A Black Church only for Black People?

In the act of worship itself, the experience of liberation becomes a constituent of the community’s very being.

It was my deacon who asked the question first—and he asked it the way only a man from Mississippi could. As more and more white members joined our congregation over the years, he pulled me aside one day with a look that carried the weight of everything he had lived through. “Pastor,” he said, “are we going to remain a Black church?”

It was not a hostile …