Bill Pannell Helped Me Leave My White Christianity Behind

This article originally appeared on God’s Politics.

Bill Pannell passed away on Friday, October 11th at the age of 95. Bill Pannell touched the lives of countless legions of others, including me, when I was a teenager in Detroit, Michigan, where he was a pastor and leader in my hometown Black Church.

Just three weeks before his death, Fuller Theological Seminary premiered a new documentary about the life of Bill Pannell. I strongly encourage anyone who cares about the gospel of Jesus Christ to watch this remarkable story of a black evangelist from America.

Bill loved Jesus, and his son Peter told me that he could hear his father talking to Jesus all day long in the home hospice, right up until he lay down in bed and could no longer speak. Bill Pannell was the first black trustee of Fuller’s board, the first black faculty member at this global seminary, dean of Fuller Chapel for about ten years, and he inspired the William E. Pannell Center for Black Church Studies, which continues its work. today in Fuller.

Bill Pannell was evangelical in the truest and best sense of the word. He fervently believed that humanity must be reconciled with God. And to each other. But he was Black evangelistwhich were and are still so different from white evangelicals in America. And this was crucial in this disciple’s pilgrimage, which is now documented for us. Throughout his life and ministry, he was an evangelist bringing people to Christ, but he never left race aside from the gospel message, as almost all the white evangelists around him did. White evangelicals, he said, “slept through the civil rights movement,” the most important Christian movement of our time. White evangelicals have chosen to ignore racism because it is easy to do when you are the race in charge of society.

As a white kid growing up in Detroit, I couldn’t understand it either. How could the white Christians around me refuse to acknowledge the racism that was the most recognizable thing happening in my city, country, and church when I was growing up. How could they just leave that out of their message? They taught me to sing a song… “All the children of the world. red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Jesus may have loved, but the white Christians around me clearly did not love the black children around them. And they never talked about it or answered my obvious questions.

My search for these questions led me to Bill Pannell. People always loved Bill Pannell’s big, easy smile, and I remember his smile when I asked him many questions after hearing him deliver a message that seemed to me like what the Gospel of Jesus should have been, but was not. my white world or church. Bill always wanted to bring world into your message of Christ and not just ignore the world by telling people how they can leave the world and go to heaven. It was impossible to escape from the world while listening to Bill Pannell preach or not hear how the gospel would change the world. In 1968 he wrote a book called My friend, enemy this became a defining reality for me as a young white man growing up in a world where white Christians were a problem. The title of Bill’s book still stands out to me as an old man, as does the title of one of my other mentors’ books, written by a white man named William Stringfellow, who was called My people are the enemy.

I used to joke to Bill that he was the first Christian I had ever met who read regularly New York Review of Booksone of the most scientific publications of our time. Bill was always a scientist, always a student, always connecting the good news of Jesus to the real world people lived in – especially those outsiders who felt the same way as he did – a black man left outside the church by his white brothers and sisters inside churches. church. He confirmed for me that this was the biggest problem, the biggest problem, the biggest mistake of the American churches. And he became an elder for me for the rest of my life.

Even more ironic and significant is that Bill Pannell was the leader of the Black Plymouth Brethren churches in Detroit, the same churches I came from! When I asked my church why they never told me about the black churches in our town, I had no idea that just a few miles away there were actually Black Plymouth Brethren churches that we had never visited or even heard of about them. Bill continued to smile to all my questions.

Bill Pannell continued to work with Youth for Christ before leaving them to work with a Harlem evangelist named Tom Skinner. Pannell’s documentary includes a powerful section on the famous keynote message that Skinner preached to thousands of young people at the annual conference of Intercollegiate University in Urbana, Illinois, in 1970, telling them that the true gospel message sets people free both spiritually and physically. So instead of just wanting to go to heaven, they needed to live and practice the Gospel of the Kingdom of God “on earth as it is in heaven,” which is what the Lord’s Prayer calls us to do, and where the “message of Jesus” sets captives free and sets the oppressed free ” A thunderous ovation followed from the crowd of mostly white students joining the black students.

But what followed was a slew of white evangelical critics attacking Skinner and Pannell for being “too political.” We started Temporary around the same time and with the same message. To this day, when you talk about racism and poverty, you are called too political – but unfortunately, the highly politicized message of White Christian Nationalism in support of Donald Trump is, in fact, majority white evangelicals, this is not a problem.

I remember an elder from my white Plymouth Brethren church taking me aside at the time, worrying about all my trips to the “inner city,” working with black men, and listening to black preachers. He felt he had to tell me, “Son, Christianity has nothing to do with racism. This is a political issue, but our faith is personal.” This was the moment I left my white Christianity and joined the secular student movements of my time against racism, poverty and war. Because if the religion that raised me had nothing to do with what was now turning my life upside down, then I wanted nothing to do with it. But I never got rid of Jesus, and the lives and witness of black Christians like Bill Pannell and many others eventually helped me return to faith.

I recall many conversations and meetings with Bill Pannell over the years, including my last visit with him just a few months ago in Pasadena. In 1973, we were appointed as the final two editors of the historic Chicago Declaration on Evangelical Social Concern on the night before the final day of a unique conference of young and old evangelical leaders coming together and releasing a statement that would be difficult to recognize as “…evangelical” today. Bill and I also talked about this election and how awkward white evangelical politics had become, as he put it, “more and more American and less and less Christian.”

His son Peter also told me how when the hospice workers came to care for his father at home, they told Bill, “I know you, we came here to take care of your wife Hazel (Bill’s beloved wife of nearly seventy years), and you loved so much us. It’s so nice to be back and be with you now.” That’s what Bill Pannell always did: try to love everyone around him because that’s what he thought Jesus would do.

Bill ends the documentary about his life with the word “honesty.” It was a word that defined his entire life, and he wanted it to be his legacy. White evangelicalism in America has lost its integrity. But the integrity of the gospel was what Bill Pannell was faithful to, while most of his white brothers and sisters were simply missing too much of what was at the core of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Many people now have a deep fear of how white American evangelicals are bringing a spirit of fear and hatred into our world and politics. But Bill Pannell learned long ago that God “so loved the world” enough to bring Jesus into it, and whose message he sought to follow. I think in this day and age he would advise all of us to simply show our integrity by honestly living the gospel of Jesus no matter what is going on around us. This is what Bill Pannell tried to do with his life.

That’s why I recommend you watch this incredible documentary right now. You will learn more about Jesus. To many of us, he was a prophet of God, but to his family and all those close to him, he was simply a wonderful man, husband, father, grandfather, friend and teacher who always had a smile on your face. Bill Pannell will always be an elder to me. May his soul rest in peace, but ours continues to be activated and nourished by his spirit of simply following Jesus.