering his call to ministry at the height of lynching terror in Mississippi, Mason aspired to counter racist rituals of dehumanization by instituting rituals of rehabilitation for Black folks, among which were the holy dance and ardent expression in worship and preaching. This is the dimension of Mason’s reclamation that is most often missed. The holy dance was not merely a liturgical preference. It was a defiant biblical and anthropological claim: that Black bodies, the very bodies that white supremacy sought to terrorize and destroy, were sites of divine encounter, worthy of the Spirit’s habitation, capable of holy movement. To dance before the Lord was to declare that no lynch rope and no plantation theology had the final word on what a Black body was for. The holy dance he carried into COGIC was rooted in the Black Baptist sacred cosmos. Mason rescued it from those who were in the process of domesticating it out of existence.

The praise break you see in Pentecostal and now increasingly in Baptist churches today is Mason’s reclamation come full circle. It is the fit, traveling under a new name, finding its way back home.

The Fit and Frenzy Defended and Dignified

The Bapticostal tradition I am articulating names and defends this tradition against progressive respectability which unwittingly is itself a form of anti-Blackness and anti-biblical. The Baptist fit, and its various manifestations — the holy dance, the praise break, the shout, the trance, the vision, the wordless cry that rises when the Spirit passes through a room — are not liabilities to be apologized for, charismatic borrowings to be explained away, or relics of an unsophisticated past that a more educated Black church should have outgrown. They are essential, not as performance or cultural habit, but as the living expression of a pneumatological and cosmological inheritance that runs from the West African sacred cosmos, through the brush arbors and praise houses of enslaved Black people, through the three marks Du Bois documented in 1903, through Mason’s defiant reclamation, and into every Black Baptist congregation where somebody, even now, pierces the veil.

What Bapticostalism insists is that this deserves our theological attention. That the fit is not a footnote. That it carries within it a serious and coherent account of the Holy Spirit’s work.

Before Azusa, there was the Baptist fit.

The pneumatological orientation of Black Baptist Christianity is not a borrowing from Pentecostalism. It is not a late arrival to a tradition that was originally staid and restrained. It is, in fact, one of the oldest and deepest dimensions of Black Christian life, with roots that reach back through the Second Great Awakening, through the Invisible Institution of enslaved African religion, and all the way to the cosmological and anthropological frameworks that African peoples carried across the Atlantic in their bodies, their memories, and their souls.

To understand Black Bapticostalism, we have to begin here.

The World They Brought With Them

The men and women stolen from the African continent and brought to the Americas in chains did not arrive as blank slates. They arrived carrying with them sophisticated frameworks for understanding the world, the self, the community, and the sacred, frameworks that had been refined over centuries across the diverse cultures of West and Central Africa. These traditions varied considerably from people to people. But across that diversity, certain orienting convictions appeared with enough regularity to constitute something like a shared cosmological grammar.

In many of these traditions, the boundary between the material and spiritual worlds was understood to be permeable rather than fixed. The Spirit was not confined to some separate realm accessible only through special religious acts. The Spirit moved through the ordinary world, through water and fire and breath, through the bodies of the living and the memories of the ancestors. The community of the living did not stand alone; it existed in dynamic relationship with those who had gone before, and that relationship shaped the ethical, liturgical, and social life of the community in concrete ways.

Perhaps most important for our purposes is what these traditions held about the body. In much of Western Christianity, shaped by Platonic dualism, the body is understood as a vessel, a temporary container for the immortal soul. The goal of spiritual life, on this reading, tends toward the immaterial: the soul’s ascent, the mind’s illumination, the inner man’s purification. The body, at best, is incidental. The African cosmological traditions that shaped enslaved peoples carried a different anthropology altogether. The body was not a container for the spirit; the body was the site of spiritual encounter. It was through the body, through movement and rhythm and sound and physical expression, that the Spirit made contact with the human community. Healing, deliverance, prophetic utterance, and the presence of God were not primarily interior or intellectual events. They were registered somatically, felt in the flesh, expressed through the whole person.

Scholars of African American religion have documented this inheritance with care and precision. Albert J. Raboteau’s landmark study Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, 1978) remains the essential starting point, tracing in meticulous detail how African religious traditions were transformed but not destroyed through the ordeal of enslavement, and how those traditions shaped the distinctive contours of Black Christian worship and belief. Mechal Sobel’s Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton University Press, 1988) also makes the case most directly relevant to our argument: that the specific shape of Black Baptist faith was the result of a creative synthesis between African worldviews and Baptist Christianity, producing what Sobel calls a distinctive “Afro-Baptist Sacred Cosmos” that was neither simply African nor simply Baptist but something genuinely new and generative.

These books together establish what might be called the deep structure of Black Baptist pneumatology. The Spirit-expectancy, the embodied expressiveness, the corporate experience of divine presence, the permeable boundary between the sacred and the ordinary, all of these were not created by Baptist revivalism. They were brought to Baptist revivalism by a people who already knew, in their bones, that the Spirit of God was real, present, and active in the gathered community.

The Great Awakenings as a Moment of Resonance

This is what makes the story of the Great Awakenings, and especially the Second Great Awakening of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, so theologically interesting for our purposes. Standard accounts treat the Awakenings as a moment of Black conversion, a period when enslaved and free African Americans encountered evangelical Christianity and were drawn into its orbit. That framing is not false, but it is incomplete. It misses the dynamic that was actually at work.

The Second Great Awakening was characterized by precisely the features of religious life that resonated with the cosmological sensibilities African peoples already carried: the expectation of immediate, felt encounter with the Spirit of God; emotional and physical expressiveness in worship; the public testimony of conversion experience; the corporate intensity of the camp meeting, where hundreds of people gathered in the open air and the Spirit was expected to fall; and the radical democratization of spiritual authority, where an unlettered farmer or formerly enslaved person could speak with the anointing of God in a way that confounded the educated and powerful.

White revivalism created space for all of this, but it did not create all of this. Enslaved Africans came to the camp meetings and the brush arbors not as empty vessels waiting to be filled with something foreign, but as a people already oriented toward the Spirit, already practiced in the expectation of divine encounter, already formed by a cosmology in which the body was the instrument of spiritual contact. When the Spirit fell in the revival meeting and people fell, shouted, wept, and spoke in ways that seemed beyond ordinary human capacity, Black worshippers recognized something they already knew. The ecstatic behavior that astonished and sometimes disturbed white observers had African precedent and African resonance that those observers had no framework to perceive.

Sobel’s analysis shows that the frenzied expressiveness that characterized the Awakenings persisted in Black Baptist worship long after it had dissipated from white evangelical circles. This is not because Black Christians were less educated or less refined. It is because for them, this mode of worship was not an emotional excess to be eventually disciplined away. It was the continuation of a theological conviction: that the Spirit of the living God makes genuine, felt, embodied contact with the community of faith, and that such contact is to be welcomed, not suppressed.

The Second Great Awakening, then, was not the origin of Black Baptist pneumatology. It was a moment of resonance and amplification, a moment when an African cosmological inheritance found a new Christian vessel and a new theological vocabulary. The Baptist insistence on the new birth, on conversion as a real and felt transformation rather than a merely nominal religious affiliation, aligned naturally with what African peoples already believed about the Spirit’s power to change the human person. The Baptist practice of believer’s baptism by immersion, with its rich imagery of death and resurrection, contact with water, and public witness, resonated with African traditions in which water held profound spiritual significance. The Baptist conviction that the church is constituted not by territory or birth but by genuine encounter with God aligned with the African communal sense that the gathered community is the place where the Spirit is present and active.

A Pneumatological Orientation Before Pentecostalism

The theologian Amos Yong, in his indispensable work The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global Theology (Baker Academic, 2005), offers a concept that helps us name what was happening. Yong argues for what he calls a “pneumatological orientation,” a fundamental disposition toward the Spirit that shapes how a community understands God, worship, Scripture, and the world. Such an orientation is not the exclusive property of formally Pentecostal or charismatic movements. It is a broader theological sensibility that predates those movements and finds expression in multiple traditions, including, Yong suggests, in the African and African diasporic religious traditions that fed into Black Christianity.

This pneumatological orientation was fully present in Black Baptist life well before Azusa Street. It showed up in the expectation that the preached Word would be accompanied by the Spirit’s power, not merely by the preacher’s rhetorical skill. It showed up in the practice of prayer as direct, intimate, expectant address to a God who hears and responds. It showed up in the tradition of the watch-night service, the all-night prayer gathering in which the community waited on the Lord together. It showed up in the practice of testimony, which was not simply a narration of past events but a present proclamation of the Spirit’s ongoing work in the life of the speaker and the gathered community. It showed up in the centrality of healing, not as a rare miraculous exception but as an expected expression of the Spirit’s care for the whole person, body and soul.

All of this was Black Baptist Christianity before anyone named it Pentecostal. The Invisible Institution had cultivated it. The Great Awakenings had given it new Christian expression. The independent Black Baptist churches that multiplied across the South after emancipation had institutionalized it and passed it from generation to generation through preaching, song, prayer, and the practices of community life.

When the Holiness movement came in the late 19th century with its language of entire sanctification and the fullness of the Spirit, it did not introduce something foreign to Black Baptist Christianity. It offered theological vocabulary for something that had always already been there. When Charles Price Jones, a Baptist exegete formed by this tradition, read his New Testament and concluded that there was a fullness of the Spirit available to the believer beyond initial conversion, he was not departing from his tradition. He was pressing his tradition to its own deepest logic.

And when Azusa Street erupted in 1906, it did not create a new spiritual reality. It institutionalized and systematized an impulse, a hunger, an expectation, that Black Baptist Christianity had been carrying for generations, drawn from the wells of African cosmology, shaped by the fires of the Awakening, and sustained by a people who knew from bitter experience that if God was not real, nothing was.

— A Substack Introduction —

Something is stirring in Black Baptist life. You can hear it in the worship. You can feel it in the prayer meetings. You can see it in the way a new generation of Black Baptist preachers, many of them trained in the finest seminaries and divinity schools in the country, are laying hands on the sick, praying with expectation, and openly claiming the gifts of the Spirit without apology. Something is being reclaimed. And it turns out it was never really gone.

This post is an introduction to that something. The term I am using is Bapticostalism,and I want to invite you into a conversation about what it means, why it matters, and why it seems to emerge in every generation of Black Baptist life like a river that refuses to be dammed.

What Is Bapticostalism?

Bapticostalism is a hybrid theological identity. It holds together two streams of Christian life that the broader church has often treated as incompatible: the Word-centered, historically rooted, congregationalist commitments of the Baptist tradition on one side, and the Spirit-expectant, charismatic, experientially alive vitality of Pentecostal Christianity on the other.

For Black Bapticostalism in particular, this is not a merger of two separate things. It is the recovery of one whole thing that was artificially divided. The Black Baptist tradition has always carried within it a profound openness to the Spirit, a willingness to expect God to show up, to heal, to speak, to move in ways that exceed the order of service. That expectation was present in the hush harbors where enslaved people worshipped in secret. It was present in the testimony services of the early Black church. It was present in the prayer traditions that sustained Black communities through slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and beyond. Bapticostalism is the theological name for what was always already there.

The framework I find most useful for holding this together draws on four sources of theological authority: Scripture, Experience, Reason, and Tradition. Scripture remains the norming norm, the irreducible foundation against which everything else is tested. But in the Black Christian tradition, Experience has functioned not as a supplement to Scripture but as the first encounter with God that drives people back to Scripture with fresh and urgent eyes. Reason holds its place, not as the gatekeeper that manages the Spirit’s surprises, but as the careful interpreter that helps communities discern and articulate what God is doing. And Tradition, rightly understood, is not the dead weight of the past but the living memory of a people who have met the living God and refuse to stop expecting to meet him again.

Why Does It Matter?

We are living through a moment of profound ecclesial crisis. Churches across the theological spectrum are shrinking. Younger Black Christians are leaving institutional churches in significant numbers, and many of them are not leaving because they have lost faith in God. They are leaving because they are tired of choosing between two bad options: a dead formalism that is intellectually tidy but spiritually hollow, or an uncritical emotionalism that is energetic but theologically thin. They are looking for a third way.

Black Bapticostalism is that third way. It refuses both of those false choices. It insists that rigorous theology and alive spirituality are not enemies. It insists that the gifts of the Spirit and the fruit of the Spirit are not embarrassments to be explained away but realities to be received, tested, and deployed in service of the Kingdom. It insists that a people who have always read the Bible from below, under conditions of suffering and dispossession, have something irreplaceable to offer the global church precisely because they never could afford a faith that stayed only in the head.

There is also a global dimension worth naming. Christianity is growing with explosive vitality across the Global South, and that growth is overwhelmingly Pentecostal and charismatic in character. These communities take the Spirit seriously. At the same time, they often lack the prophetic social witness and liberationist theological tradition that the Black Baptist church has embodied at its best. Black Bapticostalism brings these together. Pneumatological vitality and prophetic social engagement are not competitors. The same Spirit who moves in worship is the Spirit of justice who fueled the prophets and the civil rights movement.

A Retrieval in Every Generation

What strikes me most about Black Bapticostalism is that it does not appear as a single historical moment. It appears as a pattern. In every generation, something suppresses it, and in every generation, something retrieves it.

The suppression is usually driven by respectability. As the historian Carter G. Woodson observed, there was a persistent tension in Black Baptist institutional life between those who wanted to leave behind anything that looked too much like slave religion and those who wanted to preserve a faith that could be felt. The Progressives, as Woodson called them, saw expressive, Spirit-saturated worship as an embarrassment. In seeking legitimacy in the eyes of a watching white world, they pushed the Spirit to the margins. This was not malice. It was a survival strategy. But it came at a cost.

And yet the stream kept flowing. It flowed through the 1890s, when figures like Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason stood up and said there was a third way beyond the progressive and conservative binary, a way that was both theologically serious and Spirit-filled. It flowed through the twentieth century in the mystical spirituality of Howard Thurman, in the anointed preaching of Gardner Calvin Taylor, in the Spirit-saturated prayer life of Prathia Hall. It flowed into our own era through the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship International, founded by Bishop Paul S. Morton, which gave institutional form to what countless Black Baptist ministers were already experiencing in their congregations.

Today, the retrieval is accelerating. The National Baptist Convention USA, Incorporated, under the leadership of Dr. Boise Kimber, is showing increasingly visible accents of Bapticostal expression. Independent congregations across the country are embracing what their grandmothers practiced in the prayer meeting but the official church never quite sanctioned. A generation of scholars, including the recently retired Duke Divinity School theologian William C. Turner Jr., has given this stream rigorous academic voice.

What we are witnessing is not a novelty. It is not a borrowing. It is not a compromise of Baptist identity. It is, as I have argued in my book Deeper Still: Ministry Empowered by the Holy Spirit, a homecoming. The Spirit-filled stream that runs through Black Baptist life is older than Azusa Street. It is older than the Pentecostal movement. It is older than the formal categories we use to describe it. It has simply refused, in every generation, to stay buried.

An Invitation to the Conversation

This post is a beginning, not a conclusion. My aim here is simply to name the thing and open the conversation. In future posts, I want to go deeper into the historical figures who carried this stream, the theological framework that gives it coherence, and the practical questions facing Black Baptist congregations who are living this reality right now.

But I also want to hear from you. Are you part of a Black Baptist congregation wrestling with these questions? Have you experienced this tension between your Baptist formation and your pneumatological hunger? Do you see this retrieval happening in your own community? The conversation is richer when more voices are in it.

The stream is still running. Come and see.

This post draws on arguments developed at greater length in Deeper Still: Ministry Empowered by the Holy Spirit. A longer academic version of this argument is also available upon request.