I grew up in a family that attended a traditional Black Baptist church. From a young age, I was drawn to spiritual matters, and I became a Christian around age 11. When I went to college in the 1980s, I knew I wanted to be involved in a Bible study. In the early weeks of my freshman year, I attended a campus ministry fair and followed a classmate to a table with a sign that said “Navigators.”
Looking back, I recognize this as the moment I not only walked into a world of focused Bible study and a path of discipleship but also unknowingly walked into the world of the evangelical movement. There were no signs declaring, “Welcome to Evangelicalism!,” and I do not recall hearing much about the people called “evangelicals.”
Instead, I slowly began to gain awareness of the ethos of evangelicalism. I began to learn about popular preachers like Charles Stanley and Chuck Swindoll, organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru) and Officers’ Christian Fellowship, and theological schools like Dallas Theological Seminary. I saw magazines like Discipleship Journal and Christianity Today in the homes of my Bible study leaders.
It appeared to me at the time that the common thread was a clear commitment to the Bible—both how to understand it better and how to pursue life with the Bible as a central guide. I had great appreciation for both the things I was learning and the fellowship I had with peers and older Christians at the Navigators ministry and the Southern Baptist church I attended.
One of my most life-changing experiences was going to a Navigators summer program in Memphis. It was more racially mixed than what I had experienced on campus, and it led to significant growth—and, though I did not know it at the time, it directed my path toward being a theology professor. The ethnic diversity of the group was more incidental for me; I noticed and appreciated it, but I felt no tension with my experience in evangelical spaces and my racial identity.
After college, I moved to Memphis to live with a Navigator staff member to experience greater spiritual formation and discernment about my vocation. While there, I slowly began to learn much more about the evangelical movement. A lot of this came from listening several hours daily to one prominent Christian radio station, where I heard preachers like Swindoll, John MacArthur, and Stanley, along with programs like Focus on the Family, D. James Kennedy’s Truths that Transform, and radio programs that directly spoke about politics and culture. I began to become more explicitly aware of the evangelical movement and its relationship not only to biblical understanding but also to society.
Living in Memphis, with its history and sociocultural dynamics, it was impossible to avoid questions about race, even as I wanted to be conflict avoidant and neutral. Some of my Navigators peers were much more willing to name issues of race, even within the evangelical world. Eventually, I found myself wondering what was lacking in much of what I was hearing in the many evangelical radio shows. The typical politics and culture topics were the Cold War, rising secular humanism, abortion, and conservative approaches to economics.
I started asking myself, “Why is little to nothing said about race from all these people who say they are clearly committed to the entire Bible?” Racism, if mentioned, was usually defined as actions of prejudice by individuals. I did sometimes hear Tony Evans mention racism on his radio show, but my vexation continued to grow. I began to think that, at least for evangelicals, it would be necessary to prove that questions of race were valid and should be among the social topics that were addressed.
After three years in Memphis, I went to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School north of Chicago. I soon noticed there were fewer than ten Black students from the United States. I was very excited to be there and to dive deeply into the Bible and theology, and I wondered why there weren’t more of us there.
During my second year, I met an African American leader who was occasionally on campus and raised this question with him. He suggested I write an article about it. As I pursued this article, I began to learn about other Black evangelical leaders, interviewing people like Bill Pannell, Elward Ellis, Bill Bentley, and Tony Evans.
In 1993, I was still working on this article when I attended a conference about Black evangelicals held at Geneva College. There, I personally encountered Pannell, Evans, Clarence Hilliard, Eugene Rivers, and numerous others, including Ron Potter. Carl F. H. Henry and Kenneth Kantzer also spoke at the conference.
At that conference, I was confronted by two big realizations: first, that there were Black evangelicals who preceded my experience by decades, and second, that many of them had considerable cynicism about the world of evangelicalism.
I left the conference with a mix of confusion and tension, because my questions about the evangelical movement were fewer than the questions I had heard from the speakers. I processed this by writing a brief essay for my school paper about my experience at the conference.
My Friend, Bill Pannell
Looking back, I think it is accurate to say I felt a tension between reality and my hopes for what could be true: the reality of the negative experiences of some of the Black evangelicals at the conference and my hope that a movement (evangelicalism) committed to the complete truth of the Bible would and could name and address the realities of race in America.
I eventually completed and published my research article on minorities in evangelical leadership, “When Will There Be Room in the Inn?,” with Urban Mission in 1994, the same year I graduated from Trinity. In 1995, I began doctoral work, and though I cared about questions of race, I did not want my career to be defined by them. So I tried to focus on other topics—but God had other ideas.
My first publication as a doctoral student focused on race and theology. While I wrote about other topics, in time I understood that I needed to include this as part of my work. But I did not imagine what was ahead.
I began teaching at Wheaton College 25 years ago. When I arrived, I wanted to be known as a theologian, not as a “Black theologian.” Few African Americans taught theology at seminaries in general, and even fewer taught at evangelical institutions. (There are more of us now, but the number remains small.) I did not want to be perceived as a kind of special-interest theologian.
I wanted to avoid being expected to be an evangelical answer to the work of James Cone and other Black liberation theologians; I wanted to be known for much more than this. I also began my career with a commitment to avoid bringing up race because I wanted to avoid being “that person.”
Eventually I came to understand that it was actually very important for me to include questions of race in my own scholarship and teaching, where appropriate. It dawned on me that I was doing a disservice to my students and myself if I actively avoided these topics as part of my writing, speaking, and classroom discussions.
And there was this realization: How many students in all the American Christian colleges, Bible schools, and seminaries were likely to encounter a nonwhite theology professor? As a Wheaton College professor, I also cannot avoid questions about race and the evangelical movement. As I look over my years within the fabric of evangelicalism, I have observed developments both hopeful and distressing.
Strangely, two truths seem to be in great tension. The first is that more white evangelicals are aware of and willing to engage with questions of race and justice. The second is that within the last decade (perhaps longer), others have seemed to have a more pronounced resistance to addressing these matters, some stating that they want a colorblind unity, and still others have regarded discussion of race as part of a Marxist strategy (this is actually not a new accusation).
We are now in a time when many are convinced the evangelical movement is primarily a sociocultural movement that wants to claim allegiance to the Bible and Jesus. Many of us know people who have rejected the label because they do not find it to be truly a movement of “Bible Christians.”
I have seen much to lament, but I also know evangelicalism is a kind of Bible-centric ecumenical movement, which by definition comprises people from many traditions and commitments. When I think of it this way, it is hard for me to readily say it is mostly a political identity.
What does all this mean for Black evangelicals, including those who have rejected the label or never used it even though they, like me, have had significant engagement with evangelicalism?
As a result of these questions, I recently helped produce a documentary, Black + Evangelical, in tandem with my friend Ed Gilbreath and Christianity Today’s Big Tent Initiative. One reason I wanted to tell the story of Black evangelicals is because I wanted others like me to know their experience is not unique and because we can discern paths of faithfulness to God when we learn from others who have come before us and walk beside us. Their stories show us how to name and lament dark experiences while also striving toward lives of faithful discipleship.
It can be easy to look only at exasperating challenges, but we also have the exciting opportunity to see how others have been faithful. We can follow these examples and demonstrate that evangelicals can be truly Good News people.
Vincent Bacote is professor of theology at Wheaton College and director of the school’s Center for Applied Christian Ethics.
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