I've been a dreamer my whole life.

Not in the aspirational sense — though that too — but literally. Every night, when I close my eyes, the backs of my eyelids become a screen. Vivid. Colorful. Full-body immersive, like I've been cast in Avatar. I once read in a psychology book that most adults don't actually experience their dreams — they sleep through the night in something closer to static. I remember thinking: “I must be built different.” I cannot recall a single night when the lights didn't come up on a new technicolor feature.

Not all of it is good. For years I had a recurring nightmare starring The Undertaker — yes, the WWF wrestler, and yes, I still feel silly admitting it, and yes, it still worked on me every time. But the pattern in my bad dreams has always been bigger than one wrestler in dark clothing. When the dream turns dark, I am almost always running. From a violent mob. From a fall off some high place with no bottom in sight. Or from a version of the world — the one I believe God has called me to help change — that I am losing.

I don't think that third one is really a nightmare. I think it's a warning.

The World as the Upside Down

I imagine Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had his own technicolor nights. I can't know what he saw when he closed his eyes, but I know what he saw when he opened them: a nation that had built poverty into its architecture, a war machine that ate its own poor, a peace that was really just a name for who was being made to suffer quietly. He called it what it was. And over these last few months, I've felt something like what I imagine he carried — burdened with a passion to wake a sleeping world to the possibility of peace, justice, and love, even while grieving a version of that world that looks less like a dream and more like a visit to the Upside Down.

Poverty. War. Destruction dressed up as policy. It's not hard to find the nightmare version of the world right now. Some days it doesn't even hide.

What I Still Believe

But this week marks the anniversary of the March on Washington, and I still believe in the dream.

The prophet Joel promised a day when *old men shall dream dreams, and young men shall see visions* (Joel 2:28, NRSVUE) — not as escape, but as the Spirit poured out on ordinary people who refuse to accept the world as a finished draft. That's the tradition King stood in. That's the tradition I'm trying to stand in too, alongside Malcolm X's insistence that dignity was never a request to be politely made but a truth to be recognized.

So here is what I still believe, on this anniversary: that humans of every socially constructed society can wake up to our shared nature and become a better version of ourselves. That truth will prevail in a world that has learned to profit from lies. That it is possible — not guaranteed, but possible — to leave a better world for my sons than the one I was handed in Oak Cliff, a neighborhood I still call beloved on its hardest days as much as its best ones.

I believe the church still has a purpose inside that dream — that whatever storms itself against it, whatever gates of Hades line up at the door, will not prevail (Matthew 16:18, NRSVUE). Not because the church has always gotten it right. It hasn't. But because the mission was never supposed to be smaller than the institution carrying it.

And I believe in the world King called the Beloved Community — not a slogan stitched onto a mountaintop speech, but a world where Oak Cliff, and every neighborhood that shares its zip code of struggle, is not something you have to escape to be somebody. A world my sons can inherit that looks less like the Upside Down and more like the one God intended from the beginning.

I believe it's God's will for this story to end better than any Marvel movie could write it. Not because the ending is easy, but because the One writing it has already shown us, in an empty tomb, how this kind of story tends to go.

The mob doesn't get the final scene. Neither does the fall.

I'm still dreaming. I hope you are too.

We have a mission statement. It hangs in narthexes, sits on letterhead, opens every conference report: making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

We are making something. It is not disciples.

We are making motions and amendments. Statements and counterstatements. Task forces, working groups, and press releases. Complaints and defenses. Bylaws conformed to the neutral principles of state law. Resolutions of non-recognition. Filings. Dockets. Transcripts.

Everything but disciples.

The Cycle

Watch how my church has spent the last seven years, and you will see one motion repeated until it wore a groove.

Something high-profile happens. A General Conference. A seminary. A disaffiliation wave. A megachurch. Within hours, both wings mobilize — statements drafted, alliances counted, positions staked, hashtags launched, attorneys retained. For two weeks the connection is fully awake. Everyone has read the documents. Everyone has an analysis.

Then it passes, and we go back to sleep until the next one.

We are a body that only rouses for spectacle. And notice what never triggers that mobilization: nobody convenes an emergency session about a generation leaving the faith. No caucus organizes around the fact that our people cannot name the doctrines they were baptized into. No press release goes out when a congregation goes another year without a single person being formed toward holiness.

So we keep responding to one high-profile example after another, and every response proves the same thing: seven years after a General Conference that was supposed to settle it, conservatives and progressives still don’t get it. They think the other side is the problem. They have never once considered that the fight itself is the problem — that both wings have been formed by the same catechism, and it is not Wesley’s.

The Numbers Nobody Calls a Special Session About

None of this is hidden. The data is public, free, and about as easy to find as our mission statement.

By the end of 2023, 7,631 congregations had disaffiliated — a quarter of our churches and nearly a quarter of our American membership. Our own finance agency projects general church income falling from roughly $310 million in 2017–2020 to about $158 million in 2025–2028. Meanwhile Pew finds fewer than half of young adults now identify as Christian.

But here is the number that should stop this church cold: the same study finds that 86% of Americans say they have a soul.

Read those together and the diagnosis writes itself. The desire is intact. What collapsed are the hearts no longer aflame. That is not a secular nation out there. That is a nation full of people who believe exactly what our doctrine says about them — that there is something in them God is after — and who have concluded we are not the ones who will help them find it.

We have spent seven years arguing about how to do church: who governs, who ordains, who owns, who votes, who may leave and what they must pay. And the call of a disciple was never to a way of doing.

It is a call to a way of being.

Being formed. Being made holy. Being changed into the likeness of Christ so completely the world can see it without being told.

We are defending a way of doing to a generation asking about a way of being. No wonder they cannot hear us. We are answering a question nobody asked.

What We Actually Believe

You can tell what a body believes by what it protects.

We say we believe in prevenient grace — that God is already working in every person before they know it. We say we believe in justification, in the new birth, in assurance, in sanctification, in going on to perfection in love. Those are not slogans. They are our doctrinal standards. They are what makes a Methodist a Methodist rather than a Baptist with a bishop.

Now look at what we spend our money on. What our best minds argue about. What gets a lawyer hired, a firm retained, a bishop’s calendar cleared, a delegation flown across the world.

Not sanctification. Never sanctification.

Property. Pensions. Paragraphs. Authority. Who controls the appointment, the deed, the vote, the credential, the narrative.

We did not vote for that. There was no petition, no amendment, no majority. It happened the way all real change in institutions happens — by what we practiced instead of what we professed, over decades, until the practice became the identity.

Wesley Gave Us a Discipline, Not a Book

Here is why this is a Methodist tragedy and not merely an American one.

Our founder’s genius was never polity. Wesley gave the world a discipline long before anyone printed a Discipline. Class meetings. Bands. Three plain rules — do no harm, do good, stay in love with God. And one unbearable question, asked face to face by people who knew your name, every week without exception:

How is it with your soul?

That question built a movement that shook two nations. Not legislation. Not litigation. Ordinary people submitting their actual lives to one another because they wanted to be made holy, and knew they could not get there alone.

Notice the grammar of it. How is it with your soul is a question about being. It cannot be answered with an activity, a budget line, or a policy position. It asks what you are becoming.

Two centuries later, we took that and made it procedural. We took accountability out of the room and put it in a paragraph. We took sanctification off the class meeting floor and handed it to a committee. And how is it with your soul became what does the Discipline permit, and who gets to say so?

Once accountability lives in paragraphs instead of relationships, everything that follows is inevitable. A paragraph must be interpreted. Interpretation must be enforced. Enforcement requires an authority. Authority gets contested. And a contested authority ends up — always, eventually — in front of a judge who has never heard our doctrine and does not need to.

Litigation is not a departure from what Methodism has become. It is the destination.

It is what a church arrives at when it replaces formation with regulation.

Fifteen Years and a Strange Fire

I should say plainly where I stand in this, because I am not writing from outside the house.

For fifteen years I have given this church my ministry. I did not arrive a Methodist. I came with a Pentecostal heart — formed in rooms where the Spirit was expected to show up and change somebody before anyone went home, where holiness was not a policy position but a temperature. What Wesleyan grace gave me was not a correction of that. It was a vocabulary for it. Prevenient. Justifying. Sanctifying. Perfection in love.

And somewhere in the middle of learning that language, the thing dawned on me that has kept me here ever since: the flame in my Pentecostal heart was the same flame that strangely warmed John Wesley’s heart on Aldersgate Street. Two centuries and an ocean apart, one fire. That is a discovery about being. It changed what I understood myself to be, and it is the reason I took vows in this connection.

Then I spent fifteen years inside a system that could not read it.

A way of doing can measure your category, your credential, your process, your paperwork, your track. It can tell you what you are permitted to administer and where your name goes on a list. What it cannot do — what it has never once been designed to do — is take the temperature of a fire. So a church whose entire genius was once the pursuit of holiness now evaluates its ministers by nearly everything except whether they are being made holy.

I am not the exception. I am a data point.

And here is the part I need my church to hear, because it is the whole indictment in one image. Scripture tells us about two priests who brought before the Lord a fire he had not commanded, and it is remembered as strange fire. Our flame is still burning. The connection is not cold. But look honestly at what has been fanning it these last fifty years: not Aldersgate. Not the pursuit of scriptural holiness across the land. Power. Control. Authority. Who governs, who owns, who decides.

A church can be on fire and still not be warm.

Both Sides Learned the Same Lesson

The disaffiliation was supposed to fix this. Seven thousand six hundred congregations left. One side got its exit; the other got its house. Both believed the departure of the other was the cure.

It cured nothing, because the disease was never a faction. Watch:

The traditionalist wing organized its departure through its institutions — schools, caucuses, networks built for formation and repurposed for strategy. The progressive-leaning wing now defends its position through corporate law and communications firms and resolutions drafted with a courtroom in mind. Opposite theology. Opposite aisles. Identical instinct: when threatened, reach for the lever your institution gives you.

Neither wing sinned in a way the other cannot recognize, because both were catechized by the same fifty-year war. We taught an entire generation of leaders that faithfulness means winning, that conviction outranks covenant, that the way to save the church is to control it.

And then we act surprised when a church council does the math we taught it.

I wrote in 2019, from the floor of that General Conference, that fear disguises itself as strategy and demands power dressed in righteous indignation. I wrote two weeks later that there were no winners — only brokenness and separation, the Gates of Hades seemingly prevailing. I ended that essay saying the world is watching, and recording, and transcribing, and asking what their report would be.

The report is a transcript. It has a cause number. It is indexed and permanent and it will outlive everyone named in it.

Why the Trumpet Doesn’t Work

I have been blowing this trumpet since 2019, and before. Others have too. It has not moved the connection an inch, and I have finally understood why.

A trumpet calling a church back to formation cannot compete with a spectacle. Formation is slow, obscure, unquantifiable, and produces no headline. It generates no statement to sign and no side to take. There is no press release for a class meeting.

So the trumpet sounds and the connection does not turn, because the connection has been trained to respond only to threat. We are a body with excellent reflexes and no habits. We can mobilize three hundred people in a week and cannot form three people in a year.

Ezekiel’s watchman was told the blood is on his hands if the sword comes and no trumpet sounds. Nobody warned the watchman about the other outcome — that the trumpet would sound faithfully for seven years over a city that had grown accustomed to sirens.

We Have Done This Before

Before anyone books a flight to Calgary, we should sit with what happened the last time we gathered to imagine.

In 2024, the legacy Central Texas and North Texas Conferences — now merged into Horizon Texas — convened a Covenant Day and brought in the futurist Bob Johansen to teach us future back thinking: stand in the future, look backward, and ask what the present must become to arrive there. The room was electric. We talked about artificial intelligence and ministry. We talked about a church nobody in that room had seen yet. For a day, we were a body imagining instead of a body defending.

That was 2024. Then came November, and the conversation stopped.

Not because anyone canceled it. Because the American church, once again, turned its whole face toward the empire. The election consumed the oxygen. The politics of a nation displaced the doctrine of a church — and the future we had just spent a day imagining was quietly filed away.

And here is the sentence I need you to sit in: the same conference that gathered to imagine the future in 2024 was in court by 2026.

Two years. From future-back to filing. From a room asking what the church must become to a petition asking what a judge will allow. Nobody chose that trajectory. It is simply what happens when a body imagines for a day and then returns to its actual habits.

That is the pattern in miniature — the whole essay compressed into one conference’s two years. We are capable of the real conversation. We can convene it, fund it, and be genuinely moved by it. We just cannot sustain it, because the moment a spectacle arrives — an election, a lawsuit, a headline — we revert to what we have practiced for fifty years.

The Test

So forgive me if I am cautious about Calgary.

In two months, this church gathers under the theme Emboldened by the Spirit: Imagining a Church Yet to Be. Three hundred leaders. Four continents. No legislative authority. No votes to win.

Which makes it, in Methodist terms, something we have not convened in a very long time: a class meeting with a bigger table.

It will be tempting to spend those four days on structure. On strategy. On what the next General Conference must do. That is the reflex, and the reflex is the disease.

The test of Calgary is whether three hundred leaders can sit in a room with no power at stake and ask each other the only question that ever made us Methodists. Not what should the church become. Not who should lead it. But:

How is it with your soul?

And then go home and ask it of the people they serve, week after week, in obscurity, with no press release, until a church that has forgotten how to make disciples remembers.

What Report Will They Give?

Jesus wept over a city that did not recognize the time of its visitation. Not a city that rejected him — a city that missed it, that had its face turned toward its own affairs while God walked past.

That is my fear for the people called Methodist. Not that we will choose wrongly. That we will be so busy responding to the next high-profile example that we do not notice the visitation when it comes.

We do not have a polity problem. We have never had a polity problem. Every polity crisis of the last fifty years has been the fever, not the infection. We have a discipleship problem — and there is no legislation that fixes it, no lawsuit that settles it, no departure that cures it, and no majority that can vote it away.

Eighty-six percent of our neighbors believe they have a soul. They are not asking us how we govern. They are asking, whether they have words for it or not, the only question we were built to answer.

There is only the first half of our own mission statement, waiting where we left it.

Making disciples of Jesus Christ — and then, only then, for the transformation of the world.

Lord, in your mercy. Let us go back and do the first thing, so the second one has a chance.

Seven years ago, from the floor of a General Conference that broke my heart, I wrote these words about my beloved United Methodist Church:

Fear of loss… who and how many will leave? Who keeps the “stuff?”

Fear of the other… we can’t let them in, let them serve, let them lead, let them love…

Fear of being honest… we can’t say that or they will think this about me/us…

Fear of the truth… but what if I’m wrong? What if they’re right?

Fear of the unknown… we can’t change what I’ve always known about MY church…

I wrote that fear was demobilizing us. That fear disguises itself as strategy. That fear demands power, often dressed in righteous indignation and appeals to morality. And that when fear goes unchecked, it curdles into fragility — empty apologies, aggressions toward the other, and anger.

That was 2019. Since then, my church performed surgery on itself. Roughly a quarter of American congregations disaffiliated. The traditionalists — the faction so many progressives believed was the tumor — took their exit. The bans came down. The language was amended. The regionalization my Central Conference family deserved was ratified. By every institutional measure, the church I lamented in 2019 got what it said it wanted.

So why am I writing this?

Because the traditionalists left, and the fear stayed on the membership rolls.

I diagnosed a faction’s problem in the language of a spirit, and I was more right than I wanted to be. You cannot amputate a spirit. Fear was never a caucus. Fear was never a voting bloc. Fear is a discipleship — and my church has been discipled by it for fifty years, which is why we keep graduating new classes of the afraid.

Exhibit A: Litigation…Again!

On August 10, 2026, my former annual conference — Horizon Texas — filed suit against its own largest congregation. Highland Park United Methodist Church. Sixteen thousand members. The largest United Methodist congregation in Texas, seated on the campus of the university where I earned my theology degree.

The conference alleges that in 2022 and early 2023 — the exact years the disaffiliation door stood open, the exact years honest departure had a sanctioned process — Highland Park’s Church Council rewrote the church’s articles and bylaws. Removed references to The United Methodist Church. Removed the conference. Removed the Book of Discipline. Concentrated authority in the council. And did it, the conference says, without the knowledge of the congregation.

When I first read the filing, I had my paragraph ready. It practically wrote itself out of my 2019 litany: fear of loss — who keeps the “stuff?” Here is the stuff, beloved: one of the most valuable church properties in Texas. Fear of being honest. Here is the dishonesty: sixteen thousand people kept in the dark about the identity of their own church. Disaffiliation was costly and public; bylaw amendments were quiet and cheap. They wanted the inheritance, I was going to write, without the honesty of leaving the house.

Then Highland Park answered. And an article about fear cannot be too afraid to revise itself in public.

The Ledger and the Tell

On August 19, Highland Park’s minister-in-residence, who led that congregation for over a decade — released a statement opening with John 16:33 and the observation that Scripture’s first violence was between brothers. He called the suit among the most unnecessary and egregious betrayals he had witnessed in twenty-six years of United Methodist ministry.

Then he opened the books, and the books are not nothing.

Highland Park did not disaffiliate. When 7,600 congregations left, they stayed. They have launched 41 United Methodist churches. They run the largest confirmation program in the conference now suing them. They built a dormitory and student center at Africa University. They recapitalized two congregations the conference had written off as dying — and then gave Munger Place back to the conference, revived and funded, as a gift. Five and a half million dollars in apportionments over four years, never a payment missed. More than six million more to United Methodist institutions and charities. The conference accepted this August’s apportionment, Rasmussen notes, while the suit was already prepared.

I have to sit with that. Whatever else is true, that is not the ledger of a congregation hoarding an inheritance and slipping out the back. That is a church that paid, planted, gave, and stayed. My ready-made paragraph does not survive contact with those numbers, and I will not pretend otherwise to protect a thesis.

But the ledger does not settle it either. Because buried in the church’s own FAQ is the tell — offered as prudence, and I believe it was offered sincerely: the documents were revised, they explain, in response to Texas courts’ guidance on handling church affairs under neutral principles of state law.

Church, hear what that phrase means. “Neutral principles” is the legal doctrine by which civil courts decide church property disputes using deeds and corporate documents while ignoring denominational polity — the doctrine that determines who keeps the building when a congregation and a denomination part ways. Revising your articles to conform to it is not proof you intend to leave. It is proof you have thought carefully about what happens if you do. It is a church buying flood insurance while insisting it loves the river.

And that is precisely what I named seven years ago.

Fear disguises itself as strategy.

In 2019 it wore righteous indignation; in 2026 it wears fiduciary prudence. Nobody in this story believes they are afraid. The council believes it is being responsible. The bishop believes he is protecting a sacred trust. Fear has never once introduced itself by name — it comes as stewardship, as best practices, as due diligence, as legally sustainable.

There is a second tell, and it belongs to the congregation. Asked why no vote was called, the church explains that a 1998 charge conference delegated governance to the Church Council, and everything since has flowed from that delegation. Legally, that may be airtight. Ecclesially, read it again: sixteen thousand baptized members, and the most consequential decisions about their church’s identity route through a council they did not know had made them. Whatever the courts decide about the corporation, something has already been decided about the congregation — that they are patrons of a ministry rather than participants in a polity. That is fragility with a quorum.

So look at what we have. Two statements. Both pastoral in tone. Both scripturally framed — Cain and Abel from one side, sacred trust from the other. Both released to the public. Both, functionally, litigation postures. One brother says betrayal; the other says necessity. Fear now speaks fluent Christianese in two dialects, and both are grammatically perfect.

And hear the word of the Lord over all of it: When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? … To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you (1 Corinthians 6).

Paul does not ask who has the better case. Paul says the case itself is the loss. Whatever Dallas County decides, the verdict is already in from the court that matters: the people of grace, back in the news, fighting over property. Again. Another national headline that preaches nothing, converts no one, feeds no one, frees no one.

Exhibit B: Calgary

Now hold this next fact beside the first one, because the juxtaposition is the sermon.

In two months, the United Methodist Church gathers in Calgary, Alberta — October 20 through 24, at Knox United Church — for a Leadership Gathering themed Emboldened by the Spirit: Imagining a Church Yet to Be. Three hundred participants from four continents. No legislative authority. A space, in the words of its co-convener, designed for imagining possibilities rather than making decisions.

And who is that co-convener, now president of the Council of Bishops, the face of our denomination’s imagination? The same bishop whose conference just filed the lawsuit.

Church, I am not here to assassinate the bishop’s character. I know the fiduciary arguments. I know a bishop can inherit a crisis he did not create and face two faithless options and one lawsuit. My grief is not with a man.

My grief is with what this moment reveals about the system that forms all of us: we have built a church in which the leader we chose to convene our imagination must spend his season convening litigation.

We have built a church where the same episcopal office signs petitions to the court and invitations to the Spirit in the same quarter. In 2019 I wrote that anytime concern for legislation takes priority over worship, the Spirit of the Lord has been quenched and the spirit of fear is leading us. In 2026 I must extend the diagnostic: anytime a church’s docket is more consequential than its dreaming — anytime we imagine in Canada what we litigate in Texas — the spirit of fear is still leading us. It simply hired better lawyers.

And do not miss where the imagining had to happen. The gathering convened to envision the future of a church born in the American colonies could not be held on American soil. It meets in another nation, hosted by another denomination. Read that however you want. I read it the way I read all patterns now: the Spirit may be telling us something about our address.

So Who Should Lead?

Here is the question underneath everything, the one I asked in 2019 and the one this moment forces: who is actually qualified to lead The United Methodist Church?

In 2019, I watched white American progressives and conservatives treat my LGBTQ family and my Central Conference family as pawns — their sacred worth and their votes weighed on American scales. I said then that the church’s future did not depend on how well the Central Conferences aligned to our American political, ideological, and theological frameworks. Seven years later, the evidence has ruled. While American Methodism shrinks, litigates, and drowns in the empire’s politics — inundated, distracted, and discipled by every election cycle — the church abroad grows. Plants churches. Makes disciples. Does the thing.

And notice how the American church defends itself when accused: with a balance sheet. I do not fault Highland Park for it — the receipts were real and the accusation demanded them. But sit with what it reveals about all of us. Our highest available argument for our own faithfulness was a dollar figure. We even built a dormitory at Africa University, which is a genuine good and also a perfect parable: we fund the buildings on that continent while keeping the leadership of this connection on this one. We will pay for their campus. We are slower to follow their bishops.

Church history could have told us this was coming. The center of Christianity has never stayed put. Jerusalem gave way to Antioch. Antioch to Rome. Rome to Wittenberg. Wittenberg to Aldersgate. Aldersgate to Azusa Street. Every time an established center chose power over Spirit, chose property over people, chose fear over faith — the Spirit changed addresses. The Spirit is not sentimental about real estate. Ask the Temple.

So let us apply the only leadership rubric Scripture gives Timothy: God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. Power. Love. Sound mind. Not endowments. Not litigation budgets. Not proximity to Washington. Not the ability to fund a gathering. Measured by Paul’s three marks — honestly, prayerfully measured — which part of our worldwide connection is currently leading with power, love, and a sound mind? And which part is leading with declaratory judgments?

I am not romanticizing the church abroad; every context has its sins, and I will name them when they are mine to name. But I am done pretending that the American church’s money entitles it to the head of the table while its witness is in receivership. Regionalization was supposed to end the era of American gravity. The question Calgary must answer — the question three hundred leaders from four continents should ask out loud in that room — is whether the American church can do the one thing fear has never let it do:

Follow.

Not fund and steer. Not host and control. Not bless and manage. Follow — the way Peter had to follow the Spirit to Cornelius’s house and discover God was already there without him.

Are We All Feeling Free?

I ended my 2019 essay with the Spirit’s résumé, and I will end there again, because the Word has not moved even though we have.

Jesus, standing in Isaiah’s tradition, announced the job description: good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, the year of the Lord’s favor. And Paul gave us the audit: Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

So audit us, church. Audit us honestly, across four continents this time.

Is the congregation of sixteen thousand — who learned their church was being sued from the evening news — feeling free? Are the members who discovered that a council has held their governance since 1998 feeling free? Is the pastor who gave that church a decade and now writes about betrayal between brothers feeling free? Is the conference that had to hire counsel to talk to its largest church feeling free? Is the bishop carrying a docket in one hand and a denomination’s imagination in the other feeling free? Are the local pastors and the overlooked, credentialed with asterisks, feeling free? Is the family abroad — done being pawns, done being managed, growing while we grieve — free yet to lead the church their faithfulness has earned?

Are we all feeling liberated or free?

Seven years ago I wrote: we have two days left. Lord, in your mercy.

Now I write: we have two months until Calgary. And after Calgary, a whole church yet to be.

Lord, in your mercy — this time, let us fear nothing but the quenching of your Spirit.

Today marks nine months since Gee left us.

I took a picture this morning. Just two things sitting on a table in Los Angeles: a small urn holding some of my brother’s ashes, and the necklace I wear every single day with his face caught mid-smile, encircled in diamonds. A tree of life etched on the urn, birds lifting off its branches and taking flight toward the lid.

I’ve written before about carrying Devin with me—the necklace against my chest, the ashes on my nightstand, the loc I’m still waiting to weave into my crown. Back in March, I wrote a piece called “Mama Would Say, ‘Take Your Brother With You!’” about how, when we were kids, he always wanted to tag along, and how the tables had turned—how now I’m the one who needs him to come with me.

But this trip, “taking your brother with you” took on a new meaning.

The Places We Dreamed About

Gee always wanted to go to LA.

It was one of those places that lived in his imagination—the city, the culture, the energy, the sense that something was possible there. We’d talk about it. About going one day. About what it would be like to experience it together.

A few weeks ago, I put this same urn in my luggage when I traveled to Chicago. Gee and I were both fond of Chicago because of some of my friends from college. So much of what we experienced growing up in Oak Cliff mirrored what people from Chicago described about their own neighborhoods—the same textures, the same struggles, the same particular way of coming up in a place that both formed you and tried to break you. There was a kinship there, a recognition.

Gee always wanted to go. So I took him with me.

And now he’s with me in LA.

Our First Night, and the Streets We Talked About

We landed and spent the first night on the 17th floor of a hotel near Disneyland. Man, you would’ve loved this one. You loved a nice hotel. You would’ve been all on the gram with it—the view, the room, the whole vibe. I could see you now, posting stories, making everybody back home jealous.

Then we went to Earle’s on Crenshaw.

When I came here last March, I told you about it, and you said you would’ve definitely gotten the Vegan Dog. I should’ve gotten it this time in your honor. But I had the turkey. Next time, bro—next time I’ll get the Vegan Dog for you. I got a shirt too. I would’ve loved to bring you one back.

And then—you already know—I had to hit Crenshaw and Slauson.

The spirit and the soundtrack of Nipsey Hussle rode with me as I flipped these streets. The Marathon. And I’ll be honest: in some ways, I know how Blacc Sam must feel. Carrying a brother’s dream forward. Standing in the place your brother built and being the one left to keep it going, to keep the vision alive, to make sure the work doesn’t die just because the person who dreamed it with you is gone.

And just like Blacc Sam, I promise to run this marathon for you, bro.

I could hear us in those streets—the conversations we would’ve had. Pac and Snoop. Kendrick and Game. Debating, arguing, connecting the music to our own lives the way we always did. West Coast legends and the culture that raised us even from a distance in Oak Cliff. Flipping Crenshaw with my brother’s ashes in my luggage and his voice in my memory, having the conversation we’d always meant to have here together.

You finally made it to LA, Gee. And I made sure we did it right.

The Grace and the Grief in the Same Vessel

And here is where I have to tell the truth, because this series has never been about pretty grief.

This is only possible because we had to cremate my brother.

We couldn’t afford to bury him.

I need to sit in that sentence for a moment, because it holds both a gift and a wound, and I can’t separate them.

The gift: I can quite literally carry a part of my brother with me. To Chicago. To LA. To Earle’s on Crenshaw and down Slauson. To the pulpit on Sunday mornings. Cremation made that possible. There is a strange and holy grace in being able to take Gee to the places we dreamed about—a form of presence that a grave in a Dallas cemetery could never have given me. He is not fixed to one plot of earth 200 miles away. He travels. He tags along. He’s here, riding these streets with me.

The wound: he is ash instead of buried earth because of money. Because of the financial struggles he faced his whole life. Because of the financial struggles we faced as a family. The same crushing economic weight I’ve written about across these nine months—the weight that pressed on him while he was living—followed him into death and shaped how we could grieve him.

Every time I open my luggage and see that urn, I hold both things at once. Gratitude that I can bring him with me. And the reminder that I can only do this because we couldn’t do what we would have chosen to do if the resources had been there.

This is what it means to grieve while Black and working-class in America. Even our mourning is constrained by economics. Even the form our loss takes is dictated by what we could afford. The dignity of a burial is a luxury, and families like mine make impossible calculations in the worst moments of our lives—calculations that echo for years in the objects we carry and the choices we couldn’t make.

There’s something fitting, then, about flipping Crenshaw with Nipsey’s spirit in the air. Because Nip understood this. The marathon was never just about one man—it was about ownership, about building something that outlasts you, about refusing to let the conditions you were born into be the conditions you die in. Blacc Sam carries that now. And I carry Gee. Same assignment, different names.

What the Urn Preaches

I keep coming back to the image on that urn. A tree of life, its branches releasing birds that scatter upward and outward into flight.

There’s a sermon in that.

Because that’s what Gee’s love has done. It didn’t stay rooted in one place, one body, one grave. It scattered. It took flight. It multiplied into everyone he touched and into every city I now carry him to. His love is in the air over Crenshaw and Slauson the same way it’s in the air over Oak Cliff and East Austin.

The tree is rooted, but the birds are free.

And maybe that’s the theology I need at nine months. That the crushing economics that forced cremation could not crush the love. That the same fire that reduced my brother to ash also, in some mysterious way, set him free to travel with me in a manner a buried body never could. That God takes even our forced choices, even our poverty-shaped grief, and finds a way to bring life out of it.

I’m not going to pretend the wound isn’t real. It is. The fact that we couldn’t afford to bury him is an indictment—of systems, of inequities, of a world that leans its full weight on Black backs even in death. I’ll keep naming that. I’ll keep fighting it. Because beloved community means no mother has to choose cremation over burial because of money, and no brother has to hold that particular grief.

But I’m also going to keep taking Gee to the places we dreamed about. Chicago. LA. Crenshaw and Slauson. Wherever comes next.

Nine Months In

The boy who wanted to tag along is still tagging along.

He wanted to go everywhere I went. And now he does—not reluctantly taken to the corner store to keep him out of the streets, but intentionally carried across the country to the cities we imagined together. To the 17th-floor hotel views you would’ve loved. To Earle’s, where I owe you a Vegan Dog. Down Crenshaw, with Nip in the speakers and Pac and Kendrick in the conversation we finally got to have.

To LA, Gee. You finally made it, bro. I told you I’d bring you into rooms and places we dreamed of.

The urn sits in my luggage. The necklace rests against my chest. And your love keeps taking flight—rooted in where we came from, free to go wherever I go.

And I promise, bro: I’ll run this marathon for you.

Nine months. This life still ain’t the same. But you’re still with me. Still riding shotgun. Still flipping these streets with me. Still seeing the world through the brother who couldn’t bear to see it without you.

Love you. Miss you. Welcome to LA.

Until we meet again. ✌🏾

I walked into Professor North’s English class smelling like weed.

Flip-flops. Durag. Hoodie. A freshman at Huston-Tillotson carrying what I have since named my “astronautical ambitions” — I stayed high in those early years. High enough to orbit. I knew how I was perceived. Faculty saw me coming. Staff saw me coming. The perception preceded me down every hallway on that campus.

He did not reprimand me for how I arrived. He did not write me up for the smell that walked in with me. He looked past the presentation and found the curiosity underneath it, and then he did something no policy has ever done for anybody: he redirected it. Research the subject matter, he told me. Turn the thing into a question. And I did. And it made me a better student — not because someone corrected my appearance, but because someone confirmed my mind.

Years later, when I began to discern a call to ministry, Rev. Brewington made the same wager. He chose not to focus on how I showed up. He focused on the fact that I showed up. Presence, not presentation. Attendance as the raw material of formation.

I did not need a restrictive policy to change. I needed to be seen — fully. I needed to be cared for — just as I was.

Hold that story. We will need it.

Tuskegee

This week, Tuskegee University announced a new dress code. Bonnets, durags, and bedroom shoes are now banned from classrooms, dining halls, and official university events. The policy arrives bundled with attendance requirements, cell phone rules, and a language of workforce preparation. The president calls it transformation. Many alumni call it about time. Many students call it what it is.

Let me be precise about my objection, because it is not an objection to standards.

The policy names a what — a list of garments. But read the list closely and you will find it describes a who. Nobody banned silk pillowcases. Nobody banned pajama pants at the PWI down the road. The items selected are not the least professional items available to a college student. They are the most legibly Black, most legibly hood items a college student owns. A durag is not sleepwear. It is hair-care technology specific to Black hair, reclassified by its connotation rather than its function. And the connotation is a person. A class of person. A neighborhood of person.

I know, because I am that person. I am hood. I am Oak Cliff. I matriculated through an HBCU in the very uniform Tuskegee just outlawed.

The scholar Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham gave us the name for this over thirty years ago: the politics of respectability. Black Baptist women at the turn of the twentieth century, preaching temperance and tidiness as armor against a white gaze that caricatured us all. Higginbotham saw its double edge from the start — a strategy of resistance that simultaneously turned a disciplinary eye on the poorest of us, treating their conduct as the problem to be managed. Kevin Gaines pushed further: uplift ideology let a rising Black middle class define its respectability against an internal other. The unrespectable Negro. The one in the bonnet. The one in the durag.

The banned-items list is a portrait of that other. It is a description of a person, rendered as a description of clothing.

And the venue makes it bitter. This is Tuskegee — Booker T. Washington’s own house, the architectural home of uplift-through-discipline. The policy is not new. It is the founding pedagogy, reasserted. Clean first, catch after.

But the church taught me the order runs the other way.

Catch Before You Clean

There is a saying in Black churches: you have to catch a fish before you can clean it.

Notice the saying does not argue against cleaning the fish. It argues about sequence. And sequence is theology. The whole Wesleyan grammar I preach in runs on grace that arrives before amendment of life — prevenient grace, going ahead of us, wooing us while we still smell like the streets we came from. I was not loved into the kingdom after I took the durag off. Grace met me under it.

A university, like a church, is a catching institution. Its entire reason for existing is that people arrive unfinished. A dress code that treats unfinishedness as a violation has confused itself with the destination it claims to prepare students for. The employer can demand the suit. The alma mater’s calling is to grow the person who will one day fill it.

And here is what the vitality metrics will tell you, if the metrics are what we claim to care about. Retention and graduation — especially for Black students, most especially for Black men — do not rise on grooming policy. They rise on belonging. On faculty who see students as assets to be developed rather than problems to be corrected. I have lived both sides of that research. I was the student Professor North refused to give up on, and years later I directed a center for men of color that retained two-thirds of them — and not one percentage point of that came from telling a young brother his hair care was a violation.

Because no one cares what you know until they know how much you care. That is not a slogan. That is the mechanism.

A first-generation freshman from the hood walks onto campus and the institution’s first word to her is that her bonnet is contraband. We should not be surprised when she hears the sentence underneath the sentence: you, as you arrived, are contraband. The students most fragile in their belonging receive the clearest signal that they do not belong. And then we hold conferences about retention.

This is rationed grace. Grace extended on condition of prior conformity — which is to say, not grace at all, but wages.

A Word for the Elders

Now let me say what love requires me to say to the alumni cheering this policy, because I refuse to write an essay against my elders.

You are not wrong about the world.

The world our elders graduated into did not extend grace to Black excellence in casual clothes. For their generation the suit was armor — a Black man in a suit was harder to dismiss, harder to deny, sometimes marginally harder to kill, and marginally mattered. When they police the bonnet, they are reissuing the only armor they were ever given. That is not white supremacy talking. That is a survival pedagogy forged under it. They rationed grace because grace was rationed to them, and they survived it, and mistook survival for pedagogy.

I honor the fear. I refuse the remedy.

Because the armor was always also a cage, and I know it from the inside. Some of these same elders have told me, in recent days, that I do not dress like a pastor. That the fresh sneakers and jeans disqualify me from rooms my mind, my training, and twenty-three years of ministry qualify me for. Hear the arithmetic in that: the mind qualified me; the attire disqualified me. Which means the room valued the symbol of seriousness over the seriousness itself. When the sign eats the referent, the church has a word for that. We call it idolatry.

And they misread the shoes anyway. A man who built a sneaker restoration business as a memorial to his late brother does not wear casual shoes. He wears testimony. Devin walks into the pulpit with me. Oak Cliff walks in with me. I did not have to amputate my origins to accept my call — and every eighteen-year-old from East Austin sitting in that chapel needs to see that with her own eyes, because she has been told her whole life that God’s people look like somebody else.

I am not underdressed for the office. I am dressed for the assignment.

Scripture settled this argument before we started it. When the assembly seated the man in fine clothes up front and told the poor man to stand in the back, James called it what it was — distinction-making, evil-thought judging (James 2:2–4, NRSVUE). And when Samuel surveyed Jesse’s sons for the outward evidence of a king, the LORD interrupted him: mortals look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7, NRSVUE).

The founder of our faith, by every dress code ever written, was underdressed.

The Who

So here is what is at stake, at Tuskegee and in every sanctuary and syllabus we steward.

The freshman in her bonnet and the credentialed chaplain in his Jordans are the same person at two ends of one pipeline — disqualified by the same gaze from the same rooms their gifts already earned. The gaze never blinks. Comply at eighteen and it finds you at forty-five. The checkpoint just moves. Which exposes the fiction at the bottom of the whole system: the criterion was never professionalism. It was resemblance. And resemblance can never be completed, only demanded again.

But I have seen the alternative, because the alternative made me.

Refuse the what for the who, and watch what people become. A professor looks past the smell of weed and finds a scholar. A reverend looks past the hoodie and finds a call. A durag-wearing freshman from Oak Cliff becomes a pastor, a chaplain, a professor, an author, a father raising two sons in the same tradition of being seen fully. Not because anyone cleaned the fish first. Because somebody caught me. Because grace went ahead of me into that classroom and was sitting there waiting when I walked in high.

Every campus policy, every ordination interview, every side-eye at the sneakers in the pulpit is finally asking one question: will we make conformity the price of admission, or will we make love the means of formation?

The what is a garment. The who is a gift of God.

See the who.

Grace and peace, Marcus

“Unfortunately, I think we are in for a grid stressing, powerless Summer… and Fall too.” — Me, June 3, 2024

This article is a response to an article I wrote two years ago…https://informedscholar.com/2024/06/03/its-happening-again-recurring-power-outages/

I really wish you could see the world through my glasses.

The ones I put on my face so I can see things from afar. See, I’m nearsighted. Without my glasses I can read, scroll on my phone, and see the beauty in the faces of the people I love up close. The challenge is distance. The street sign three blocks down. The storm building on the horizon. The pattern forming just past where my natural eyes give out.

I have come to believe prophecy works the same way. Scripture’s oldest word for prophet is seer — not one who predicts, but one who sees. When Elisha’s servant panicked at the army surrounding them, the prophet did not pray for the army to move. He prayed, “Lord, open his eyes, that he may see.” Same hillside. Same enemies. Different prescription. Amos testified that God does nothing without first revealing it to God’s servants — and the revelation is rarely a whisper from a cloud. It is a pattern sitting in the distance, in plain sight, that the house has agreed not to look at.

Two years ago, I wrote about the things I noticed from afar. I wrote about power outages — the literal Texas kind, where the grid buckles and a family that loves each other has to share a dark living room, and the American kind, where our social power grid proves, election cycle after election cycle, that it cannot empower all of our communities well. I said it was happening again. Just like 2016. And 2020. I said we were in for a powerless summer and fall.

I hate that I was right.

So let me tell you what these glasses have shown me since — through every pair of lenses my life has ground.

As a pastor, I saw…

…mercy become controversial. A bishop asked the most powerful person in the world for mercy — not policy, just mercy — and the request became a national scandal. I saw pulpits that find their voice for everything else go quiet, or applaud. I saw the moment call for a conscience and watched much of the church audition to be a court chaplain instead.

And I saw it inside my own house. Wesley described grace as a house: prevenient grace the porch — the light God leaves on before we know we are looking for home; justifying grace the door; sanctifying grace the rooms, where we spend our lives learning to love the way we have been loved. In a nation of outages, the church is supposed to be the house on the block whose lights stay on — not because our grid is better, but because our power source was never the grid.

Instead I saw grace rationed in the house of grace. Rationed at credentialing tables, where calling is measured by category. Rationed in appointment seasons, in budget lines, in who gets called “Reverend” with a full chest and who gets it with an asterisk. We cannot preach a grace we practice on ration. Wesley asked his preachers if they were going on to perfection — perfection in love, not in polity.

Some nights, wearing these lenses, I am the watchman of Ezekiel 33 — standing a post nobody assigned me and nobody relieves. The watchman’s math is merciless: if the sword comes and no trumpet sounds, the blood is on the watchman’s hands. So I keep blowing. But it is lonely on that wall. I look across this beautiful, maddening, grace-shaped connection I love, and I am pained by the real feeling that I am one of only a few who see that the national outage and the ecclesial one are the same pattern — that a church rationing grace inside its walls will have no surplus to share when the neighborhood goes dark.

Elijah said it first — “I alone am left” — and God corrected the prophet’s arithmetic: seven thousand had never bowed. I keep asking God to correct mine. I want to be wrong about being alone far more than I ever wanted to be wrong about the outage.

As a father, I saw…

…what I had to explain over dinner. In the original essay, the children in the powerless house asked the question that indicted everybody: “Why don’t we have a say?” I did not invent that question. I live with it. I am raising two Black sons in this country, which means I teach pattern recognition as a survival skill — our people have been reading patterns since patterns were reading us.

Through a father’s lenses, the timeline looks like this: before the summer of 2024 was out, they were shooting at candidates. Twice. By November, half the house declared victory while the other half went quiet in their rooms. Then came the year the lights stayed off — soldiers in American streets, federal agents pulling neighbors out of parking lots and courtrooms while churches debated whether sanctuary was a metaphor, lawmakers gunned down in their homes, a public figure assassinated on a campus in broad daylight while both corners of the house argued over whose rhetoric loaded the weapon.

And the beefs I shorthand-listed in 2024 did not squash. They metastasized. Gaza. Congo. Ukraine. Now Iran.*

*My shorthand is not mischaracterization of atrocities ravaging real bodies and real families as I type. That asterisk cost lives to earn.

That is not a news cycle. That is a pattern. 2016. 2020. 2024. Every four years the grid strains, the house darkens, and we act brand new — as if the handwriting just appeared on the wall, when the wall has been covered in it for years and we keep repainting instead of reading.

God is not hiding these patterns from us. We are hiding from the patterns.

As a son — of Oak Cliff, and of a grieving mother — I saw…

…a 250th birthday party thrown in a house that never made up. The Semiquincentennial. A milestone no living American had ever seen. And we fought over the guest list. Rival committees planned dueling parties. The concert on the National Mall collapsed when the artists said nah, we good, and a rally took its place. Seven out of ten of us told the pollsters we are dissatisfied with where the house is headed. The fireworks ended, and the family’s attention snapped back to the war, the midterms, and the group chat.

I watched it through the lenses my parents’ generation handed down, and to the elders of Oak Cliff, none of it was breaking news. They have seen lights come on and go off in this country before. They taught me what I now hand my sons: the power came back on for the birthday party, and we discovered the outage was never electrical. America got its lights turned on — candles, drone shows, the whole production — and sprinted for the corners. We can see each other in high definition now. And seeing, we chose the corners anyway.

Douglass asked what the Fourth of July is to the slave. I have spent the summer asking what the Fifth is to the slave’s great-great-grandchildren. One answer: the morning after the party, when the “unity” comes down with the bunting and the outage resumes on schedule.

And I saw my mother’s face. Because while the nation was rehearsing its forgetting, my family was learning what remembering costs. No son should have to watch his mother bury her son. I have. Which is why the national amnesia is not an abstraction to me. It is an offense.

As the brother of Devin, I saw…

…the power go out in my own house in a way no generator could touch. My brother. Thirty-four years old. Five months after I published that essay.

I learned in my own living room what I had been theorizing about the nation’s: darkness will either drive you to your corners or drive you to the couch where your family is sitting, and grief does not let you choose neutral. I chose the couch. I am still choosing it. Some days badly.

Is it possible that we have quickly forgotten the trials endured, the pain caused, the tears shed, the lives lost, the healing needed, the time it took… I asked that in 2024 as a social critic. I ask it now as Devin’s brother.

As a chaplain, I saw…

…a generation watching us with perfect eyesight. My students do not need my glasses; they see the patterns natively, and what they are deciding — right now, in real time — is whether the church deserves their hope.

They watched the culture run the play, too. That “rap beef” I shorthand-listed in 2024 ended in a public verdict — danced to in stadiums, performed at the Super Bowl, litigated in courtrooms and group chats. For one strange season it was the closest thing this country had to a shared conversation about accountability. Then this spring, the artist who took the loss spun the block like 2024 was a rumor: three albums in one night, forty-three songs, numbers one, two, and three on the charts simultaneously. No reckoning. Just volume. Track titles promising to make them cry, make them pay, make them remember — everything except make it right. And America ate it up, because that is our favorite play: when the verdict is uncomfortable, out-release the memory. Hip-hop raised me, so I say it with love: the culture is not separate from the pattern. Sometimes the culture is the pattern, with a better beat.

My students stream the albums and clock the amnesia in the same breath. They are not fooled. The question is whether the church will prove any different from the chart.

And in all of these roles, I see — and continue to see — with hope.

Because here is the part of my prescription nobody asked about: I only need the glasses for distance.

Up close, my eyes work fine. Up close, I see Tiffany across the kitchen, steadying me when the watching gets heavy. I see my sons becoming men worth following. I see the Johnsons — because my family does not live alone. By intention and covenant, two families share one household: a veteran and a pastor, our children growing up under a common roof, staying at the same table, splitting the same bills, extending the grace we hope to receive. People ask us why. Here is why: we decided not to wait for an outage to learn how to share a living room. It is not utopia. It is rehearsal. And I testify from inside the experiment: the corners are not destiny. The pattern can be broken on purpose. I see it every morning, no correction required.

That is why I still hope. The love is legible up close. The God who grinds lenses for distance gave me native sight for grace.

So receive my petition — a word I have learned is both a legislative instrument and a prayer. To my United Methodist family, whom I address as a child of the house and not a stone-thrower outside it: we have proven we can change. We amended what we once called unamendable. That is exactly why I will not let us rest. And to the church in general — capital-C, every tradition that carries Christ’s name: when the world’s power fails, we do not get to fail with it. We are the people who are supposed to know where the candles are.

I am not petitioning us toward niceness. Niceness is what the empire accepts in lieu of love. I am petitioning us toward the higher degree — the love that runs the extension cord across the property line. The love that shares the generator with the neighbor who voted differently. The love that grieves with families the state has decided are disposable.

Do no harm. Do good. Stay in love with God. Simple when Wesley said it. Simple now. Never once easy.

The founders wrote “a more perfect Union” and rationed it. The church has too often followed suit. But the God I serve does not do grace on ration — that is the whole petition. That is the entire prayer. A better Union — better than the founders imagined, better than the rally version, better than the corners — is still on the table. Not because the grid got fixed. Because the family is still in the house, and the Host has not left the room.

When the lights go out — and they will — who will we be in the dark?

I said it in 2024. I will say it louder in 2026, from the wreckage, with receipts:

We do not have to run back to our corners.

We can share both in the joys of restored power and the clarity of common humanity.

We can.

In the garden, on the worst night of His life, Jesus asked His friends for one thing. Not strategy. Not defense. Could you not watch with me one hour? They slept while the pattern closed in.

So I am asking my denomination, and every believer within the sound of this essay, what Christ asked the church before there was a church — and I am handing you my glasses as I ask:

If you see it too, say so. From your pulpit, at your charge conference, in your delegation, on your feed. Blow the trumpet next to mine, so I stop wondering whether the sound on the wall is another watchman or just the wind.

Watch with me. See with me.

It’s still happening. But so is grace. And grace, unrationed, is the only power that has never once gone out. Keep the glasses for the distance, beloved. Come close for the rest.

The Fourth of July was not the same without you, bro.

Now, let me be clear—we already don’t celebrate the Fourth like the rest of America celebrates the Fourth. We know our history. We know what our ancestors were doing on this day 250 years ago while others were signing declarations about freedom and independence they had no intention of extending to us. We just celebrate that we have one more day with each other that THEY haven’t taken from us.

So the Fourth has always been complicated. Always been a day we hold at arm’s length, a day we interrogate as we celebrate.

But this Fourth was different. Heavier. And it took me a while to understand why.

I Thought It Was Just Exhaustion

At first, I thought the heaviness was just exhaustion.

June wore me out. Mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally—all of it. The work has been relentless. Ministry at St. Peter’s. Chaplaincy at Huston-Tillotson. Grant work. Preaching. Pastoral care. The endless obligations that come with serving two institutions simultaneously while trying to build something meaningful in both.

And I can hear you now, bro. Clear as day: “Bro, you be moving. I’m tryna be like you!”

You always said that. Always marveled at my schedule, my pace, my constant motion. You looked at how I moved through the world and saw something you aspired to.

And I always replied: “Bro, one day you will be with me everywhere I go!”

I meant it as encouragement. As a promise that we’d build together, that you’d travel with me, that we’d take Phat Kicks and our shared vision to every room I entered.

I didn’t expect that promise to be fulfilled by your face on a necklace against my chest.

Damn.

You are with me everywhere I go now. Just not the way either of us imagined when I said those words.

The Fourth Was Different Because You Loved It

But the exhaustion wasn’t the whole story. The Fourth was heavy for a more specific reason:

You loved the Fourth.

Despite all our complicated feelings about America and its hypocrisy, you knew how to find joy in the day. You knew how to make it about family, about community, about presence.

You’d put on a fresh, fly fit—because you always understood that looking good was its own form of resistance, its own declaration of dignity. You’d post up on the porch and shoot the breeze with Boo, Petey, and ‘nem for hours. Just talking. Just being. Just enjoying each other’s company the way we were raised to do.

And Mama would keep coming outside, being nosy, inserting herself into the conversation, making sure she didn’t miss anything. LOL. You know how she does.

That was your Fourth. Fresh fit, good company, porch conversations, Mama being all in your business.

And we all felt your absence this year.

The Whole Family Felt It

Mama was sad when I called her. I could hear it in her voice—the particular grief that holidays bring, the way celebration becomes complicated when someone’s missing from the picture.

But here’s what love looks like: Kayla and the kids went to see Mama to cheer her up. They showed up. They filled some of the space your absence created. They made sure she wasn’t alone with her grief on a day that used to include you.

That’s the beloved community in action. That’s us taking care of each other the way you always did.

Boo and others posted on the Book about how much they missed you. The tributes, the memories, the “wish you were here” posts that show up now on every holiday, every milestone, every ordinary day that reminds someone of you.

BG posted on the Book too. And man, we laughed. BG shared a story about how you told her that I told you she was living rent-free in your head whenever you were thinking about doing something “Christians shouldn’t be doing.” LOL. The way you’d hear her voice, feel her conviction, let her be your conscience in those moments.

That’s the thing about how you loved, bro. You collected people. You made them family. And now they’re all carrying pieces of you, sharing stories, keeping you alive in the ways that matter.

Lifting You Up in an Unexpected Room

Today, I lifted you up in a room full of mostly white young people.

I’m preaching at a United Methodist youth camp this week. And as I stood before these young people—most of whom will never know the neighborhoods we came from, the porches we sat on, the run-ins we survived—I talked about you.

I talked about Phat Kicks. About the vision we had to build something together, to grow it in Dallas and Austin, to create a business that honored our love for sneaker culture while building generational wealth and legacy.

I showed them a picture of us when we were younger. Fresh kicks on our feet, sitting in front of Aunt Alice’s (RIP) two-door Chevy Cavalier in the driveway of the house.

And it just dawned on me as I was standing there...

The same driveway.

The same house.

Damn.

The geography of our lives, the sacred ordinary spaces where we became who we were—I carried that into a youth camp full of white teenagers who have no context for it, and I made it mean something. I made you mean something to them.

You Would’ve Been Proud

You would’ve been proud, bro.

Because you always said you could speak in front of people the way I do. You always believed you had it in you—the gift, the presence, the ability to command a room and move people with words.

And now you do.

Every time I preach, you’re there. Every time I stand before a congregation or a classroom or a camp full of young people, you’re speaking through me. Your story, your vision, your love—it all comes with me into these spaces.

It might not be how we wanted it. We wanted you here, physically, building alongside me. We wanted to do this together, two brothers taking on the world.

But know this, bro: I will bring you into rooms we only dreamed of. I will speak your name in spaces you never got to enter. I will make sure your legacy reaches places we couldn’t have imagined when we were sitting in that driveway in our fresh kicks.

That’s a promise.

Another Black Boy Died

A Black boy died on this Fourth of July weekend too.

In the last month since I wrote about you—since I processed the collision of your anniversary with that verdict—another Black boy has died. Another family is planning a funeral. Another mother is learning to breathe in a world that took her child.

And I can only imagine what you’d say. I can hear you now: “Man, that shit crazy. They really don’t give a damn about us, bro!”

You’re right. It doesn’t seem like they do.

The pattern continues. The crushing continues. The systems that took you, that judge our children as men, that lean their full weight on Black backs—they keep operating, keep grinding, keep producing grief in our communities with relentless regularity.

But here’s where I have to add something to your words, bro. Something I’ve been learning in this season of grief and ministry:

They don’t seem to give a damn. And at the same time, we have to make them give a damn.

That’s the work. That’s the calling. That’s what I’ve committed my life to.

Making the World Better—From Camps to Porches

And that’s what I plan on doing, bro.

With you on my chest and your spirit in my heart, we will make the world a better place.

Whether it’s at a youth camp, standing before white teenagers who need to understand the world differently than they’ve been taught—

Or on the front porch, sitting with our people, building the beloved community one conversation at a time—

We will do this work.

Because beloved community isn’t just built in the big moments, the marches, the movements. It’s built in youth camps where you plant seeds in young hearts. It’s built on porches where you love people well. It’s built in sneaker businesses that honor legacy and create opportunity. It’s built in the daily, ordinary, sacred work of refusing to let the crushing win.

You loved hard, bro. And that love is now fuel for the work.

Every young person I reach, every system I challenge, every room I bring you into—it’s all part of making them give a damn. It’s all part of building the world you deserved but didn’t get to fully experience.

Eight Months In

We love you and miss you, bro.

The Fourth wasn’t the same without you. It won’t ever be the same. There will always be an empty space on the porch, a missing fresh fit, a silence where your laughter used to be.

But you’re still with me. On my chest. In my heart. In every room I enter. In every young person I reach. In every act of justice and love I offer to a world that desperately needs it.

Keep holding us down out here.

And we will carry your legacy on.

From youth camps to front porches. From Dallas to Austin. From this broken present to the beloved community we’re still building.

With you every step of the way.

Love you, bro. Miss you.

Until we meet again. ✌🏾

Rev. Marcus M. Jones is University Chaplain at Huston-Tillotson University and Senior Pastor at St. Peter’s United Methodist Church. This is part of an ongoing series processing grief, ministry, faith, and the long work of building beloved community in a world that keeps crushing the people we love.

His friends came home.

He didn’t.

Two days later, his body was found in the water off the island. As I write this, no cause of death has been released and the investigation is ongoing. I am not going to rehearse the details, speculate about the outcome, or name anyone else involved. There is only one name that matters here, and it is Nolan Wells.

I am also not going to make the argument this story demands. I already made it — seven years ago, when Nolan was eleven years old, the same age my youngest son is now.

In February 2019, I published an essay titled “Our Kids Can’t Really Be Friends: How White Supremacy and White Fragility Affect the Relationships of Children.” I wrote about the thousand small ways white supremacy structures even the sandbox — the curriculum that erases, the discipline that amplifies, the little white hands in my son’s hair, the exhaustion of raising Black children as ambassadors in spaces that never studied for the exchange. I argued that until white families do the intentional work Black families have never had the luxury of skipping, the friendships between our children remain unproven. Some readers thought I was being hyperbolic.

I will not rewrite that essay. This week rewrote it for me. Go read it, and then come back.

Because here is the only piece of analysis I will add, and it holds no matter what the investigation eventually concludes: even the most innocent version of this story is an indictment. Even if the fuller account turns out to be a tragedy with no villain in it, the boat still came back lighter than it left. A group of friends still departed an island, and the one who was not aboard was the Black one, and no one turned around, and no one counted heads and said we are not going anywhere without Nolan.

And notice what happened in Black America the moment the story broke — before a single fact came in. Millions of us looked at the shape of it — Black boy, white friends, Deep South, left behind, found dead — and our stomachs dropped into a very old place. Some will call that reaction prejudice. It is not. It is pattern recognition, purchased at full price across four hundred years, paid for in bodies pulled from Southern waters. When the news said he was with his friends, a whole nation of Black parents heard that word inside quotation marks. That instinct — that inability to trust the friendship itself — is the harvest of everything the 2019 essay named.

So let me simply sharpen the thesis into the test it has become:

Everything else — the shared classrooms, the travel teams, the birthday invitations, the “I don’t see color” — is preseason. Friendship is proven in the moment when staying costs something. Every Black child in a white space is quietly running a calculation his white friends will never have to run: If it goes wrong out here, will they stay for me? Nolan’s family now lives inside the worst possible answer to that question. Because whatever the water did, the leaving came first.

What Changed for the Joneses

When I wrote the original essay, my family lived in Wichita Falls, where we were routinely the only Black family in the room — the team, the classroom, the daycare, the denomination. I served those white spaces faithfully. There, and then in Arlington, I spent years doing exactly what I begged white parents to do in that essay: cultivating diversity, building tables, teaching the history, making room. I do not regret a day of it. That work was ministry, and some of its fruit is still growing in people I will never see again.

But seven more years taught me this: the exhaustion I named in 2019 is not sustainable without a wellspring. You cannot pour out in white spaces forever if you are not being poured into somewhere Black.

Today I serve as chaplain at my alma mater, Huston-Tillotson University — the oldest institution of higher learning in Austin, built by and for freed people. My oldest son, the eleven-year-old who couldn’t find himself in his school’s curriculum in 2019, is now nineteen and enrolled there, learning HIS history in classrooms where his presence requires no explanation and his hair requires no petting zoo. I pastor a historically Black church in East Austin, founded in 1863 by people who heard freedom coming before the paperwork arrived. My youngest son attends a primarily Black preparatory school where “good” and “bad” are assessments of his character, not measurements of his docility.

Let me say clearly what this homecoming is and is not. It is not segregation. It is not surrender.

It is Sankofa — going back to fetch what we need in order to go forward.

The HBCU, the Black church, the Black school: these have always been the wells our people drew from before walking back out into the desert of this country. My sons are not hiding from white people. They are being fortified — so that when they enter white spaces, as they will all their lives, they enter whole, named, and un-negotiable.

I could not have written that paragraph in 2019. I was still trying to survive on ally promises. Now I know: the promises may come or they may not, but my children will drink either way.

To the White Parents Still Reading

Everything I asked of you in 2019 I ask again. None of it has expired. Most of it remains undone. But this week I am adding one question to the list, and I need you to sit with it at your dinner table:

Not “is your child kind.” Not “does your child have Black friends.” Those questions cost nothing. This one: when the sun is going down and the group is ready to go and the Black kid isn’t on the boat — has your child been formed into the kind of person who says we don’t leave without him? Have you taught your children that friendship means counting heads? That some loyalties are supposed to be inconvenient? Or have you only taught them to be pleasant — and left the staying to chance?

Black parents are having our half of this conversation. We always have. We teach our children how to survive your children’s world. The question of 2019 remains the question of 2026: when will you teach your children how to be worthy of ours?

What, to Nolan’s Mother, Is the Fourth of July?

Frederick Douglass asked his version of that question in 1852, and this month — as the fireworks of the semiquincentennial faded over the Gulf — a Black mother in Mississippi was handed hers. Two hundred fifty years of proclaimed liberty, and she waits on an autopsy.

I wrote in 2019 that maybe, if white families did the work, our children could one day simply be friends. I still believe that day is possible. I am a preacher; hope is my occupation. The Jesus I serve washed the feet of men he knew would abandon him by morning — which means he knows exactly what it feels like to be left, and he stayed anyway, and he calls all of our children to do likewise.

But until the staying is taught — until white children are raised who count heads, who look back, who refuse to leave —

our kids still can’t really be friends.

And Nolan Wells should have simply come home.

Rest well, young king.

“They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” — Jeremiah 6:14 (NRSVUE)

“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” — Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (July 5, 1852)\

When I was a boy, I loved fireworks. Not watching them — setting them off, in the street between the bayou and my grandparents’ house in Louisiana, barefoot on hot asphalt with cousins yelling behind me. And here is what I understand now that I could not have told you then: those summers were never about patriotism. Nobody on that street was celebrating a document. We were celebrating each other. The Fourth was about family, and about promise — the cookout as the reward for a promise still delayed, a people feasting on what we had while we waited on what we were owed. Black folk have always kept the Fourth that way. We did not gather around the nation’s freedom. We gathered around our own — the kind we made ourselves, plate by plate, in the space between the bayou and Granny’s porch.

Yesterday my timeline was full of Frederick Douglass. Senators recited him. Activists and influencers quoted him. By sundown, the most withering indictment ever read to this country’s face had been flattened into a tasteful graphic, filed somewhere between the potato salad and the sparklers. Everybody posted the fire. Almost nobody sat with the target. So this morning — the fifth, the day Douglass himself chose, having refused to stand up on the fourth — let me sit with it.

I did not learn Douglass from a graphic. I learned him from the two institutions Black folk built when America locked every other door: the Black church and the Black college. I am a son of Oak Cliff, South Dallas, raised on scripture and classic hip-hop in roughly equal measure, and both were teaching me the same lesson before I had language for it — that this country makes promises in one voice and keeps them in another. I went from those streets to a historically Black university in Austin, the second pillar of Black striving standing right alongside the Black church, where they handed me a business degree and something the degree plan never listed: the knowledge that everything we have, we built under siege.

Then I took a theology degree from a prominent, predominantly white university, where I learned the doctrines of a church that could describe grace with precision and ration it with equal precision. And now I pastor a historic Black congregation, founded by freedpeople in 1863, inside a white denomination. Every Sunday I stand in that pulpit, I stand in the gap between what an institution professes and what it practices. So when I ask what the fifth of July is to the Black American, I am not running a thought experiment. I am telling you where I live.

Last week I wrote my denomination a letter about that gap — about a church that rations the grace it preaches — and the whole connection wrote back: Methodists, the Methodists who left to become something else, and folk with no stake in Methodism at all, in comment threads and text messages I am still answering. The volume told me the wound runs deeper than any church. It runs to the founding. My denomination did not invent the ration.

Let me first say what is true, because I was raised to tell the truth even when it favors the other side. Two hundred and fifty years ago a company of men wrote, as the opening sentence of a nation, that human beings are created equal and endowed by their Creator with rights no king may repeal. That sentence is a piece of fire. It outran the men who wrote it; it convicted them in their own lifetimes. Douglass called its principles saving principles, and he indicted America with America’s own paper — prosecutor and claimant in the same breath. That posture is my inheritance. The Black church has held it for two and a half centuries: too honest to celebrate the document uncritically, too faithful to walk away from the claim.

But the fire came fenced.

And that is America’s original problem, the one this birthday cannot outrun: an inclusive declaration with exclusive rights.

They wrote all and administered some. They proclaimed freedom universally and distributed it selectively — and every crisis this country has ever suffered over race, from the three-fifths clause to the citizenship fights of this very season, is that first contradiction compounding interest. America at 250 does not have a new problem. It has its 1776 problem, at scale.

They are not two intensities of the same love; they are two different loves, fixed on two different objects.

There is a patriotism that loves the country as a possession — loves the flag like a man loves a deed to land he did not clear, as inheritance, as entitlement, as proof of standing over somebody. Its freedom is the freedom to dominate without being questioned. Its history is a monument with the labor sanded off. It is not wounded by the nation’s sins, only by the naming of them; it cries free, free where there is no freedom and calls the one pointing at the shackle the disturber of the peace.

And there is a patriotism that loves the country as a promise — the love I was raised in.

It does not love America for its power but for its promise, and loves the promise enough to refuse the lie that it has been kept. It is the patriotism of the hush harbor, of Douglass and Truth and Tubman, of the soldiers who fought for a flag that did not fully cover them and came home to fight again, of King with his check marked insufficient funds, of Malcolm telling us plainly that a promise perpetually deferred becomes a question the country’s own creed has laid on the table. I hold King and Malcolm together the way my tradition always has — the dream and the reckoning — because the covenant patriotism needs both hands.

So — what’s free? Not a flag. Not a firework. A promise is only as free as the people it forgot. Ask the question again, deeper.

Douglass walked off that Maryland plantation a free man — and spent the rest of his life demonstrating that he had escaped bondage without escaping slavery. The system that owned him simply changed clothes and followed him north: the fugitive laws, the mob, the ceiling on everything. And that is precisely our condition now. Michelle Alexander gave my generation the language for it: we are free from a form of slavery, not from the thing itself. The plantation became the penitentiary by way of the Thirteenth Amendment’s own quiet exception — except as a punishment for crime — and the auction block became the arraignment.

This is what Meek Mill was testifying to when he came home from prison in 2018 and asked the question over a Biggie sample: a liberty a probation officer can revoke on a whim is not freedom; it is a longer leash. I’m the pastor connected to people on papers. I could’ve been on papers! Somebody is one missed check-in from a violation. When I preach this, I am not quoting a record. The record is quoting us.

And JAY-Z’s verse carries the question from the cell to the ledger: what does it profit a people to be emancipated and own nothing? Freedom without ownership is dependence with better branding — forty acres promised and repossessed within the year, Greenwood built and burned, land signed away in courthouses because the papers were never drawn.

The church says amen to every bar, and then adds the verse only the church can add:

What’s free? Not a release date with strings attached. Not emancipation with an asterisk. Ask it once more — and this time ask it for the world.

Because America’s unrepentant sin against Black Americans was never a domestic matter. It is the foundation of everything this country has done to the Global South. The habits were perfected on us first — the extraction of labor, the fencing of belonging, the grammar of invited to work, forbidden to belong — and then exported: to the banana republics and the debt traps, the coups and the client states, the darker nations of the earth treated as America treats its own darker citizens. You can watch it play out in a stadium this very week. The whole world came to North America for the biggest World Cup ever staged, sold on the creed that the beautiful game unites the earth — and it is being played inside a country holding a travel ban on thirty-nine nations, nearly all of them Black and brown, nearly all of them the Global South.

Haiti — the first Black republic, the nation that took the Declaration more seriously than its authors and has been made to pay for it for two centuries — qualified for the first time in over fifty years, and most Haitians cannot enter the country to watch. The first Somali referee to reach a World Cup was turned around at the airport holding a valid visa. Immigration agents post at the turnstiles like it’s a checkpoint and not a party.

The world at the gates can see it, even when the fireworks make it hard for the country to see itself. America cannot stand before the earth as freedom’s symbol while its first creditors remain unpaid at home and its oldest habits work the borders abroad.

Hear me, though, because I was not raised to leave anybody in the wreckage: the covenant patriotism is not the enemy of white America. It is white America’s rescue. You cannot hold a man in the ditch without climbing down in the ditch to hold him there — and the patriotism of possession has spent two hundred and fifty years in that ditch, exhausted, guarding a superiority that was always a prison with a flag on it. The justice we demand is not anybody’s defeat. It is an invitation to lay the weight down.

What’s free? Underneath the nation’s paper, and older than it, there is a freedom no congress conferred and no clause can repeal, no officer can revoke and no ledger can issue.

If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.

My ancestors found it in the brush arbor, in a God the slaveholder’s religion never meant them to meet — and because Caesar never granted it, Caesar could never take it back. It is not an anesthetic; it is an engine. It prayed, then it marched. It shouted on Sunday and registered voters on Monday. It is the freedom that let a stolen people love a country that would not love them back, and still refuse to swallow its lie.

And here is the movement nobody posts: Douglass ended in hope. After all that fire, he turned back to the saving principles and refused despair. That is the discipline I was raised in — promise in one hand, indictment in the other, and drop neither. The arc is long and it bends, but it has never once bent by itself. My grandmother’s hands were on it, in that Louisiana yard where the cookout was the down payment on a promise the country still owes. The HBCU that made me was a hand on it. The church I pastor, built by freedpeople in 1863, is a hand on it still.

So let me answer the question plainly, this last time, so nobody can say the preacher only asked it.

What’s free — for Black Americans, at America’s 250?

Equity — the debt acknowledged and the balance paid, in land and lending and schools and health, because a promise without repayment is just a longer sermon.

Self-determination — our institutions, our churches, our colleges, our businesses and our block, owned and governed by us, because Malcolm was right that no one can give you freedom you do not hold in your own hands.

Equal rights — the whole Declaration, every clause, without asterisk or exception clause, because King was right that the check was written to all and we have come to cash it. Equity. Self-determination. Equal rights. That is the answer. Everything less is fireworks.

Two hundred and fifty years ago they wrote a declaration and did not mean us. But the God my people met in the hush harbor had already declared us free before the foundation of the world — and meant every last soul.

So on this fifth of July I say to my country what I said to my church last week: I am not here to celebrate your freedom. I am here to hold you to your paper.

From Oak Cliff to East Austin, by way of a Louisiana street between the bayou and Granny’s porch — still asking the old question, and still holding on to the saving principles.

“But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” — Amos 5:24 (NRSVUE)

My dear fellow United Methodists,

I write to you in the week you delisted Asbury Seminary. But let me say at once that Asbury is not my grievance, and if you mistake the window for the house you will miss everything I have come to tell you. My grievance is the Black church in America, and the Central Conferences across Africa, the Philippines, and Europe — the people who have carried this denomination on their backs and felt its failures most severely. Asbury is only the newest place where I can see, again, the pattern of a Church that demands a justice it will not turn on itself.

I write not as an outsider to this connection but as one of its own — a Licensed Local Pastor who has loved you longer than you have made it easy to.

My journey into you began in 2011, in one of your own seminaries, Wesley Theological Seminary, while I served St. Paul UMC in Oxon Hill, Maryland. It was in your classrooms — learning John Wesley, the warmed heart, the General Rules — that I first met my own people’s Methodism, and learned that the same Wesley who lit my soul had a Black church that had to survive him, and a Central Jurisdiction that proves it. In 2012, I transferred to Perkins School of Theology at SMU in Dallas, and entered the candidacy process in the North Texas Annual Conference while serving the historic St. Luke “Community” in Dallas, a Black congregation that taught me what the connection could be at its best.

Then your process taught me what it is at its most ordinary.

In 2013 your District Committee deferred me. In 2017 I stood before your Board of Ordained Ministry and waited again on your verdict about a call I never asked your permission to receive.

Dozens of my Black colleagues — gifted, anointed, certain of their summons — met that same resistance. They were judged not unfit for the gospel but insufficiently Methodist, insufficiently polished, insufficiently safe. And they left. By every reasonable measure, I should have left with them.

I owe you the reason, and it is not the flattering one. I did not stay because you earned it. I stayed for the same reason Dr. King refused to renounce a country that betrayed him at every turn. He looked at a nation that had handed his people a check marked insufficient funds and refused to believe the bank of justice was bankrupt. I have looked at this denomination’s account and made the same wager — that Wesleyan grace is real collateral, that the ideals are not counterfeit, that the institution has only defaulted on a promise it is still good for. To stay is not naïveté about the default. It is the refusal to concede the promise was a lie. We are bound together in this connection whether you are comfortable with me or not, tied, as King said of us all, in a single garment of destiny.

So let me grant what the Asbury decision costs, and then tell you why it is not the center. Beloved community across deep difference is not a fantasy; I have built it. At the Wesley Foundation I served at the University of Texas at Arlington, our unapologetically inclusive ministry kept covenant and real friendship with the Global Methodist congregation down the road. We did not have to agree in order to belong to one another. That is what Wesleyan grace looks like when both sides are willing to spend it — the dividing wall of hostility broken down, as Paul told the Ephesians, instead of rebuilt brick by brick. The delisting forecloses that. It teaches the whole connection that the answer to difference is the closed door.

But hear me clearly, lest you think I am pleading the traditionalists’ case: the ones who broke away to build the Global Methodist Church are no innocents in this. They tore the body — ninety-seven percent of the departing churches were white — and too many did it while harvesting the votes of the global South and sharing none of its burdens, refusing the racial reckoning that real Methodism requires. They are culpable and complicit. So both sides refused the grace that makes beloved community possible: you, by slamming the door; they, by walking out and setting the house on fire behind them.

It reminds me of a scene from the 2024 movie Conclave. In Conclave, when a progressive cardinal believes the seat of the papacy may be occupied by a traditionalist, he rises and declares that what they are really in is a war — and the film’s quiet rebuttal, preached from that same chapel, is that certainty is the enemy of unity, that the gift the church most needs is a leader humble enough to doubt.

But here is what I most need you to see: the primarily white institutions trading these blows are not the ones who bleed. When you make war over orthodoxy and over the bodies of LGBTQ people, it is the Black church and the Central Conferences who are spent as currency and left holding the cost. We are courted for our votes and abandoned in our need. That is the wound. Asbury is only this week’s evidence of it.

So let me grieve it plainly, the way you grieve in a family you have no intention of leaving. This is the church that, when white Methodists North and South made their peace in 1939, purchased that peace by herding every Black congregation in the country into a segregated Central Jurisdiction — and did not dissolve it until 1968. That is not ancient history; that is my grandparents’ church. And in 2024, when you split again, the data told the truth your sermons would not: the churches that disaffiliated were ninety-seven percent white, while barely one in sixty of your Black churches walked away. Sit with that arithmetic.

The people you have served least are the people who stayed most. The remnant you gatekept is the remnant that kept you.

And it is not only us in America. Across the water, the Central Conferences — the African and Filipino and European churches who are your fastest growth and your most courted votes — are treated as wards to be managed rather than partners to be trusted: leaned on hard at General Conference, overlooked nearly everywhere else. You will fly across an ocean to count their ballots and not cross a city to fund their ministry.

So I will say it in the language of the people who raised me: put your money where your Discipline is. Your Book of Discipline is a beautiful document — open itinerancy, inclusiveness, equitable appointment, a connection that carries the weak on the shoulders of the strong. I believe those words. But a Discipline righteous on the page and unjust in the appointment is no covenant at all. You found, this week, the administrative will to end an eighty-year relationship in a single vote. Find one tenth of that will for the congregations and the conferences that never left you.

And I must say the hardest thing, because honesty is the only gift worth bringing to people you intend to keep loving. It was not the avowed traditionalist who grieved me most. King’s great disappointment was never the Klansman, whose hatred at least announced itself; it was the white moderate, more devoted to order than to justice. I have inherited that disappointment in a new costume — the white progressive who agreed with me in private and abandoned me in public. You welcomed our Black hands when you needed votes for LGBTQ inclusion, and we gave them, because justice is indivisible and we do not parcel out our solidarity.

But when Black pastors struggled and Black churches went dark, your voices — so eloquent for the one cause — fell to a whisper.

You are offended, genuinely wounded, when we name how narrow your inclusion turned out to be. The lukewarm ally is harder to bear than the honest opponent, because the opponent never called himself my brother while keeping his foot on the line that held me back.

You will tell yourselves the discomfort is about our tone — that we are strident, that we have made it political, that we will not let it rest. You will call us divisive, agitators, troublers of Israel, which is the very name Ahab pinned on Elijah for telling the truth about the kingdom. But I have sat in enough of your rooms to know what is actually moving. The offense you take is not at our Blackness or our hunger for justice. It is the flinch of a conscience that has not yet confessed the racism still dwelling within it. The annoyance is guilt wearing the mask of fatigue.

Audre Lorde named the work better than the church has dared to. The deepest revolutionary change, she warned, is never only against the oppression around us, but against the fragment of the oppressor lodged within us — the part that has learned to reach for the master’s tools even in liberation’s name. Hear how Wesleyan that is. That fragment is what Wesley called inbred sin, the residue the Spirit excavates as we go on to perfection. So the confrontation with the racism in your foundation is not a political demand I am making of you; it is sanctification. It is the holiness you say you believe in, finally turned on the one room of the house you have refused to clean. And the same blade falls on us: a liberation that picks up Pharaoh’s weapons has already lost its soul. None of us is exempt from the excavation.

I will not pretend there has been no progress; there are Ebony bishops in rooms that once held none, and I thank God for them. But the oldest trap in the house remains: the price of the high chair is too often the muzzle. The leaders you lift up are pressed to prove they are not too much — to spend their hard-won capital on everything except the people who look like them. I do not blame the ones caught in that bind. I name the bind, because the bind is yours.

And here, finally, is the difference between us — the one that ought to bring you to repentance. The Black church has always done what Lorde and Wesley alike demand: it turns the knife inward first. Judgment begins with the household of God. I will not flatter you or myself — the Black church in America is, for the most part, conservative on questions of sexuality, and we do not speak with one voice.

It has examined its own sin with the same fire it aimed at Pharaoh — and that unflinching self-examination is the very thing that has led some of us, myself among them, to keep widening the table even as much of our church holds the traditional line. Our authority was never in being right about everything. It is in being willing to stand under our own sermon. That is the gift the Black church keeps offering this denomination and this denomination keeps refusing: not a politics, but a posture — the courage to be judged by the justice you demand of everyone else. A church that has become a thermometer, merely registering the temperature of its own comfort, instead of a thermostat that sets the climate by God’s justice, has already lost the plot.

And yet — hear me — I have not given up on you, because grace is not a theory to me; it is the ground I am standing on. John Wesley insisted there is no holiness but social holiness, that sanctification was never private but a whole people perfected in love. If Wesley believed a single sinner could be made perfect in love, then I am Wesleyan enough to believe a denomination can be too.

That is the most Methodist thing about me: I think this institution is a candidate for sanctification.

And the evidence of it is already among you. The future is sitting in your young-adult and campus ministries that refuse to separate worship from justice, and in the churches — the diverse ones, the serving ones — that put community and justice first and let the gospel keep its skin in the game. The remnant was never the leftover. The remnant is the seed.

Near the end, Dr. King confided to a friend his fear that he had led his people into a burning house. When the friend asked what they should do, King answered: then we become the firemen. That is why I stay. I stay to be a fireman in a house that keeps catching fire — sometimes from the arsonists outside, and lately, I must tell you, from the matches you strike yourselves. I stay to hold the deed when the owners forget what it says. I challenge you this hard precisely because I love you, and because Black Methodists, like Black Americans, have poured into this house our soul, our sweat, and our tears, with holy justice as our grounding. I am asking you, at long last, to become what your own name already promises: a beloved community — built with Wesleyan grace on every side, and not for the ones who agree with us only, but for the world.

Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God.

Let judgment begin where it belongs — with us.

And put your money where your Discipline is.

Your brother in the connection, still,

In grace,

A Licensed Local Pastor who has not yet left

June 9, 2026

Today makes seven months.

I was sitting in my performance evaluation meeting when Mama called. I stepped out to take the call, expecting a grief-filled conversation similar to the one we’d had yesterday—the kind that has become familiar in this season, where the weight of Devin’s absence presses down on her and all I can do is offer hope and reassurance from 200 miles away.

And indeed, grief was on the line.

But this time it was compounded. Layered. Because today, the same day that marks seven months since I lost my brother, a Collin County jury found Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder and sentenced him to 35 years in prison.

“Did you see what they did to that baby?” she asked immediately as I answered the phone.

I knew exactly what she meant.

“Today is seven months since Gee passed, and now this baby is going to jail!” Her voice carried the particular ache of a Black mother who has spent the majority of her life caring, worrying, praying, and grieving Black sons. “Gee used to always say they don’t care about Black men!”

The Porch Conversation

Funny how, as soon as she said that, my mind traveled back to a conversation on the porch of Devin’s apartment several years ago.

“Bro, they don’t give a f*** about us, bro!”

This was around the time Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. We were all angry during that period. The kind of anger that comes from recognition, from seeing yourself in the body lying in the street, from understanding that it could have been you, could have been your brother, could have been anyone you loved.

See, for us growing up, police brutality, racial profiling, and racial encounters were as frequent as the 466 DART bus line that ran in front of our neighborhood, Village Oaks Apartments. (I’ve written about these run-ins before.) This wasn’t abstract for us. This wasn’t theoretical. This was the texture of our daily lives—the constant awareness that the systems designed to protect others were designed to surveil, suspect, and sometimes destroy us.

Devin understood this in his bones. He felt it. He named it. “They don’t give a f*** about us.”

And now, seven months after his passing, my mother is on the phone weeping not just for her son but for another Black mother’s son—Karmelo Anthony—and the verdict that confirms what Devin always said.

Honestly, what makes this so difficult is because this is a real case with real families, and a young man—Austin Metcalf—lost his life. A mother and father and brother are grieving him. That grief is real. Two families have been shattered by what happened at that track meet in April 2025.

I wasn’t in that courtroom. I didn’t hear all 21 witnesses. I won’t pretend to adjudicate from a distance what a jury determined up close.

But here’s what I can speak to: the way this verdict lands in Black homes. The way it confirms a fear that Black mothers carry every single day.

When I left for college, Devin lost his primary role model during the most formative years of his young life. And that absence only exacerbated the hardship of growing up in such an oppressive environment. I didn’t fully understand that burden until it was too late—until the mental, emotional, and physical stress had already begun to affect him in ways I couldn’t reverse.

The justice system doesn’t work in favor of young Black teenagers who are judged as men in ways their white counterparts aren’t. This is the documented reality—the way Black children are routinely perceived as older, more dangerous, less innocent than white children of the same age. The way the benefit of the doubt that’s extended so freely to some is withheld from others.

This is why Karmelo Anthony matters to Black people. Not because we’ve all reviewed the trial transcript. But because the weight of the law has always leaned heavily on the backs of Black Americans. Because we’ve watched too many times as the same set of facts produces wildly different outcomes depending on the color of the person standing trial.

So on the anniversary of Devin’s passing, the conviction of a young Black man weighs heavy on a Black mother… a Black brother… a Black sister… a Black community.

“We Always Take Mama’s Call”

I told my mother that I had seen the conviction and that I, too, was saddened by the verdict. We sat with it together for a moment—her in Dallas, me standing outside my evaluation meeting in Austin—two grieving people holding two griefs at once: the personal loss of Devin and the collective wound of watching another Black family’s son face decades behind bars.

Then I had to go back inside. Back to my performance evaluation. Back to the professional world that keeps moving even when your personal world has stopped.

After my call, I walked back into my VP’s office to conclude the evaluation. And before I was fully seated, she said something that landed exactly right:

“We always take Mama’s call.”

Such a simple statement. But it held so much. Recognition that some things supersede the agenda. That family—especially Mama—comes first. That in a world that so often demands Black professionals compartmentalize their humanity, here was someone giving me permission to be a son first and an employee second.

In that small moment, I felt seen. I felt the kind of institutional grace that’s all too rare.

The Lessons I’m Still Learning

It’s been seven months, bro, and this life ain’t changed.

The same systems that crushed you are still crushing. The same verdicts that confirm what you always said are still being handed down. The same weight that leaned on your back is leaning on the backs of teenagers like Karmelo Anthony, on Mama, on me, on all of us.

But here’s what I’m holding onto today:

I’m grateful for the conversations we had that helped us heal our relationship in ways that I’m still learning the lessons from. The porch conversations. The honest moments. The times we named the truth to each other even when it was hard. The way we found our way back to each other as brothers, as friends, as two Black men trying to navigate a world that was never designed for us to thrive.

Those conversations are still teaching me. Still shaping how I pastor, how I father, how I show up in the world. You’re still my teacher, even now.

When Mama called today, carrying both griefs at once, I understood something I might not have understood before losing you: grief is never just personal. It’s communal. It’s systemic. It’s the accumulated weight of being Black in America, where the loss of one son gets compounded by the conviction of another, where the anniversary of your passing collides with a verdict that confirms everything you tried to tell me on that porch years ago.

You were right, bro. About so much. And I’m still learning to carry what you tried to teach me.

Seven months in. This life ain’t changed.

But I’m still here. Mama’s still here. We’re still taking each other’s calls. Still holding each other’s grief. Still loving hard the way you taught us to.

Love you. Miss you. ✌🏾

As I wrap up my time of service to the Horizon Texas Annual Conference, I feel inclined and obligated to share my thoughts on these last thirteen years.

I was newly United Methodist when I landed at Perkins School of Theology and St. Luke Community UMC, in what was then the legacy North Texas Conference. My journey as a United Methodist had actually begun before that, at Wesley Theological Seminary in DC and Oxon Hill UMC in Maryland. I didn’t know anything about the United Methodist Church prior to my first year in seminary. I learned about the denomination in spaces that are more affirming of my gifts and graces than the conferences often realize: the academy and the local church. I learned about John Wesley before I learned about the United Methodist Church (and the long, complex history of its formation). I learned about Wesleyan theology before I learned about UM polity and doctrine. I learned how my gifts and graces are to be affirmed, cultivated, and used by the local church before I learned how those same gifts and graces are recognized by an annual conference’s often unclear pathways of clergy and lay appointment.

The local church and the academy was not concerned about whether I was a “cradle United Methodist” or not. Both sought to give me what best the best of it’s theological and missional task in guiding me toward the call of God through the communal individual processes of reflecting on God's grace in our lives and applying the Gospel to the needs of the ever-changing world. The academy engages the mind as the church does the sanctifying work on the heart. At times it seems as if conferences can forget to keep our theological task at the forefront.

When transparency takes a backseat to organizational image, we have chosen institution over Beloved. When the gifts of highly qualified leaders are ignored, reduced, or overlooked because the preferred designation—or race, or gender, or orientation—of the leader challenges the status quo, we are choosing institution over Beloved. When our strategic priorities are not strengthened and fortified by our annual budget, we have chosen a pathway of mediocrity over a pathway of discipleship.

And while I cannot speak to what happens in other annual conferences, thirteen years of service to the legacy conferences of Central and North Texas—and active participation in the unification that became Horizon Texas (which, true story, almost became the Texas Horizons Conference, or THC for short, lol)—afford me a grace of input garnered by trial, fire, and triumph. Those who know my journey can attest to the trials, the fire, and the triumph, and they are good sources for anyone who wants the specifics. For the purpose of this, I will simply share the hopes that rise from a deep well of love for the people, congregations, and communities that made the journey worth taking.

My hope for the Horizon Texas Conference is that it would live fully into its new vision statement: “We are followers of Jesus seeking the loving, just, free world God imagines for all people.”

“We are” suggests we have already accomplished the work of “becoming.” And no matter how aspirational it sounds, we are not there yet. The strategic priorities should serve as the rubric and standard for how we get there; we have not yet used them as such. But I believe we can. And I believe it for the following reasons.

College and camping ministries committed to making a better world by making even better humans. If you have been paying attention these last three or four years, campus and camping ministry has been doing a lot of the heavy lifting to keep our strategic priorities front and center—discerning and equipping ministry candidates, building the most genuinely diverse communities in the annual conference, forging intergenerational connections, and creating bridges and partnerships with local churches. The HTC camping and college ministry has been fruitful even while being financially pruned. Serving alongside some of the best the whole CONNECTION has to offer (and I serve on UMCMA, so I say that with confidence) has been a joy and a keeper of my service to this conference. Imagine what happens when the right investment meets the best gifts and graces in the conference…

A Board of Ministry committed to making a better church by credentialing even better clergy. I admit we still have much work to do, but the work God has allowed us to accomplish is something I will forever cherish. I often say that my own life as clergy might have looked very different had this been the board I sat before as a candidate for ordination. Catalyzed by the most gracious board chair we could ask for, the board has worked diligently to become the best version of itself for the horizon ahead. Intense conversations, intentional board training and development, and some of the most honest and transparent deliberations I have witnessed give me hope for a church led by the most inclusive and intentional clergy in the connection. This board is creating space for people to show up as their authentic selves, with the gifts and graces God has given them, instead of fishing for the ones the denomination prefers to uphold.

A God committed to making the Church an even better bride for the returning and redeeming Christ. No matter which direction the conference leadership desires to go—whether “to the future and back” (remember Covenant Day? seems so long ago) or to “love boldly”—God is committed to God’s Church, regardless of how quickly or slowly we align ourselves with it. And this is the ultimate hope: that we will find joy in following the Holy Spirit into the ways God desires us to show up like Jesus throughout the conference area, even when it seems the conference’s agenda is amiss. The laity and clergy who spend adequate time in prayer, deliberate time in service, and intentional time in fellowship will guide HTC toward the horizons God intends.

My service to this annual conference may be over. I have set my gaze toward Rio, and I am looking forward to the ways God will allow my gifts and graces to strengthen that conference of United Methodists. Yet a piece of my heart will always remain in the North, like Jon Snow (IYKYK).

Until we see each other again…

“I make music that electrify ‘em, you make music that pacify ‘em” — Kendrick Lamar, “Euphoria”

I, like millions of others, waited patiently for what most of us only knew would be the Iceman album. We waited to hear Drake’s reflection, to see how he’d processed the Shakespearean shakedown (shout out to The Company Man, Justin Hunte) he’d experienced two years prior, and what contribution he’d make to what seemed like hip hop’s tide turning toward an energetic form that mirrored the culture and society at large.

What we got was 43 songs of manufactured escapism drowned in braggadocious disengagement.

Let’s be clear: Drake makes good music. He’s talented. Some of these tracks show he’s actually thought about the last two years. There are moments where you can hear him wrestling with everything that went down. But here’s the problem—and it’s captured perfectly in one line where he admits how difficult it is to “dig deep,” then immediately pivots to talking about how fine his therapist is before sliding right back into the playboy persona.

That’s the whole Iceman era in one moment: brief acknowledgment of needing depth, followed by manufactured deflection back to what’s profitable and safe.

Drake dropped three albums on May 15, 2026 (Iceman, Habibti, Maid of Honour), —43 songs total. There are some who suspect he’s flooding the market to get out of his UMG contract. But timing matters. We’re in the middle of an Iran War that’s crushing the economy. I have friends who are well off wrestling with the economic ramifications of this conflict, and we don’t have time for music about luxurious living, partying, and womanizing when people are struggling to keep up with inflation caused by war spending.

Two years after Kendrick diagnosed the problem in “Euphoria,” Drake spent 43 songs proving him right. And the cost isn’t just to hip hop—it’s to young people who needed to be mobilized toward collective power but got pacified into passive consumption instead.

What Kendrick Saw: Pacification as Betrayal

When Kendrick spit “I make music that electrify ‘em, you make music that pacify ‘em” on “Euphoria,” he was diagnosing a fundamental betrayal of what hip hop was born to do.

Hip hop didn’t emerge from the Bronx as background music. From Herc’s first party raising money for his sister’s school clothes to Public Enemy making the FBI create files on them, hip hop’s power has always been its ability to electrify communities toward collective action. Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” didn’t pacify people into accepting poverty—it electrified them into naming it.

Drake’s music—talented as it is—serves the opposite function. It helps you forget your conditions, not confront them. And what makes it particularly dangerous is the timing: his 43-song drop happened during the 2026 Iran War, while “No Kings” protests brought 8 million people into the streets in March, while the Supreme Court gutted Voting Rights protections, while ICE raids terrorized communities.

The Trump White House even took Drake’s “Iceman” cover art, photoshopped a MAGA chain on it, and used it to promote ICE. Drake’s music became literal propaganda for state violence.

The Real Voices Calling for Electrifying Engagement

While Drake was pacifying, other voices were calling young people toward genuine engagement—and they’re worth listening to.

Deante Kyle, host of the “Grits and Eggs Podcast,” has been urging Birmingham audiences to “come to more events where people are talking and doing things for the community... get involved in the politics that are happening locally that actually impact your way of living.” His December 2025 conversation on “Why Hip Hop Must Move Different in 2026” speaks directly to what the culture needs: not escapism, but engagement rooted in hip hop’s tradition of community accountability.

Lynae Vanee, the activist and influencer with over a million followers hosting “The People’s Brief,” sees something different in this generation. She talks about Gen Z’s “willingness to engage” and describes “kids who are just saying, ‘No, I won’t be a part of this,’” referring to protests over Palestine. She adds: “These kids want to do what’s right... young, powerful people who do not care for status quo, who do not care for policy, who do not care for the sanitization of atrocity.”

Trevor Noah, in his April 2026 Netflix special “Joy in the Trenches,” addresses the manufactured nature of social media beef and virality—how platforms amplify negativity and chaos for engagement rather than genuine connection. His commentary on how online platforms manufacture conflict for profit mirrors exactly what Drake’s doing: manufacturing content designed for algorithmic success rather than cultural impact.

These voices represent what electrification looks like: calling people toward genuine engagement, political action, community accountability. Drake represent the opposite.

J Cole Showed Us What Accountability Looks Like

The contrast with J. Cole’s “The Fall Off” is sharp.

Cole, who entered the Big 3 conversation then publicly apologized and removed “7 Minute Drill” after realizing he was wrong, used his moment to reflect. “The Fall Off” draws you back to the introspection of Forest Hills Drive, but with the wisdom of everything that’s happened since. Cole let the Big 3 fallout examine hip hop’s current state, his own role in it, and where the culture needs to go.

That’s what growth looks like. When you get checked by the culture, you either double down on what’s profitable (Drake) or you reflect and evolve (Cole).

Even in how they released—Cole with a focused album that invited deep listening, Drake with a fire hose of content designed for playlist padding—you see the difference between artist and product, between electrification and pacification.

The Palestine Hypocrisy: Selective Engagement as Brand Management

One of the many shots taken by Drake on “Iceman” is what I believe to be his most hypocritical.

On “Iceman,” Drake calls out DJ Khaled for staying silent on Palestine: “Your people are still waiting for a ‘Free Palestine,’ but apparently everything isn’t black and white and red and green.”

The hypocrisy is staggering. Drake, who signed the Artists4Ceasefire letter in October 2023 then stayed almost completely silent as Israel’s genocidal war killed tens of thousands and created famine conditions in Gaza, is criticizing someone else for not speaking up. His one gesture—making a heart symbol to Palestinian protesters from his Copenhagen hotel balcony in August 2025—represents peak performative solidarity.

Then on “Iceman,” Drake suggests attacks on him stem from antisemitism rather than legitimate cultural critique. This is the playbook of manufactured engagement:

1. Make minimal performative gestures

2. Stay silent when your voice could actually matter

3. Call out others for the same silence

4. When held accountable, claim the criticism is about your identity, not your actions

It’s poison to young people who need to understand the difference between genuine solidarity (which requires risk) and brand management (which requires just enough performance to maintain market position).

Two Years, Minimal Growth

What I find most damning is simply this: Drake has seemingly learned very little.

Across 43 songs, you can hear moments where he’s wrestling with everything that went down. There are glimpses of genuine reflection. But then—like that line about his therapist being fine—he pivots right back to what’s safe and profitable. The playboy persona. The luxury lifestyle. The braggadocious disengagement.

Compare this to how authentic artists respond to critique. Kendrick brought Crips and Bloods together for the first time in LA history. J. Cole apologized publicly and returned with deeper reflection. Artists rooted in community face accountability and grow.

Drake protected his brand. And that’s the difference between an artist and a product.

The Cost: A Generation That Should Be Mobilized

Here’s what keeps me up: there’s a generation that needed hip hop to electrify them toward collective power, and instead they got pacification playlists.

As Lynae Vanee observed, young people “do not care for the sanitization of atrocity.” They’re ready to engage. But instead of culture that meets them where they are and mobilizes them toward action, they’re getting 43 songs about luxury living during an economic crisis caused by war.

Deante Kyle is out here urging people to “get involved in the politics that are happening locally that actually impact your way of living.” Trevor Noah is exposing how platforms manufacture virality for profit rather than genuine connection.

And Drake? Forty-three songs that pacify rather than electrify. That distract rather than mobilize. That offer consumption as substitute for collective action.

What Electrification Looks Like

We know what the opposite looks like because we can see it.

Kendrick’s “Not Like Us” wasn’t just a song—it was a cultural movement. The Pop Out concert showed LA solidarity and culture. That’s what happens when art serves community instead of extracting from it.

J. Cole showed us what accountability looks like. Owned his part in the Big 3 narrative, choose his form of peace, and electrified his fans with a mature album.

Deante Kyle, Lynae Vanee, and others are showing us what hip hop-rooted political engagement looks like: calling people toward genuine action, community accountability, systemic change.

The question isn’t whether we can be electrified. The question is whether we’ll accept pacification or demand more.

Why This Matters to Me?

Two years ago, Kendrick gave hip hop a choice: “I make music that electrify ‘em, you make music that pacify ‘em.” I serve young people, and have been since Drake dropped “Take Care.” I remember engaging his music with those young people, and thinking “his music is THEIR soundtrack.” I even had a young man who modeled his persona after Drake. That’s impact. At damn near 40, Drake is still making music like he’s a rich 25 year old.

Drake is talented. He makes good music. Some of it even shows he’s thought about what happened. But when the moment came to dig deep—when culture, economy, and politics all demanded genuine engagement—he chose pacification. Brief acknowledgments followed by manufactured deflection back to what’s profitable.

And the cost isn’t abstract. It’s young people who could be building collective resistance but are being taught that masculinity is measured by what you consume, not what you build. Who could be organized against an Iran War crushing their economic futures but are being offered luxury fantasy as escape.

Hip hop was born to electrify communities toward liberation. The Iceman era represents its opposite: manufactured content designed to pacify potential resistance into profitable consumption.

We know what electrification looks like. Kendrick showed us. J. Cole showed us. Deante Kyle, Lynae Vanee, and others are showing us. The resistance in the streets shows us.

One day maybe Drake will join in. Who knows? Some fans would ask, “why does it matter?” The question I hope to ask is whether we’ll demand it from our artists, our culture, and ourselves—or accept 43 songs of pacification as an acceptable response to a moment that demands electrification.

Everything depends on which one we choose.

May 11, 2025

Six months without Devin fell on Mother’s Day weekend.

Whew.

I knew there would be many firsts without him. First Thanksgiving. First Christmas (which was also his birthday). First New Year. Each one carrying its own particular weight, its own shape of absence.

But this one was different. This one was tough in ways I didn’t anticipate.

Because this wasn’t just about my grief. This was about watching my mother navigate Mother’s Day without one of her sons. This was about the impossible mathematics of maternal loss—how do you celebrate motherhood when part of what made you a mother is now ash in an urn?

Mama came to Austin this weekend. And I learned something I should have already known but needed to witness firsthand: there is no way I can fill the hole left in her heart with Devin being gone.

Every Memory Filtered Through His Absence

From the moment she arrived, I could feel it. Every thought she had was filtered through her memory of him. Every moment in Austin harkened her back to when they lived with me nineteen years ago in that apartment—that season when Mama needed a fresh start and I had the space to offer it, when Devin was still in high school.

Even though we’re in a different house now, the geography triggers the memories. She walked through Austin remembering that season—where they stayed, how Devin navigated being a teenager in a new city, what he said about living with his big brother. She remembered when Chicago and Ant lived with us too, that period when the apartment was full of family.

Questions about his later visits to 6th Street when he was older, coming to hang with his big brother in Austin. Stories about things he said, things he did, ways he made her laugh.

And admittedly, it was hard for me to hear her talk about him so much.

Not because I don’t want to remember him. Not because I’m trying to avoid his memory. But because too many raw feelings get touched with every mention. It’s been six months and I still don’t have the scar tissue that would allow those conversations to happen without bleeding.

Here’s what I realized this weekend: As much as I think about Devin—as much as I carry him with me in the necklace I wear, in the urn on my nightstand, in the loc I’m waiting to weave into my crown—conversations about him have really just been in my head.

I think about him constantly. I replay memories. I have full dialogues with him in my mind. I process my grief through writing these monthly reflections.

But I don’t talk about him. Not out loud. Not in real conversation with real people who knew him differently than I did.

And when Mama kept bringing him up—naturally, organically, because he’s still so present in her mind that she can’t not talk about him—I felt myself tensing. Changing subjects. Redirecting. Not intentionally, but instinctively. Like my body was protecting something I didn’t even know needed protecting.

That realization sits heavy with me now.

Preaching Through Jochebed’s Grief

Then Sunday came. Mother’s Day. And I had to preach.

With Mama sitting two pews from the pulpit at St. Peter’s.

With Devin’s memory hovering over the sanctuary like the Spirit of God hovering over the face of the deep in Genesis 1—formless, void, and somehow still creative in its presence.

I had been dreading this sermon all week.

Mother’s Day is already pastorally complex. You’re in a room with women who desperately wanted to be mothers but couldn’t. Women who lost children. Women whose children are estranged. Women whose motherhood looks nothing like the Hallmark version we celebrate. Women who had terrible mothers and are triggered by the whole day. Women who are mothering in impossible circumstances with no support.

And this year, our church community was carrying so much grief. Multiple members who had lost loved ones in recent months. Families navigating loss that had nothing to do with Devin but was just as crushing.

But standing in that pulpit with my own mother sitting there—a mother grieving her youngest son on Mother’s Day—preaching Exodus 1 and 2 about Jochebed building an ark for baby Moses and releasing him to the river because she could no longer hide him...

I barely made it through.

When I got to Point Two—”She Released”—talking about how Jochebed hid Moses for three months and then had to let go, had to build him a basket and release him to waters she couldn’t control, trusting God with what she could no longer carry—

I looked at Mama in that pew and I knew. I knew she was hearing every word through the lens of November 9th. Through the lens of a mother who had to release her son to something she couldn’t stop.

I cried. Multiple times. Standing there trying to preach about how “Jochebed’s grief is in this text. Her grief is not erased by the miracle that follows. The miracle doesn’t undo the releasing. Both things are true—she let go AND God caught him. She broke AND God worked. She suffered AND love survived.”

And then I said it—the words I needed Mama to hear, the words I needed to say out loud even if my voice was breaking:

“Your grief does not mean the love failed. Your grief is proof that the love was real.”

After the service, she hugged me. Said it was a good word. Said she was proud of me.

But I know. I know that no sermon, no matter how carefully I wove together Shiphrah and Puah and Jochebed and Pharaoh’s daughter with Afeni Shakur and Voletta Wallace and Kelly Brown Douglas’s theology of Black mothering—none of it can touch the specific grief of a mother who will never get another Mother’s Day card from her youngest son.

The Bond I Can’t Replicate

Sunday afternoon, I took Mama to the movies. We went to see Michael, the biopic about Michael Jackson’s early life. I thought maybe it would be a good distraction, a way to spend time together without the weight of everything hanging over us.

But even there, in the dark theater watching someone else’s story, Devin was present.

I could tell he was still prominent in her mind. The way she would shift in her seat. The way she would sigh at certain moments. The way her attention would drift even though the movie was engaging.

As the credits began to roll, she leaned over to me and asked, “Do you remember when Devin...” and launched into a memory triggered by something in the film. Something he did at some point in his life that connected to what we’d just watched.

And I realized something that both comforted and devastated me: Mama and Devin were alike in ways I’m not. They could hold conversations with each other for hours while I strained for things to say to her.

This isn’t about love. I love my mother deeply. But Devin had a particular kind of connection with her that I don’t have. A wavelength they shared. A way of communicating that was effortless for them.

He could talk to her about anything. They would get on the phone and hours would pass. He would visit and they would sit at the kitchen table and just... talk. About life, about struggles, about dreams, about nothing and everything.

I’m different. More reserved. More internal. I process things in my head before I bring them out. I’m comfortable with silence in ways that Devin never was.

How could I believe that I could fill that void? Devin was too special and too much of her world for me to even try.

She didn’t just lose a son. She lost her conversation partner. Her phone call. Her person who could sit with her for hours and just talk. The one who called just because. The one who understood her in ways that didn’t require explanation.

I’m her son. I love her. I’ll be here for her. I’ll visit, I’ll call, I’ll do what I can.

But I can’t be Devin. And she needs Devin.

That’s the particular cruelty of this kind of loss. It’s not just the absence of the person. It’s the absence of the specific relationship that person had with everyone else. Every person who loved Devin lost a different Devin. Mama lost her Devin—the son who talked to her in ways I never will.

The Work I Still Have to Do

She’s back home now. Back in Dallas. Back in the house that feels emptier without him.

And I’m left to figure out how we keep moving forward without Devin.

But this weekend taught me something I needed to learn, even though it’s uncomfortable: I have too much work to do in processing my own grief.

My inability to talk about Devin with Mama—my instinctive tensing, my subtle redirecting of conversations, my discomfort with hearing story after story—that signals something I hadn’t fully explored.

I thought I was doing the grief work. I’m writing these monthly reflections. I’m wearing his necklace. I’m carrying his ashes. I’m planning to weave his loc into mine. I’m thinking about him constantly.

But thinking about someone and talking about them are different things.

Writing in isolation and conversing in community are different practices.

Carrying grief internally and sharing it externally require different kinds of vulnerability.

And I’m realizing: I’ve been doing the internal work while avoiding the communal work. I’ve been processing in my head while protecting myself from processing out loud with real people who knew him, who loved him, who have their own memories and grief.

Why?

Maybe because writing gives me control. I can edit. I can craft. I can choose what to share and how to share it. I can process at my own pace without having to hold someone else’s grief simultaneously.

But conversation is messier. Someone else’s memory might trigger something I’m not ready to feel. Someone else’s grief might touch wounds I’m still protecting. Someone else’s need to talk about him might exceed my capacity to hear about him.

And that’s what happened this weekend with Mama. She needed to talk about him. Needed to share the memories. Needed to process out loud. Needed to keep him present through conversation.

And I... couldn’t fully meet her there. Not yet.

Be Patient With Me

So here’s what I’m saying to Devin, and maybe to everyone who loved him:

Be patient with me, bro. I will get there.

I will get to the place where I can have conversations about you without my chest tightening. Where I can hear Mama’s stories without instinctively deflecting. Where I can share memories in community without feeling like I’m bleeding out.

I will do the work. The communal work, not just the internal work. The vulnerable work of letting other people’s grief touch mine. The messy work of conversation instead of just the controlled work of writing.

And when I do—when I finally get there—the world will hear your story.

Not just in these monthly Substack posts that I write in isolation. But in full, embodied, communal storytelling. In conversations with Mama where I can hold space for her memories without protecting myself from the pain. In gatherings with your friends where we can laugh and cry together without me needing to control the narrative. In sermons where I can speak your name without my voice breaking.

The world will hear about how you loved hard. How you gave even when you didn’t have it to give. How you showed up for people in ways that changed their lives. How you were the light of Mac’s Place. How you were a father to Devonna, Trustin, and Lyric who made them feel like the center of the universe. How you were Mama’s son in ways I can never replicate and shouldn’t try to.

The world will hear your story. The full story. The complicated, beautiful, crushing, loving story of Devon Markel Jones.

But I need to get there first.

Six Months: What I’ve Learned

Six months in, here’s what this Mother’s Day weekend taught me:

There are no substitutes in grief. I can’t fill the gap Devin left in Mama’s life. Not because I’m not enough, but because he was specifically him. The relationship she had with him is irreplaceable, and trying to replace it dishonors what they had.

Different people grieve differently. Mama needs to talk about him. I need to think about him quietly. Neither is wrong. But I need to learn how to hold space for her grief expression even when it’s different from mine.

Internal processing and communal processing are both necessary. I can’t just write my way through this grief. At some point, I have to be able to talk about him with real people in real time with no editing, no control, no protection from the rawness.

Preaching through grief is its own kind of crucifixion. Standing in the pulpit on Mother’s Day with my grieving mother in the congregation, preaching about Jochebed’s painful release of Moses while knowing Mama was hearing every word through the lens of losing Devin—that cost me something. And I’m still counting the cost.

I’m not as far along in my grief work as I thought I was. Six months feels like both forever and no time at all. And I have so much more work to do.

Love you, Devin.

Miss you, bro.

And I promise—when I’m ready, when I’ve done the work I need to do—the world will hear your story the way it deserves to be told.

Be patient with me. I’ll get there.

Rev. Marcus M. Jones is University Chaplain at Huston-Tillotson University and Senior Pastor at St. Peter’s United Methodist Church. This is part of an ongoing series processing grief, ministry, and the long work of learning to live after loss.

I was coming out of the café — food in hand — when I saw her.

She was already seated in the center of the Student Union, a few steps down Bluebonnet Hill from the Chapel, in that open space where the real conversations happen. The café is the heartbeat of this place. People come in hungry and leave changed, or they sit in those center seats and keep going what the table started. At Huston-Tillotson, the Union is not just where you eat — it is where the community becomes itself. And the café at its center does what every good table does: it draws people together and then sends them back out into each other.

She had been baptized in the Chapel just weeks before — Holy Week, water and witness, the whole thing. She was still carrying it. You could see it on her face, that particular kind of joy that hasn’t learned to be embarrassed of itself yet. I sat down and she started talking about her encounter with God, about what this new journey felt like from the inside.

We were still in that conversation when the door of the café opened again and another student walked out.

He didn’t wait for an introduction. He just asked: “Rev, is it wrong to feel like I disagree with the faith I once believed growing up in church?”

* * *

I sat there holding both of them at the same time.

One student moving toward God like she had finally found what she had always been looking for. Another carrying something heavy — a faith that had been handed to him fully formed, no questions allowed, and was now coming apart in ways he didn’t have language for yet.

I know that weight. I’ve carried versions of both.

And I’ll be honest with you — sitting there in those center seats, Bluebonnet Hill behind me, the café humming at my back — what I felt first wasn’t hope. It was grief. A deep, familiar grief that lives somewhere between loving the church and watching the church miss itself. The kind of grief that doesn’t go away because it isn’t born of cynicism. It’s born of belief. You can only grieve something you still love.

The church is trying to save a world it doesn’t fully understand. And the trying is real. The love underneath it is real. I believe that. I have to believe that — it’s why I’m still here, still showing up, still preaching and teaching and sitting in those center seats long after the scheduled hours end.

But something is wrong. And the people who love the church most are often the ones least able to say it plainly.

Fear became the primary language of conversion in one stream. Not faith — fear. And fear is efficient. It fills pews. It generates revenue. It keeps people in line. But it does something else too: it fuses God and terror together so tightly inside a person that when the questions finally come — and they always come — it feels like the whole thing is collapsing at once. That student coming out of the café wasn’t walking away from God. He was walking away from damage. The tragedy is that he may not know the difference yet. And the church that wounded him doesn’t have the vocabulary to help him find it.

Then there is the other stream — my stream — the tradition that speaks of justice and inclusion and beloved community. That passes resolutions and updates its language and says the right things in the right rooms. I love this tradition. I am of this tradition. And it is possible to love something and still grieve what it has not yet become. Mainline Christianity keeps trailing the justice movements it claims to be leading — not because the people aren’t good but because the institution keeps choosing its own survival over the mission that survival is supposed to serve. We are so afraid of losing what we have left that we keep hesitating at the very threshold of what we are being called toward.

That hesitation has a cost. I see it in East Austin. I see it on this campus. I see it in the faces of young people who needed the church to be further along than it is.

* * *

A few miles away, something is stirring that I need you to see.

St. Peter’s United Methodist Church sits in East Austin — the same neighborhood, the same soil, the same people as this campus. This is not a coincidence. Community is the connective tissue between the university and the congregation, and what God is doing in one, God is doing in the other. The separation was always artificial.

After a year of preaching and teaching beloved community into a congregation that had known real grief — membership decline, pastoral wounds, the particular silence that settles in when a denomination looks past you — something is coming alive. Not because of a program. Not because of a strategy. Because encounters with Jesus have begun taking precedence over the protection of tradition. And when that happens, when the living Christ moves back to the center of a community’s life, everything reorganizes around that presence.

Committee meetings have purpose now. Former members are finding their way back through the door. The saints who stayed through the hard years are remembering not just why they stayed but what they stayed for. An outward focus — looking toward the neighborhood, toward the community, toward the world — is winning over the instinct to turn inward and simply persevere.

This is what the church looks like when fear is not the organizing principle. This is what becomes possible when a people stop trying to save the institution and start trusting the God the institution is supposed to point toward.

It is not perfect. It is not finished. But it is alive. And alive matters.

* * *

So I sit in the tension of all three — the campus, the congregation, the denomination — and I move from hope to grief and back toward hope again.

The student who walked out of that café into new faith gives me hope for the church. She is proof that God is still moving, still calling, still meeting people at tables they didn’t expect to be sacred. The student who walked out carrying the wreckage of fear-based theology grieves me — not because his questions are a problem but because they are the predictable consequence of a church that chose coercion over encounter. And yet what is happening at St. Peter’s — saints coming alive, the outward turn, beloved community taking root in East Austin soil — gives me hope again. Not a naive hope. A hope that has looked at the grief directly and refused to let it be the final word.

Because if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. The church does not need a new program. It needs a conversion — back to encounter, back to the table, back to the God who was always already in the world waiting for us to show up.

* * *

Before I left them, I said what I believed to be true.

I told him that where he was standing — full of questions, uncertain, unable to go back to what he had been handed — was not the edge of faith. It was the place where a faith received meets the God who makes that faith realized in ways nobody could have planned or programmed for him. That the questions weren’t the end of something. They were the beginning of an encounter.

He nodded. I don’t know if he believed me yet. But I believed it enough for both of us in that moment.

Then I gathered myself and walked back up Bluebonnet Hill.

Past the café. Past the center seats. Up toward my office, where my calendar was already telling me what came next — a denominational meeting. Budget lines. Structural conversations. The machinery of an institution trying to figure out how to survive itself.

And somewhere between that table in the Union and the chair I was about to sit in, the question settled on me the way questions do when they have been waiting for you to slow down long enough to feel them fully:

How does the church find its way back to the table?

Not the communion table — though that too. The tables and center seats of every Student Union, every community center, every ordinary gathering place where the divine and human are already running into each other without an appointment. The places where the church isn’t — but where God already is. Where students are finding faith and losing it and trying to tell the difference. Where the world the church keeps trying to save is simply living — and waiting, whether it knows it or not, for someone to sit down and stay a while.

Millions of dollars are being spent right now on preserving structures built for a world that no longer exists. And just down the hill, in the center seats of a Student Union, two students came out of the same café and carried two different wounds the institution gave them.

The church is not beyond redemption. I have to believe that. I do believe that.

But redemption requires the kind of honesty that institutions are slowest to practice — the admission that what we are is not yet what we are called to become.

Part Two: A Conversion the Church Hasn’t Made Yet — Coming Soon

Rev. Marcus M. Jones, M.Div. serves as University Chaplain & Director of Religious Life and Campus Ministry at Huston-Tillotson University and as Senior Pastor of St. Peter’s United Methodist Church in East Austin, Texas.

By Marcus Jones, M.Div.

I keep seeing them. The memes. The posts. The messages that flood social media feeds and church bulletin boards and motivational accounts.

“Never quit.”

“Don’t give up.”

“Tomorrow will be better than today.”

“God won’t put more on you than you can bear.”

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Five months after losing my brother Devin, these messages hit differently. Not because I think the people sharing them are malicious. Not because I believe they’re intentionally causing harm. But because I’m wrestling with a haunting question:

I’m not writing this as someone who has it figured out. I’m writing as someone who is complicit. Someone who has offered these same platitudes to people I love. Someone who reached for the theology that gave me hope and prescribed it for someone else’s entirely different diagnosis. Someone who is only now beginning to see how the cultural messaging around endurance—the insistence that we must always keep going, always be strong, always bear our burdens without breaking—might be doing far more harm than I ever imagined.

This isn’t about condemning anyone. It’s about inviting us all into a wrestling match I wish I had entered five years ago instead of five months ago.

The Hope We Inherit, The Prescription We Offer

Here’s what I’m learning to hold gently: people reach for what gave them hope.

When someone is struggling, we instinctively offer what worked for us. The Scripture that got us through our dark season. The mindset shift that helped us endure. The encouragement that kept us going when we wanted to quit.

This impulse is beautiful. It comes from a genuine desire to help, to comfort, to provide a lifeline to someone who might be drowning.

But here’s the question I’m wrestling with: What if their drowning requires a different intervention than our drowning did?

What if the theology that sustained me through my wilderness season—”God won’t put more on you than you can bear”—becomes crushing weight to someone whose wilderness looks nothing like mine?

What if “don’t give up” is life-giving encouragement for someone who has the resources to keep going, but a death sentence for someone who is already giving beyond their capacity with no relief in sight?

What if “tomorrow will be better” offers hope to someone with reason to believe conditions will improve, but becomes gaslighting for someone whose material circumstances suggest tomorrow will be exactly like today, just with less energy to face it?

I’m not asking these questions from a place of judgment. I’m asking them because I’ve been the person offering these prescriptions. I’ve been the big brother, the pastor, the friend who said some version of “keep going” when I should have asked “what would help you rest?”

And now my brother is gone.

What I’m Complying With (And Maybe You Are Too)

The hard work is recognizing my own compliance with systems and theologies that crush people while calling it character development.

I was raised on a theology of endurance. Scriptures about “running the race,” “fighting the good fight,” “pressing toward the mark.” Testimonies about people who made it through impossible circumstances because they didn’t give up. Cultural narratives about bootstrap resilience and individual determination.

This theology saved me at certain points in my life. When I was a first-generation college student at Huston-Tillotson, navigating spaces where I wasn’t supposed to succeed—”don’t give up” kept me enrolled. When I was at Perkins School of Theology as one of few Black students, facing microaggressions and questioning whether I belonged—”keep going” got me to graduation.

That theology gave me hope. And so I offered it to others as prescription.

But here’s what I’m wrestling with: My survival through those systems doesn’t mean the systems were right. It means I survived despite them. And celebrating my endurance without confronting what I had to endure is complicity.

When I told my brother some version of “keep going” or “God won’t give you more than you can bear,” I was reaching for what worked for me. But his crushing looked different than mine. His resources were different. His support systems were different. His mental health needs were different. His economic circumstances were different.

And I didn’t ask enough questions about those differences before prescribing endurance.

I am complicit in theologies and cultural narratives that tell people to endure crushing weight instead of helping them put it down.

I have offered “don’t give up” as encouragement without asking what giving up might actually mean—whether it means death, or whether it might mean giving up on a job that’s destroying them, a relationship that’s crushing them, a burden they were never meant to carry alone.

I have spiritualized people’s suffering—including my brother’s—as character development when I should have been naming it as injustice requiring intervention.

I have celebrated endurance without confronting the systems that make endurance necessary.

I have told men to be strong without creating space for them to be weak.

I have prescribed what worked for me without diagnosing what others actually needed.

And I wonder: How many of us are doing this right now? How many well-meaning encouragements are actually adding weight to people who are already breaking?

The Particular Violence Toward Black Men (And By Black Men)

There’s a specific dimension to this that I can’t ignore: the way cultural messaging around endurance particularly crushes Black men, and the way that crushing gets externalized as violence.

Black men are raised with a particular narrative: you must be strong, you must endure, you cannot break, you cannot show weakness, you must keep going no matter what. This isn’t just motivational messaging—it’s survival strategy in a world designed to destroy Black men. It’s what kept our ancestors alive. It’s what gets us through systems of oppression that are still actively crushing us.

But here’s what I’m wrestling with: What happens when “be strong and endure” is the only option we’re given? When we’re not allowed to rest, to break, to be vulnerable, to ask for help? When the crushing has nowhere to go but outward?

I wonder about the connection between telling men—particularly Black men—that they must always be strong and never break, and the violence that emerges when that impossible standard becomes unbearable.

When you can’t show weakness, where does the weakness go?

When you can’t admit you’re breaking, what breaks instead?

When you can’t turn your pain inward without being crushed by it, do you turn it outward instead?

I’m thinking about domestic violence. About the particular ways that Black women bear the brunt of Black men’s unexpressed pain. About how “be strong” and “keep going” might be creating conditions where vulnerability has no safe outlet, where breaking isn’t allowed, where the only release valve is violence toward the people closest to us.

This isn’t excuse. This is excavation. This is asking: What if our cultural and theological insistence on endurance is creating the conditions for violence we say we want to stop?

What if telling men they can never be weak, never ask for help, never stop going, never admit they’re breaking—what if that’s directly connected to men externalizing their pain as violence toward women, toward children, toward themselves?

What if “don’t give up” is not just failing to prevent suicide—what if it’s contributing to intimate partner violence, to rage that has nowhere safe to land, to destruction of the very relationships that might offer support if men were allowed to be vulnerable in them?

I’m asking this because I wonder: If Devin had been given cultural permission to stop, to rest, to be weak, to ask for help without it threatening his manhood—would he still be here? Would other people be safer?

The Questions I’m Learning to Ask Instead

So if “don’t give up” can be harmful, what do we do instead? How do we offer support without prescribing endurance?

I don’t have this figured out. But here are the questions I’m learning to ask—both of others and of myself:

Instead of “Can you keep going?”
Ask: “What would rest look like for you right now?”

Instead of “God won’t give you more than you can bear”
Ask: “Is this weight something you should be carrying in the first place?”

Instead of “Tomorrow will be better”
Ask: “What would make today more bearable?”

Instead of “Don’t give up”
Ask: “What do you need in order to stop for a while?”

Instead of “Be strong”
Ask: “Where do you need to be weak right now? And who can hold that with you?”

Instead of “You can do this”
Ask: “Do you need to do this? Or is it okay to step away?”

These questions assume something radical: that rest is not weakness, that stopping is not failure, that asking for help is not shameful, that some weights should be put down rather than endured.

They also assume something uncomfortable: that my prescription might not fit someone else’s diagnosis. That what worked for me might crush someone else. That my survival doesn’t validate the system—it just means I survived.

An Invitation to Wrestle

I’m not writing this to condemn. I’m writing to invite.

Invite us to examine what we’re reaching for when someone we love is struggling.

Invite us to question whether our prescriptions match their diagnosis.

Invite us to consider whether “don’t give up” is always appropriate, or whether sometimes the most loving thing we can say is “it’s okay to stop.”

Invite us to wrestle with how our cultural and theological insistence on endurance might be connected to violence we claim to want to prevent.

Invite us to ask whether we’re offering support or adding weight.

Invite us to imagine what it might look like to create cultures where rest is honored, where breaking is not shameful, where asking for help is celebrated, where stopping is sometimes the most faithful response.

What if instead of celebrating those who endure crushing systems, we committed to dismantling those systems?

What if instead of spiritualizing suffering, we sat with people in their pain and asked how we could help carry it?

What if instead of prescribing what worked for us, we asked what they actually need?

What if we recognized that sometimes love means helping someone put weight down rather than encouraging them to keep carrying it?

Devin’s Gift

My brother is gone. I can’t go back and have those conversations differently. I can’t undo the times I offered “keep going” when I should have offered “you can rest.”

But Devin’s death has become a gift I didn’t ask for and don’t want: the gift of wrestling. Of questioning. Of examining my complicity in systems and theologies that crush people.

And if his death can prompt others to wrestle too—to question before prescribing, to ask before encouraging, to examine whether their hope might be someone else’s crushing weight—then maybe something redemptive can emerge from this devastating loss.

Not redemption that makes it okay. Not silver lining that minimizes the tragedy. But the kind of hard, uncomfortable wrestling that might prevent another family from burying someone who was told to keep going when they needed permission to stop.

Will you examine what you’re reaching for when someone is struggling?

Will you question whether endurance is always the answer?

Will you consider creating space for people—especially men, especially Black men—to be weak, to rest, to ask for help, to stop?

Will you wrestle with how our encouragement might be complicit in crushing people?

I don’t have answers. Just questions. Just wrestling. Just the growing conviction that we have to do better.

For Devin. For all the Devins still here, being crushed while being told it’s character development. For the people who love them and don’t want to look back five months, five years, five decades from now and realize our encouragement was actually cruelty.

I’m wrestling. And I’m inviting you to wrestle too.

April 21, 2026

Kevin Fredericks—better known as KevOnStage—has been catching heat from Christians lately. The comedian and content creator, whose brand built itself on the intersection of Black church culture, faith, and social media, has been vocal about his evolving views on LGBTQ+ persons, drinking, profanity, and a host of other issues the church has traditionally labeled “sin.” In recent interviews, Kev has spoken openly about how authentic relationships with LGBTQ+ people have changed him, how proximity has transformed his theology, and how he can no longer cosign the homophobia that masquerades as biblical fidelity in many Christian spaces.

Predictably, the saints are upset.

“He’s compromising Scripture.” “He’s following the culture instead of Christ.” “He’s putting feelings over God’s Word.” The critiques are familiar because we’ve heard them every time someone dares to suggest that maybe—just maybe—the way the church has weaponized the Bible against LGBTQ+ persons isn’t actually faithful witness.

But here’s what I want to say, as clearly as I can:

And if the modern church is going to bear faithful witness to a world increasingly alienated by Christian culture wars, we need to wrestle seriously with what Kev is naming.

What the Red Letters Actually Say (And Don’t Say)

Let’s start with the facts: Jesus said nothing directly about homosexuality. Not one word in the four Gospels. Zero red letters on the topic as we understand it today. What Jesus did talk about—extensively—was religious hypocrisy, economic injustice, the idol of purity culture, and the tendency of religious people to use Scripture to exclude rather than include.

Now, many Christians will immediately respond: “But Jesus affirmed marriage as between a man and a woman in Matthew 19!” True. Jesus quoted Genesis 1-2 when asked about divorce. But careful exegesis would note that Jesus was addressing a specific question about heterosexual divorce in a patriarchal context, not delivering a comprehensive sexual ethic for all time. And even if we take it as such, we still have to acknowledge what Jesus emphasized versus what He was silent on.

Jesus was silent on homosexuality. He was loud about welcoming the outcast, touching the unclean, and defending those the religious establishment marginalized.

Does this mean Paul’s letters don’t matter? Does this mean the Levitical holiness code is irrelevant? No. But it does mean we need to stop putting words in Jesus’ mouth that He never spoke. It means we need to read Scripture as a whole, not as a series of isolated proof texts. And it means we need to reckon with the reality that the modern discourse on sexuality—sexual orientation as identity, committed same-sex relationships, the concept of LGBTQ+ community—simply did not exist in the ancient world.

The texts we keep weaponizing addressed temple prostitution, pederasty, exploitative power dynamics, and ritual purity in specific cultural contexts. They were not written to address what we’re debating today. That doesn’t mean they’re irrelevant, but it does mean we can’t just copy-paste ancient prohibitions onto modern questions without doing the hard work of exegesis, cultural context, and theological discernment.

The Church’s Book vs. The World’s Rulebook

Here’s the theological move I need you to sit with: The Bible is the Church’s book. It is not the world’s rulebook.

This distinction matters more than almost anything else in this conversation.

The Bible is given to the community of faith as our framework for understanding God, holiness, and discipleship. It tells us who we are, whose we are, and how we’re called to live as people who bear the name of Jesus. The doctrinal and theological frameworks we derive from Scripture are meant to justify, edify, and sanctify those who believe it—and to serve as witness to those who do not.

But here’s what the Bible is NOT: It’s not a legislative document to impose on those outside the faith. It’s not a weapon to coerce conformity from people who don’t claim Jesus. It’s not a tool for culture war dominance or theocratic control.

Paul himself said it plainly in 1 Corinthians 5:12-13: “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.”

Read that again. Paul—the guy who wrote the passages we keep quoting about sexual immorality—explicitly says he’s NOT trying to police the sexual ethics of non-Christians. His concern is the church’s holiness and witness, not controlling the behavior of those outside the faith.

This means Christians have to hold a tension that we’re often unwilling to hold: What does this ancient text mean for us, the called-out people of God? And what is the work we’re called to do in the world?

Those are related questions, but they’re not the same question.

The Arc of Scripture Bends Toward Radical Inclusion

When I read Scripture as a whole narrative—not a flat rulebook but a progressive revelation of God’s character—I see a consistent pattern: God keeps breaking our categories of who’s in and who’s out.

• Genesis 12: God’s blessing through one family (Abraham)

• Exodus: Expanding to one nation (Israel)

• Ruth and Jonah: Hints that outsiders can be included

• Isaiah 56:3-5: Even eunuchs—people whose sexuality made them “other”—are welcomed into God’s house

• Acts 10-11: The Gentiles—the “unclean,” the uncircumcised, the ones “good Jews” wouldn’t eat with—are included without becoming Jewish first

• Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”

Every single time, the religious establishment resisted. Every time, they quoted Scripture to defend their boundaries. Every time, God said, “I’m doing a new thing. Who are you to call unclean what I have made clean?”

This is the arc of the biblical witness. This is the trajectory of the Gospel. And if we claim to read Scripture faithfully, we have to ask ourselves:

I’m not saying the answer is obvious or simple. I’m saying the question is faithful.

Jesus Was Simultaneously More Welcoming AND More Demanding

Here’s what we can’t do: We can’t flatten Jesus into only a welcoming hippie who never called anyone to transformation. That’s not the Jesus of the Gospels either.

Jesus ate with sinners BEFORE they changed. He welcomed the unclean without requiring them to get clean first. He touched lepers, defended prostitutes, and made space at His table for people the religious leaders wouldn’t go near.

AND—Jesus also said, “Go and sin no more.” He called people to radical transformation. He said, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off.” He intensified the moral demands of the Law rather than lowering them.

Jesus was simultaneously more welcoming than the Pharisees AND more demanding. He included people the religious establishment excluded, but He also called them to lives of holiness that surpassed mere rule-keeping.

The church keeps trying to collapse this tension. Conservatives emphasize the demanding Jesus and use Him to exclude. Progressives emphasize the welcoming Jesus and ignore His calls to transformation. But the actual Jesus of the Gospels holds both in tension—and so must we.

The question is: Which comes first? The welcome or the demand?

Jesus’ practice is clear: Welcome first. Table fellowship first. Inclusion first. THEN discipleship, formation, and the ongoing work of transformation.

The Pharisees required transformation as the entry fee. Jesus offered transformation as the fruit of relationship with Him.

When the Church Chose Grace Over Stones

I know this tension isn’t theoretical because I’ve lived it. Let me tell you a story that shaped how I understand the church’s witness.

Years ago, when I was deeply involved in church ministry, the mother of my oldest son and I consummated our love before marriage. We were both active servants in the church—people who knew the teachings, who understood what the Black church said about sexual purity and “living right.” And then she was pregnant.

We stood at a theological and ecclesial impasse. The church we served was theologically against both premarital sex and birthing children “out of wedlock,” as the saints say. We knew the sermons. We knew the judgment that often came with situations like ours. We knew that in many Black church contexts, we would be made examples of—sat down from ministry, publicly shamed, used as cautionary tales about the consequences of sin.

But that’s not what happened.

Instead of stones, our church showed us grace. Instead of exclusion, they practiced inclusion. Instead of demanding we disappear until we “got right,” they surrounded us with love and support. They allowed us to continue growing in our faith even as we prepared for parenthood outside of marriage. They brought our child into a loving community that didn’t require us to perform perfection before we could belong.

That grace didn’t excuse what we’d done. It didn’t pretend there were no consequences or no need for growth. But it also didn’t make transformation the entry fee for continued community.

The church said, in effect: “You’re still ours. This child is ours. We’re going to walk with you through this. You don’t have to have it all figured out to be loved here.”

That experience fundamentally shaped how I understand what the church is called to do. It taught me that welcome doesn’t mean endorsement, and inclusion doesn’t mean the absence of ethics. But it also taught me that when we lead with grace instead of judgment, when we practice table fellowship before demanding transformation, people actually encounter Jesus—and THAT’S what produces lasting change.

Here’s what haunts me now: If the Black church could extend that grace to me—a young man who violated its sexual ethics—why can’t we extend the same grace to LGBTQ+ persons?

Why is premarital heterosexual sex met with grace and restoration, but same-sex love is met with exile and condemnation? Why are some violations of the church’s sexual ethics treated as opportunities for discipleship, while others are treated as disqualifying? Why do we know how to hold the tension of “love the sinner, hate the sin” for straight people, but collapse into pure rejection when it comes to LGBTQ+ persons?

The answer, if we’re honest, often has more to do with whose sin makes us uncomfortable than with what Scripture actually demands.

I’m not saying all sins are equal or that there’s no such thing as sexual ethics. I’m saying that if we’re going to claim biblical authority for how we treat LGBTQ+ persons, we better be applying that same standard consistently. And the truth is, we’re not. We’re selective. We extend grace where we’re comfortable and withhold it where we’re not.

The church that surrounded me with love didn’t stop calling me to holiness. They didn’t pretend my choices had no moral dimension. But they understood something crucial: transformation happens in the context of belovedness, not as a prerequisite for it.

That’s the Jesus of the Gospels. That’s the church at its best. And that’s the witness we owe to everyone—including LGBTQ+ persons—who are seeking to encounter God.

The Matthew 25 Test

Here’s where the rubber meets the road for me. When we stand before Jesus and He separates the sheep from the goats, what’s the criteria?

Matthew 25:31-46 is painfully clear. The test isn’t “Did you have the right sexual ethics?” The test isn’t “Did you vote correctly?” The test isn’t even “Did you have sound doctrine?”

The test is: “I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me.”

And when the righteous ask, “When did we see you like this?” Jesus says: “As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

Now let me tell you who “the least of these” are in our current moment:

• 40% of homeless youth in America identify as LGBTQ+

• LGBTQ+ youth are 4 times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers

• LGBTQ+ persons experience disproportionate rates of violence, family rejection, employment discrimination, and housing insecurity

• Black trans women face some of the highest rates of murder in this country

When Jesus says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” He’s talking about THEM. When Christians spend more energy policing sexuality than protecting vulnerable LGBTQ+ persons, we fail the Matthew 25 test. Full stop.

I don’t care what you believe about sexual ethics—if you’re not feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and defending the most vulnerable among us, you’ve missed the whole point of the Gospel. And right now, in this cultural moment, LGBTQ+ persons—especially LGBTQ+ youth, especially LGBTQ+ people of color—are among “the least of these.”

That’s not debatable. That’s measurable, documented reality.

What I Believe (And How I Hold It)

Let me be as clear as I can about where I stand, knowing that clarity invites critique from multiple sides:

First, I believe the arc of the biblical canon bends toward radical inclusion. I see God consistently widening the circle of belovedness, breaking down walls, and challenging our categories of who’s worthy.

Second, I believe the Bible is the Church’s book, not the world’s rulebook. My job as a pastor isn’t to legislate Christian sexual ethics for society. My job is to embody beloved community and witness to God’s love. I’m not trying to impose Scripture on people who don’t claim to follow Jesus.

Third, I believe LGBTQ+ persons are made in the image of God, fully beloved, and entitled to dignity, safety, and respect—PERIOD. No conditions. No asterisks. Whether I think same-sex relationships are God’s ideal design or not doesn’t change that foundational truth.

Fourth, I create space for LGBTQ+ persons to encounter Jesus without preconditions. Transformation happens through relationship with Christ, not as a prerequisite FOR relationship with Christ. I’m not the Holy Spirit, and I refuse to play gatekeeper to God’s grace.

Fifth, I hold my convictions with humility because faithful Christians I deeply respect read Scripture differently than I do. I could be wrong about some of this. What I won’t be wrong about is choosing love, dignity, and inclusion over judgment and exclusion.

Sixth, I believe Christians have to hold the tension between what Scripture means for us as the Church and the work we’re called to do in the world. We are called to holiness AND called to witness. We are called to transformation AND called to love. We live in that tension, not by collapsing it.

Beloved Community Requires This

Dr. King’s vision of beloved community—a vision rooted in his own Wesleyan theological formation—was never about everyone agreeing on everything. It was about creating a community where the dignity of every person is honored, where justice rolls down like waters, and where love is the highest ethic.

We can’t build beloved community while dehumanizing LGBTQ+ persons. We can’t witness to the Gospel while weaponizing Scripture against the vulnerable. We can’t claim to follow Jesus while failing the Matthew 25 test.

KevOnStage is right: Jesus doesn’t cosign your homophobia. The Jesus who ate with tax collectors and sinners, who touched lepers, who defended the woman caught in adultery, who included Samaritans and Gentiles and everyone the religious people excluded—that Jesus is not interested in your theological justifications for treating LGBTQ+ persons as less than fully human.

Does this mean every expression of sexuality is blessed by God? Does this mean there are no ethics, no boundaries, no vision of holiness? No. But it does mean that our posture toward LGBTQ+ persons should be characterized by welcome, not warfare. By inclusion, not isolation. By love, not legislation.

And if we can’t figure out how to do that—if our theology requires us to dehumanize people Jesus died to love—then our theology is the problem, not the people.

The Work Ahead

The church is losing an entire generation over this issue. Not because young people are biblically illiterate, but because they’ve watched us use the Bible to harm people. They’ve seen us spend more energy fighting culture wars than feeding the hungry. They’ve watched us defend our “biblical values” while ignoring the Matthew 25 mandate to love the least of these.

And they’re walking away.

Not from Jesus. From us. From the version of Christianity that looks more like the Pharisees than the Christ we claim to follow.

If we want to bear faithful witness in an increasingly pluralistic, sexually diverse world, we need to learn to hold the tension KevOnStage is naming. We need to stop pretending we have all the answers. We need to lead with humility, hospitality, and love.

The Bible is the Church’s book. It forms us, shapes us, and calls us to holiness. But it’s not a weapon to wield against those outside the faith. It’s a witness to the God who keeps breaking our boundaries, widening our circles, and reminding us that love—radical, inclusive, transformative love—is the highest law.

That’s the Jesus of the Gospels.

That’s the work of beloved community.

And that’s the witness the world is waiting to see.

Rev. Marcus M. Jones is University Chaplain at Huston-Tillotson University and Senior Pastor of St. Peter’s United Methodist Church in Austin, Texas. He writes at the intersection of Black prophetic tradition, theology, and public witness.

Comments are open. Let’s talk about this. Seriously. No performative outrage, no drive-by condemnation—just honest engagement with what faithful witness looks like in this moment. I’m listening.

Today makes five months.

After chapel hour this morning, a visiting pastor asked me about my necklace. I was especially conscious today to wear it visible—pulled out over my shirt instead of tucked under like it sometimes is. But of course, my life is so busy and filled with engagements, obligations, and commitments that I often don’t even know I have it on until someone notices it.

She pointed to your face, encircled in diamonds against my chest, and asked, “Who is this?”

I told her it was you and that you passed away five months ago today.

She didn’t say anything at first. Just reached out and touched the necklace gently, her fingers resting on your smiling face, and said a prayer right there at the front of the stage in the chapel.

It warmed my heart for a moment.

At the same time, I’m not sure if the prayer was for me or you.

Honestly, I hope it was for me.

The Prayer I Need

I know theologically that you’re beyond the reach of prayers now. You’re in God’s hands, held in eternal rest, free from the crushing weight that suffocated your spirit in this life. The prayer you needed—the prayer for relief, for peace, for the love that would finally fill the void—that prayer has already been answered in whatever mystery lies beyond death.

But me? I’m still here. Still carrying. Still trying to figure out how to do life without you while also carrying you with me everywhere I go.

So yeah, I hope her prayer was for me. Because five months in, I need it more than I want to admit.

Life Keeps Moving

Life for me has been so fast since you left, and I’m trying to slow it down.

I cleaned kicks for the first time in a long time the other day. Sat in the shop with the brushes and solutions, working on a pair of Jordans that had been sitting there for weeks. Phat Kicks—our dream, the thing we were building together—has been on pause since November. Every time I look at the equipment, the supplies, the business plan we sketched out, I feel the weight of it.

This dream of ours seems so deferred with you gone.

But I’m going to make it work though. Somehow. I have to. Because if I don’t, then that’s another piece of you that dies. Another future that gets erased. Another possibility that gets buried with your ashes.

The problem is time. Or more accurately, the complete lack of it.

Between the church and the school, it’s like I barely have time to myself, let alone time to work on kicks. St. Peter’s needs a pastor. Huston-Tillotson needs a chaplain. Students need counseling. Sermons need writing. Chapel services need planning. Board of Ordained Ministry interviews. Committee meetings. Grant applications need submitting. Strategic plans need developing.

People are always saying, “You need to rest.”

And I know it. I know it. My body knows it. My mind knows it. Even my spirit knows it.

But who’s going to do the work I need to get done if I stop?

Who’s going to step up at the church? Who’s going to do all the RLCM administrative tasks? Who’s going to pastor the students, shepherd the congregation, advocate for the candidates, write the grants, build the vision? (Of course someone will but who?)

And more honestly: if I stop moving, what catches up with me?

Because here’s what I’m learning about grief at five months: busyness is both necessity and avoidance. I genuinely have responsibilities that require my attention. But I’m also moving fast enough that I don’t have to sit still with the absence. If I’m always preparing the next sermon, planning the next event, meeting the next need—I don’t have to feel the full weight of you being gone.

Until moments like this morning. When someone touches your necklace and prays, and suddenly I’m aware that I’ve been running so fast I forgot I was carrying you.

I have to figure out how to slow my ministry life down. Not just for self-care—though that matters—but because you deserve more than being an afterthought I remember when someone asks about my necklace. You deserve to be carried intentionally, not just accidentally.

Visiting Mama

I try to visit Mama every time I’m in the city.

The 200 miles between Austin and Dallas feel longer now. Every trip back is a reminder of all the times I made that drive to see you, to check in, to make sure you were good. Now I make it to see Mama, to make sure she’s good, knowing that she’s navigating the unbearable grief of burying her youngest son.

She misses you so much. I can see it in her face, hear it in her voice, feel it in the way she talks about you in present tense sometimes and then catches herself. Being in the house alone is hard for her. The space you used to fill with your presence, your energy, your love—it’s just empty now. And no amount of visiting from me can fill that void.

But I try. I visit as often as I can. I sit with her. I let her talk about you. I share memories. I hold space for her grief while carrying my own.

This last time, something happened that I’m still processing.

Mama had bought small urns—beautiful ones, the kind that look like art pieces rather than containers for human remains. She asked if I wanted to take some of your ashes with me.

I grabbed one of the small urns and brought it back to Austin. It sits on my nightstand now, next to the lamp and the papers I need to figure out what to do with.

That made me happy and sad.

Happy because now I have a piece of you with me in a different way. Of course, with my necklace I take you everywhere I go—to church, to campus, to meetings, to the grocery store. But now with the ashes, I have a piece of you that stays with me in my most private space. In my bedroom. In the place where I’m not “Reverend” or “Chaplain” or “Pastor,” where I’m just Marcus trying to sleep, trying to rest, trying to figure out how to live in a world where my brother is gone.

Sad because it feels unreal. That your physical presence has been reduced to ash in a small urn on my nightstand. That this is what remains of the body that housed that explosive love, that infectious smile, that generous spirit.

I’m carrying you in ways I never imagined I would have to.

The Loc

I’ve been holding one of your locs from your hair since November.

Daun saved it for me when she was doing your hair for the funeral. A single loc, maybe six inches long, still holding the pattern and texture of how you wore your crown. I’ve been carrying it with me, waiting for the right moment, the right opportunity.

I’m going to get back to Daun so she can connect it to mine.

I miss her doing my hair. She was our loctician—the one who started my journey, the one you introduced me to, the one who understood that hair is spiritual work, not just aesthetic maintenance. I keep up with her on socials and she’s prospering, building her business, thriving in her craft. We knew she would. She had that energy, that gift, that way of making you feel seen while she worked.

I’m glad you introduced me to her. It’s one of the many gifts you gave me—connections to people who would become important to my life, to my journey, to my understanding of what it means to be a Black man navigating the world with intentionality.

You’d like our new loctician as well. She’s super cool and always has good energy. She does all of our hair now—mine, Jalen’s, Ian’s. We sit in her chair and talk about life, about struggles, about dreams, about everything and nothing. She doesn’t know how much those moments mean—how sitting still for two hours while someone works on your crown is sometimes the only rest you get.

And Tiffany loc’d up too now! Your sister-in-law joined the journey. She’s been wanting to for a while, and watching her go through the process of starting locs, of committing to the journey, of embracing that natural crown—it makes me think about you. About how you wore your locs with such pride. About how you understood that hair is identity, is resistance, is connection to ancestry and culture.

When Daun connects your loc to mine, it will be another way of carrying you. Your hair literally woven into mine. Your crown connected to my crown. Your journey integrated into mine.

Physical. Permanent. Sacred.

The Incompleteness

It’s hard with you gone.

That’s the simplest way to say it, even though the reality is infinitely more complex.

Life feels incomplete. Like I’m walking around missing a limb and everyone expects me to function normally. Like there’s a piece of me that died with you on November 9th, and I’m still figuring out how to operate with that absence.

And all this I’m working toward—the ministry, the vision, the strategic plans, the dreams—it all feels empty without you.

Phat Kicks was supposed to be our thing. The Jones brothers building something together. You handling the operations, the customer relationships, the day-to-day grind. Me handling the vision, the marketing, the expansion plans. Both of us doing what we do best, creating something that would generate income and legacy and possibility for our families.

But now it’s just me. And cleaning those Jordans the other day felt hollow. Like going through the motions of something that only matters because you’re not here to do it with me.

The church work feels empty without you there. You joined St. Peter’s. You were supposed to be baptized. You were supposed to be in the pews on Sunday mornings, sitting with your kids, being part of the community I’m trying to build. Your giving records sit on my desk as evidence of your commitment, but I’d trade all of that for one more Sunday with you present.

The campus ministry feels empty without you understanding what I’m building at Huston-Tillotson. You got it—the significance of being back at our alma mater, of serving HBCU students, of creating space for young Black people to explore faith without compromising their identity. You would have been my biggest cheerleader and my most honest critic.

Everything I’m building, I’m building without you. And that makes it feel less like building and more like surviving.

Five Months…

So here I am at five months.

Wearing your face on a necklace that I forget I have on until someone notices.

Carrying your ashes on my nightstand in an urn that looks like art.

Holding your loc in my pocket until I can weave it into my crown.

Moving so fast through ministry obligations that I barely have time to grieve.

Trying to honor our dreams while feeling the weight of their incompleteness.

Visiting Mama and seeing your absence in her eyes.

Working on kicks and feeling the hollowness of doing it alone.

A visiting pastor touched your necklace this morning and said a prayer. And I hope—I really hope—that prayer was for me. Because five months in, I need all the prayers I can get.

Not prayers for you to rest in peace. You’re beyond that now.

But prayers for me to figure out how to live in a world where you’re not physically here but somehow present in every way I can manage to carry you.

In diamonds around my neck.

In ashes on my nightstand.

In a loc that will soon be woven into my crown.

In the work I’m still trying to do even though it feels empty without you.

In the love that persists even when the person who taught me to love hard is gone.

I love you, bro.

I miss you, bro.

And I’m carrying you in every way I know how.

Rev. Marcus M. Jones is University Chaplain at Huston-Tillotson University and Senior Pastor at St. Peter’s United Methodist Church. This is part of an ongoing series processing grief, ministry, and the long work of learning to live after loss.

This is Part II of a series begun on Holy Saturday, April 4, 2026 — the 58th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Part I examined what a war, a UN vote, rich Black NBA players, and Holy Week have to do with King. The answer, I argued, was everything. Part II picks up where the empty tomb left us.

Easter came.

The stone rolled. The women ran. The disciples stumbled toward belief. And the President of the United States of America — a self-identified Christian, who had extended his Iran destruction deadline specifically because he said bombing a nation on Easter Sunday would be “inappropriate” — woke up on Resurrection Sunday and posted this to Truth Social at 8:03 a.m.:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F—n’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Then he skipped church.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Leo XIV offered the world his Easter message: “Let those who have weapons lay them down. Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace.”

The contrast requires no commentary. But it demands a response.

I grew up in Oak Cliff — Village Oaks, South Dallas — the part of Dallas the city has always known what to do with and never chosen to do it. I am now the Senior Pastor of St. Peter’s United Methodist Church in East Austin, a 162-year-old historically Black congregation sitting in the most rapidly gentrifying corridor in the American South, and the University Chaplain at Huston-Tillotson University, an HBCU in the center of the gentrification in a city focused on tech and not the poor. I am writing from inside the reckoning of Constantinian Christianity.

This Is What Constantinian Christianity Looks Like

Constantine did not destroy the church by persecuting it. He destroyed it by baptizing empire. He took the sign of the cross — the instrument of Roman state execution used against an occupied people’s prophet — and put it on Roman shields. He turned the resurrection into a war banner. And the church, hungry for survival and seduced by power, largely said amen.

We have been living in that theological catastrophe ever since.

When a president frames an ultimatum to bomb bridges and power plants in a nation of 90 million people around the holiness of Easter — and international law scholars are calling his planned targets potential war crimes — he is not invoking Christianity. He is consuming it. Using the language of resurrection as cover for the logic of empire. And when the church is silent, when we are more animated about Easter brunches and flower arrangements than about what was threatened in the name of our holiest day, we are not being apolitical.

We are being Constantinian.

King understood this with his whole body. His “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church in 1967 was not a political detour from his gospel work. It was the gospel. He named the triplets of evil — racism, militarism, and materialism — as one interconnected principality, not three separate issues. You cannot worship the risen Jesus on Sunday and be indifferent to the bombs falling in His name on Monday.

The disciples on the first Easter had no power to stop the empire. We do. And we are choosing, largely, to look away.

The Empire That Performs Apocalypse and Then Walks Away

Here is what happened as this piece is being written.

Trump declared that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” He threatened to destroy power plants, bridges, and critical infrastructure across Iran. He threatened to bomb a nation into collapse. He called it “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”

90 minutes before the deadline he had declared final, he granted a two-week ceasefire, brokered by Pakistan’s Prime Minister, contingent on Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz. He declared victory. The stock market shot upward. Oil prices dropped five percent.

The empire performed apocalypse for breakfast and announced peace before dinner. And by tomorrow, most of America will have moved on.

This is how empire has always worked. It manufactures crisis so massive that the moral imagination buckles under the weight of it. It threatens civilizational destruction. It walks it back. It claims victory. And in the churning news cycle that follows, the slower, quieter, more permanent violence — the poverty, the disinvestment, the dismantled programs, the Memphises left behind — disappears entirely from view.

King named this dynamic with surgical precision. The war abroad consumes the moral bandwidth needed to fight the war at home. And the war at home grinds forward while we watch the spectacle.

Two weeks from tonight, the deadline comes again. And Black America will still be deciding which war to pay attention to.

We Have Been Here Before

This is not a new crossroads. It is the same one.

King was killed in April 1968. By July, Congress had passed the Fair Housing Act — one of the landmark achievements of the civil rights movement, powered in no small part by the grief and rage that swept through 196 cities. By November, Richard Nixon had won the presidency on a Southern Strategy designed to convert white racial grievance into electoral power. Within his first term, Nixon declared a War on Drugs — which his own aide John Ehrlichman later admitted was designed to criminalize Black people and the antiwar left. Not to fight drugs. To criminalize communities.

The gains came. And simultaneously, the war on those same communities began.

Reagan deepened it — gutting public housing, slashing food assistance, dismantling mental health infrastructure, expanding the carceral state. The civil rights generation had cracked open the door of opportunity. The Nixon-Reagan axis sent the bill to the poor.

Black America stood at a crossroads in 1968: walk through the door that had opened, or remain in the street fighting for those who couldn’t reach it yet. By and large — with painful and luminous exceptions — we walked through the door. And pulled it mostly closed behind us.

We are standing in that same street today. The door is being re-locked from the outside.

The Familiar Architecture of Erasure

What Trump has done to the legislative architecture of the civil rights era is not random. It is structural. New generation, same blueprint.

Head Start — the War on Poverty program that has reached more than 40 million low-income children since 1965 — has been targeted for elimination. SNAP is being cut while child poverty among Black and brown families remains stubbornly high. Medicaid, which disproportionately serves families of color, faces slashing. TRIO and GEAR UP, which have opened higher education to 1.4 million low-income students, face elimination. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights was shut down entirely, freezing over 500 active investigations into abuse and discrimination. The Department of Education itself — which Nixon tried and failed to eliminate, which Reagan tried and failed to eliminate — has been signed away and is being wound down in real time.

This is not coincidence. It is a program. It is the war on the poor wearing the costume of fiscal conservatism. Nixon used crime. Reagan used welfare queens. Trump uses DEI. The language changes. The target does not.

And here is the question the Black church has not yet fully answered — because answering it honestly requires us to look at what we did with the last 58 years:

Who among us has actually been fighting this?

Not tweeting. Not preaching about it once in February. Fighting it — the way King fought, with his body, his calendar, his institutional weight, his willingness to lose respectability in order to tell the truth.

The civil rights legislation gave us access. Integration gave us proximity to power. And many of us — myself included — used that access to build platforms, build congregations, build careers, build comfort. While the poor Black communities King died for watched the scaffolding of their potential get dismantled, bill by bill, program by program, executive order by executive order.

We were busy. We were building. We had finally made it to the table.

We did not notice they were eating the poor while we were seated.

My State’s “Memphis”

Oak Cliff is Dallas’s Memphis. Village Oaks where I grew up is on the southern side of the Trinity River in South Dallas — the part of the city that has been red-lined, highway-carved, and disinvested in the same deliberate, systematic way that produced the poverty people are now calling a character flaw in Memphis. The same maps that locked Black families out of North Dallas wealth are written into the geography of the neighborhoods that raised me. Dallas has never fully reckoned with what it did to those streets. Austin hasn’t reckoned with East Austin. Memphis hasn’t been given the tools to reckon with itself. These are not separate stories. They are the same story, told in different zip codes.

I carry Oak Cliff with me into every room. Into St. Peter’s, where I am trying to build what I call a “Church of Churches” — a beloved community that does not merely survive gentrification but becomes a prophetic center of resistance to it. A place where poor people in East Austin find not charity but power. Not a handout but a table set in the presence of their enemies. I believe it. I preach it. I am working toward it.

But I have to be honest about what is happening around me while I work.

My close friend and brother Zach Johnson served this country in uniform. He came home and built The HABITS Group — a Black veteran-owned company rooted in the same ethos of service and discipline that defined his military career. And this administration has been systematically dismantling the contracting infrastructure that businesses like his depend on to compete.

On Trump’s first day, he rescinded Executive Order 11246 — the Johnson-era order requiring federal contractors to actively prevent racial discrimination — and gutted the Minority Business Development Agency, the only federal body created specifically to help minority-owned firms navigate a contracting landscape that was never designed with them in mind. The SBA’s goal for Small Disadvantaged Business contracts was slashed from 15% to 5%, shifting billions in federal dollars back toward businesses that have always had access. And right here in Texas, the state Comptroller used emergency rules to dismantle the Historically Underutilized Business program — decertifying over 15,000 minority and women-owned businesses overnight, renaming what remained “VetHUB” while quietly narrowing eligibility to the point of exclusion.

Zach served. He built. The system that was supposed to give him a fair shot at contracts his company is qualified to perform is being disassembled in real time, dressed in the language of merit and equal opportunity, while the playing field beneath it remains as tilted as it has always been.

This is not abstract policy to me. It is a kitchen table conversation with a brother. It is the difference between a Black veteran-owned company growing and one fighting to survive. And it is happening in the same city, in the same moment, while I work to unite the missions of two historically black institutions central to the black communities’ survival.

A People Distracted, A Nation Divided

While the empire performs its theater of war and diplomacy, Black America is consuming itself in arguments about hotel sheets.

The national discourse that erupted around LeBron James, Anthony Edwards, Draymond Green, and Stephen A. Smith’s commentary on Memphis is not a sports story. It is a sociological document. It reveals exactly what happens to a people when they have been sufficiently distracted, divided, and detached from their own history.

Black America is being pulled in three directions at once. There is the war abroad — a conflict that has already killed thousands, disproportionately burdening the Black and brown working-class families whose children fill the enlisted ranks. There is the war at home — the dismantling of civil rights era programs, the gutting of every mechanism built to address the generational poverty that racism engineered. And there is the cultural war — the exhausting, social-media-fueled argument about which successful Black person said something wrong today.

The Memphis discourse landed in that third category and stayed there. Because it was easier to argue about hotel preferences than to reckon with why Memphis is poor, why it has been poor, and whose responsibility it is to do something about it.

Not one major commentator centered the conversation on the 1,300 sanitation workers who summoned King to Memphis in 1968. Not one named Echol Cole and Robert Walker — the two men crushed to death in a garbage compactor in February 1968 because the city of Memphis classified them as equipment. Not one connected the city’s present poverty to the deliberate economic strangulation documented in city after city after King’s death — collapsed property values, contracted employment, corporate disinvestment that fell hardest on Black communities and never reversed.

The discourse was conducted entirely in the present tense, as though Memphis materialized from nothing. As though poverty is a personality flaw rather than a policy outcome.

The athletes are not villains. They are symptoms. They are what Black excellence looks like when it has been severed from Black suffering. And the fact that the national conversation spent a week on hotel sheets while the world named slavery a crime and a president threatened civilizational destruction on Easter morning is not a media failure. It is a spiritual one.

Woodstock and the New Resistance

Progressive white America is in the streets. The protests against this war, against the dismantling of civil rights legislation, against the authoritarian direction of this administration are real, sustained, and in some cities unprecedented. There is a generation of white progressives who feel, in their bones, that something fundamental is being broken — willing to march, to organize, to put their bodies where their Woodstock grandparents and Vietnam-era parents once stood, alongside King’s white allied wing, and came home changed.

My own denomination is in this fight. The United Methodist Church — for all of its complicated and unfinished history with race — has not been silent. In February 2026, the General Board of Church and Society led a “Faithful Resistance” march to the U.S. Capitol for immigrant justice. The Council of Bishops issued pastoral letters against the dismantling of DEI policies, calling for ceasefire in Palestine, and rejecting violence against transgender persons. The General Commission on Religion and Race has spent decades equipping the church to dismantle racism from within. The freshly adopted 2025-2028 Social Principles stand in the Wesleyan tradition — John Wesley himself preached against the exploitation of the poor and the trafficking of human beings — calling United Methodists to forthright moral witness on the most pressing social issues of the age.

I am proud of that witness. I am a product of it. The Wesleyan tradition insists that personal salvation and social holiness are not separate conversations. You cannot be sanctified in your soul while ignoring the suffering of your neighbor.

But I am also honest enough to say: the United Methodist Church is a predominantly white denomination with its own unfinished business with race — segregated conferences that took generations to merge, patterns of placing Black clergy in under-resourced appointments, an ongoing struggle to center Black and brown voices in a governance structure that has long centered white ones. The denomination marching for immigrant justice is the same denomination still learning to fully reckon with its own racial architecture.

Which is why the question of who leads is not incidental to the question of what we fight for.

The Black church must hold two things at once.

First: this coalition is necessary and we must welcome it. King’s Poor People’s Campaign was multiracial by design. He believed — until his last breath — that America’s moral conscience could be awakened across color lines. He organized allies, challenged them, and invited them into a movement led by and centered on those most harmed. We should do no less.

Second: we cannot allow someone else’s awakening to set our agenda. Progressive white resistance in 2026, like progressive white resistance in 1968, tends to organize around the issues most legible to white progressive consciousness — the war, the authoritarianism, the threat to democracy broadly defined. These are real and urgent. But they are not the whole list. The poverty of Oak Cliff. The poverty of Memphis. The UN vote against naming slavery a crime. The gutting of Head Start, SNAP, Medicaid, and the Minority Business Development Agency — these do not automatically make the march’s agenda.

The movement of the 1960s was not destroyed by its enemies. It was diminished by fragmentation — by the moment white progressives returned to their campuses and suburbs after Nixon’s election, and Black communities were left alone with a War on Drugs designed to cage their sons. The denomination went back to its pulpits. The poor went back to their poverty.

We cannot afford that again. The two-week ceasefire clock is ticking in the Middle East. The dismantling clock never stopped at home. The question the Black church — and every progressive faith community that claims the Wesleyan tradition, the prophetic tradition, the tradition of Jesus — must answer is whether we are prepared to lead a coalition that holds both wars in view simultaneously, refusing to let the spectacle of empire abroad become the alibi for ignoring the slow violence of empire at home.

The Crossroads

I do not know what the Black church is going to do. (Perhaps follow the lead of Alfred Street Baptist Church!)

I know what we have done. After every moment of prophetic courage — Selma, Montgomery, the sanitation workers’ strike — there has followed a long season of institutional consolidation, of pulling the gains inward, of protecting what was won rather than pressing toward what was promised.

I know that right now, in East Austin, in Oak Cliff, in Memphis, in every majority-Black city that America has systematically underfunded and abandoned, there are people who needed the Black church to be something other than a well-dressed institution with a good choir and a building in a changing neighborhood.

King’s last sermon was preached the night before he was killed — standing at Mason Temple in a Memphis thunderstorm with a sick throat. It was not about monuments or milestones. It was about whether the movement would survive him. He said he had been to the mountaintop. He said he had seen the Promised Land.

He didn’t say we were already there.

Fifty-eight years later. Easter passed. The bombs have been paused — for two weeks, contingent on negotiations, at the pleasure of an empire that threatened to wipe out a civilization this morning and declared peace before dinner. The programs are still being cut. The poor are still being abandoned. And the Black church — the institution King trusted to hold the fire — is still deciding what kind of church it is going to be.

What are we going to do?

I don’t know the answer.

But the clock is running. And it has been running for 58 years.

Rev. Marcus M. Jones, M.Div. is the University Chaplain and Director of Religious Life & Campus Ministry at Huston-Tillotson University, an HBCU in Austin, Texas, and Senior Pastor of St. Peter’s United Methodist Church in East Austin. He lives and writes at the intersection of Black prophetic tradition, theology, and public witness.

By Rev. Marcus M. Jones

What does a war, a vote, rich Black NBA players, and Holy Week have to do with Dr. King?

Everything.

And the fact that the question even needs to be asked is the indictment.

Today is April 4th. 58 years since a bullet found Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. And I need you to sit in that before you scroll to something easier — because what is happening in the world this Holy Saturday is not a collection of unrelated news stories. It is a single, unbroken testimony to what happens when a people bury their prophet without reckoning with what he died for.

A Death Without Reckoning

There is something theologically prophetic about the fact that April 4th falls inside Holy Week this year.

Holy Saturday is the day between death and resurrection — the day of silence, of absence, of a grief so thick that even hope feels dishonest. The disciples didn’t know Sunday was coming. They only knew Friday had happened. They stayed in the weight of it. They did not let the empire convince them that Friday was normal.

King was killed on a Thursday — the Thursday before what would become the most turbulent Holy Week in American history. What followed his death was, by the account of historian Peter B. Levy, the greatest wave of social unrest in America since the Civil War. Between April 4th and Easter Sunday 1968, looting, arson, and rebellion erupted in 196 cities across 36 states. 43 people killed. 3,500 injured. 27,000 arrested. 58,000 National Guard troops deployed.

America called it riots. Scholars called it the Holy Week Uprising.

America did what empires do. It absorbed the threat, repackaged the prophet, put his face on a stamp and his words on government buildings, and went right back to the business of war, extraction, and racial capitalism. The 1968 uprising didn’t produce reckoning. It produced Richard Nixon. It produced the War on Drugs. It produced mass incarceration. The grief of Black America over King’s body became the fuel for a political movement built on controlling Black bodies.

But the Black church’s failure runs deeper and cuts closer to home. By and large, we held on to the privileges that the civil rights movement won — access, integration, respectability, proximity to power — and we left the poor behind. We traded the prophetic for the pastoral and called it maturity. We moved to the suburbs and called it progress. We built bigger buildings in better zip codes and called it blessing. And the Memphises of the world — the poor Black cities, the forgotten corners of the movement’s geography, the sanitation workers’ grandchildren — we left them to figure it out.

King didn’t die for our upward mobility.

He died in Memphis fighting for people who collected other people’s garbage. And 58 years later, on this Holy Saturday, three stories are sitting on top of each other in a way the church cannot afford to keep ignoring.

Business As Usual For The Empire

On February 28, 2026, the United States launched nearly 900 strikes against Iran in 12 hours. Civilians died. A girls’ school near a naval base was struck. The Supreme Leader was killed. As of this Holy Saturday morning, an American service member is missing in hostile territory while the President gives a sovereign nation 48 hours to comply — or face “all Hell.”

King called the United States government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He said it in 1967 from Riverside Church. It cost him the support of moderate white liberals, most of the mainstream Black establishment, and eventually his life.

The Black church largely didn’t back him then — not on Vietnam, not on the Poor People’s Campaign. And if we are being honest, not now. We have war. We have empire. We have threats of total destruction issued on a deadline. And the prophetic tradition King died defending is mostly quiet, because we have learned, generation by generation, to consecrate America’s violence as long as our side is doing it, or as long as the enemy has been sufficiently demonized.

King didn’t play that. And we buried him without learning his lesson.

123 to 3!

Nine days before this Holy Saturday, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade and the racialized chattel enslavement of Africans the gravest crime against humanity. The resolution called for reparatory justice, formal apologies, and accountability for the enduring economic consequences of centuries of forced labor.

123 countries voted yes.

America’s stated position was that it “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred” — and that the resolution amounted to “reallocating modern resources to people and nations who are distantly related to the historical victims.”

Distantly related.

They said that about us.

About people whose grandparents were lynched. About communities whose wealth gap, health outcomes, incarceration rates, and educational access trace in a direct, unbroken line to the system they just voted against naming.

The whole world is no longer pretending. 123 nations looked at 400 years of evidence and said: this was a crime, and the debt is real. America — the nation that put King’s face on a stamp — stood with Israel and Argentina and said no.

King’s last campaign was essentially a reparations argument marching on Washington. They killed him before he arrived.

The Black church must sit with that longer than a social media post demands.

What Happens in Memphis…

This is the part that costs something to write — because it requires us to look at ourselves.

In recent months, LeBron James — the most influential athlete on the planet, a Black man, a man who has done real good in the world — publicly called for the Memphis Grizzlies to relocate to Nashville. Anthony Edwards complained about the hotel sheets. Draymond Green said the team should move. Stephen A. Smith said players don’t feel safe.

Memphis.

The city where King died fighting for sanitation workers making $1.65 an hour who weren’t allowed to take shelter from the rain because the city considered them equipment. Memphis — a city that remains among the poorest large cities in America not because its people lack resilience or soul, but because of the same forces of redlining, corporate extraction, and deliberate municipal disinvestment that King spent his life naming.

And now Black men with global platforms are accelerating the narrative that this majority-Black city is too broken, too dangerous, too dirty to deserve a professional franchise. One analysis said it plainly: LeBron wants to own an NBA team. His best path runs through relocation. Memphis is a chess piece.

I am not writing this to condemn. I am writing this because we must reckon with what it means when the language of Black aspiration has been so thoroughly absorbed by capitalism that we can no longer tell the difference between making it and consuming the people we left behind.

I serve as Senior Pastor of St. Peter’s United Methodist Church in East Austin — a historically Black congregation sitting in one of the most rapidly gentrifying corridors in the American South. East Austin is being consumed in real time. The same forces that hollowed out Memphis are working on this city block by block, displacing Black and brown families who built this community across generations, pricing them out of the neighborhoods their grandparents were forced into during segregation and that they transformed through sheer determination and love.

And I have a vision — I genuinely believe it — of St. Peter’s becoming a “Church of Churches,” a beloved community that doesn’t just survive gentrification but becomes a prophetic center of resistance to it. A place where poor people in East Austin find not charity but power, not a hand out but a table set in the presence of their enemies.

But I have to be honest about the distance between the vision and the work. I have degrees. I have a platform. I preach prophetically about systems on Sunday and write about them on Substack on Saturday. And the poor are still poor in East Austin. The displacement is still happening. The bulldozers don’t stop for good theology.

LeBron is a billionaire who uses capital to move chess pieces around a board. I am a pastor who sometimes uses words to move feelings around a screen. The difference in scale doesn’t make my complicity any less real.

King didn’t die for our analysis. He died in the middle of doing — walking with sanitation workers, raising bail money, organizing the poor. The Poor People’s Campaign wasn’t a thought piece. It was a tent city on the National Mall.

What is my tent city? What is yours?

The Reckoning of Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday is not a day of answers. It is a day of honest confrontation with everything Friday cost.

The disciples didn’t earn Sunday. They didn’t manufacture the resurrection. What the text demands of us is that we refuse to let the empire normalize Friday. We stay. We grieve. We name what was lost and what we failed to protect.

This nation has spent 58 years treating April 4th as normal. A holiday. A monument. A march. A speech. But never a funeral. Never the kind of grief that actually changes what you do on Monday.

So here is my question — not for America, but for the Black church, for Black America, for myself:

What would it look like to finally hold the funeral?

Not a service with flowers and a eulogy. A reckoning. The kind where you name what you lost, name what you failed to protect, name what you have become in the absence of the thing you buried. The kind where you look at a nation at war on the anniversary of King’s death, voting against naming slavery as a crime, watching a beloved Black city degraded by its own successful children — and you don’t just post about it.

You repent. You reorder. You show up.

Resurrection is Sunday’s gift. But it requires Saturday’s honesty.

We are still sitting in Saturday.

Rev. Marcus M. Jones, M.Div. is the University Chaplain and Director of Religious Life & Campus Ministry at Huston-Tillotson University, an HBCU in Austin, Texas, and Senior Pastor of St. Peter’s United Methodist Church in East Austin. This reflection was written on Holy Saturday, April 4, 2026.