I want to speak directly to my white friends, white Christians and especially white clergy colleagues during Black History Month. I’m writing to you not as an adversary or a critic, but as someone who has prayed with you, eaten at your table, preached beside you, stood at your sacred desk, trusted you and grown to love you.
Black History Month is not a cultural add-on to the church calendar. It is not a sermon illustration. It is not a mission moment. It is not a diversity slide before returning to church as normal.
Braxton Wade
Black History Month is an invitation to remember — and to ask what remembering asks of us here and now, today.
For many Black Christians, history is not something we visit once a year. It is something we carry in our bodies. It is stitched into the fabric of our worship, our grief, our joy, our pain, our tears, our theology. It is present in the songs we sing, the way we preach and pray, the Scriptures we cling to and the way we hope, even when the world continues to try to take our hope away.
For many white Christians, history has been considered something of the past — disconnected from the present, untethered from accountability or responsibility. However, the gospel does not permit us to remain at a distance.
Not long ago, a white colleague — someone thoughtful, well-meaning, someone I respect — asked me a question I’ve been asked more times than I can count, “Why do you still choose to work in predominantly white churches?”
It wasn’t hostile; it was curious, maybe even admiring. And still, it made my chest tight.
Because the truth is, it has been hard. I have wrestled with my call — this call to the white church. I have felt the strain of being welcomed and misunderstood at the same time, the loneliness of loving a church that does not always know how to love me back.
There was a season when I walked away — from my call, from the white church, angry and hurt from believing things could be different.
And yet, even then, I could not escape the quiet truth beneath the anger: I still believed God had called me here. Not because these spaces are easy. Not because they are neutral. But because this is where God has called me to bear witness.
“When your people have been enslaved, you do not read the story of Pharaoh as a metaphor.”
Many Black Christians always have known something this country — and often the white church — struggled to understand: God is often encountered in the heart long before God is explained in the head. Before theology was systematized, God was felt. Before we went looking for God, God had been waiting for us. Before freedom was legal, God was real.
That is why Exodus never has been abstract for us. When your people have been enslaved, you do not read the story of Pharaoh as a metaphor; you read it as memory.
Exodus teaches us God hears cries before God gives commandments. Liberation comes before law. Freedom comes before order. And again and again, God commands the people to remember — because like the Israelites, God knows what we are capable of forgetting once we are safe.
According to Scripture, forgetting is not a neutral act but rather a mechanism that sustains injustice and causes God’s people to confuse comfort with faithfulness. For many Black Christians, forgetting is impossible, as history is immediate, shaping our worship, preaching, songs and hope.
For many white Christians, forgetting often has been easier or even encouraged. History is framed as “the past.” However, Black History Month is not about dragging up the past. It is about telling the truth about the present.
Here is what I know to be true: When the church is faithful to remembering, God does God’s best work. Not when we push past the pain. Not when we sanitize the story. But when we sit honestly in the hurt and the heartache — when we refuse to forget Exodus. When the church remembers, God shows up, and when God shows up, God reminds God’s people that God is faithful.
“Black History Month is about telling the truth about the present.”
A few years ago, during MLK weekend, I chaperoned a youth retreat with a dear friend — not because I was eager, but because I didn’t yet know how to say no to everything.
The proclaimer that weekend was Timothy Peoples, a Black pastor now serving as senior pastor at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas. Timothy preached like someone who remembered. He spoke truth to power without apology. He named pain without softening it. He trusted God without shrinking God. He hadn’t forgotten Exodus.
Somewhere between seeing the Black pastor live into his call and my hopelessness, something in me broke open. I remembered that El Roi — the God who sees — had seen me. I remembered that in Exodus, God tabernacled with God’s people. That moment sparked my journey back — back to my call, back to the wilderness, back to believing that remembering is not about nostalgia but about survival.
So hear this as an invitation to remember.
Black History Month is not asking you to say the “woke” thing or say the right thing. It is asking you to remember — not as spectators, but as people of faith shaped by a God who liberates all.
So dear friends, stay, listen, remember. Because forgetting is costly for black lives. And remembering is where God shows up again.
Braxton Wade is a Clemons Fellow with BNG. He is a graduate of the University of Richmond and Chicago Theological Seminary and lives in Richmond, Va.