The Future of the Black Church Rests in Its Ability to Evolve

“THE FUTURE IS Black!” is a clarion cry at the entrance to “Mothership: Voyage into Afrofuturism,” an exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California. Its placement is a prickly reminder of the indomitable persistence of Black lives, and affirmation that in the imagined future they will not only matter but be present, alive, and thriving. This declaration of an imagined future of thriving Black lives must be thrust also into the importance of the Black Church and Black faith.

Much ink has been spilled on the misnomer that “God is dead”—with a caveat that the Black Church is dying—by scholars and practitioners alike. But, the monolithic nature of the Black Church has long been dispelled by prolific sociologists of religion such as W.E.B. Du Bois, C. Eric Lincoln, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, and Anthea Butler, to name only a few. While the debate of the status of the Black Church rages on, the lived reality of the Black Church is that it is very much engaged and transforming as an institution in America and around the globe.

The future of the Black Church rests in its ability to evolve and meet the growing needs of the communities it serves. It will require not only attention in times of political and social upheaval but also attending to the necessity of joy and to a salvific, life-giving acceptance of adherents as whole human beings. The latter has proven a challenge for churches that impart patriarchal misogynoir onto believers who come to them for hope and salvation, only to find ecclesiastical hurt in the name of the God of their ancestors. These are two prongs of struggle for transformation within the church life that are not new.

Nonetheless, in a world with ongoing crises and ravaged by multiple pandemics, the call remains that the “Future of the Church Is Black!” What Americans, particularly African Americans, know is that the Black Church will be different—and cannot help but be—as the world changes around it.

Churches that learn from the past and build toward a vision that is life-giving rather than death-dealing will thrive as interlocutors in the lives of those hungry not merely to mark their Blackness but to mark all of who they are in their human sacred lives. This approach is what theologian Prathia Hall called a “Sankofa ethic,” in which Black people of faith walk and live in such a way to remember their past, through occasions such as Black History Month or other cultural markers, but also never cease moving forward toward personal and institutional growth that builds upon a legacy that affirms Black humanity.

In short, to the degree that the Black Church cultivates Black joy and evolves as a place and space of transformative hope that embraces the full humanity of individuals, it will live into a future as an institution. It will then be a life-giving liminal space where it not only saves souls, but provides new imagined Black alternative futures for the souls it serves.