a fresh expression mission stream

Black Church Initiative

The Black Church has consistently innovated under constraint!


Rooted in a legacy of faith, resilience, and community leadership, we help pastors and church teams discover new ways to join God's mission in their local communities.

What is the Black Church Initiative?

The Black Church has innovated under constant constraint! The Fresh Expressions Black Church Initiative seeks to walk with pastors and church teams as they seek to join God’s mission in new ways. The initiative builds on the Black Church’s long tradition of faith, resilience, and community leadership, while also helping congregations explore new kinds of Christian community.


A fresh expression is a new form of church for people who aren’t yet part of one. It grows up in everyday places like a kitchen table, a barbershop, a park, or a community center. The Black Church Initiative helps congregations start these new communities from their own gift and culture, alongside the life of  the existing church, not in place of it.


Our Purpose
  • Connect Black pastors and church teams with one another, and with the wider Fresh Expressions movement, so no leader innovates alone.
  • Equip congregations with practical tools to listen to their neighborhoods, discern a vision, and test new forms of Christian community.
  • Renew the leaders who carry the weight of ministry through soul care, spiritual formation, and sabbath rhythms.
  • Send teams into their communities to launch fresh expressions that carry the Black Church’s witness to a new generation.

A Legacy of Holy Innovation

 Fresh expressions of church are not new to the Black Church. For over two centuries, Black Christians have made a way out of no way. When doors were closed, they created new forms of faithful community that fit the needs of their day.

SLAVERY

CHURCH IN THE HUSH HARBORS


Enslaved Africans were often barred from worshiping freely, so they gathered in secret in woods, ravines, and brush arbors. Historians call this hidden network of worship the “invisible institution.” There they prayed, sang spirituals, and heard the Exodus story as a promise of freedom. It may have been the first fresh expression of the Black Church: church without a building, led by the people, in the places where they already were.


LATE 1700s - 1800s

walking out and building new


In Philadelphia, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and other Black worshipers walked out of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church after church officials pulled Jones from his knees during prayer. Rather than accept exclusion, they built something new. Allen founded Bethel Church in 1794, and in 1816 the African Methodist Episcopal Church became one of the first independent Black denominations in the United States. Allen also authorized Jarena Lee to preach, and she became one of the earliest women preachers in the AME tradition.

EMANCIPATION & RECONSTRUCTION

A NATION WITHIN A NATION


After the Civil War, independent Black churches spread quickly across the South. Congregations founded schools and colleges, organized mutual aid, and trained leaders for public life. The church met the social, educational, financial, cultural, and political needs of its people. Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier later described the Black Church as “a nation within a nation.”

THE GREAT MIGRATION

STOREFRONTS AND NEW NEIGHBORHOODS


As millions of Black Southerners moved to cities in the North and West, the church moved with them. Storefront congregations appeared in rented shops and living rooms, offering belonging, familiar worship, and practical help to newcomers in unfamiliar places. The church reinvented itself to meet people where they had landed.

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
SANCTUARIES OF FREEDOM

Black churches became mass-meeting halls, training grounds for nonviolent protest, and the organizing backbone of the movement, from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the marches that followed. Pastors, deacons, church mothers, and choirs gave the struggle its leaders, its courage, and its songs.

TODAY
THE NEXT CHAPTER

The Black Church remains a moral voice and a spiritual home. It also faces real challenges: changing neighborhoods, younger generations who are spiritual but not connected to a congregation, and pastors stretched thin. The Black Church Initiative starts from a simple conviction. The same Spirit who moved in the hush harbors is still making a way. The next fresh expression may start in your fellowship hall, at your block party, or around a neighbor’s table.

Historical context adapted from Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song (Penguin Press, 2021), and the companion PBS series.

What Makes the Black Church Initiative Unique

Rooted, not borrowed.

We begin with the Black Church’s own gifts: preaching, music, hospitality, prophetic witness, and deep community ties. We don’t import a model from somewhere else.

Pastors and teams together.

Church teams learn and experiment together while pastors get dedicated sessions for their own growth. Change is shared, not carried by one leader.

Soul care for leaders.

Healthy mission flows from healthy leaders. The journey includes inner healing, identity, and spiritual formation, including an in-person gathering for pastors.

Try it, then scale it. Teams learn to prototype: start small, listen, learn quickly, and build on what works. Innovation feels possible, not risky.

Community-shaped.

Every fresh expression is designed with and for a specific neighborhood, network, or group of people the church is called to reach.

What Could a Fresh Expression Look Like?

Every fresh expression is unique to its community. Here are a few ideas congregations might explore:

  • A Sunday-dinner church that gathers neighbors around a shared meal, Scripture, and prayer
  • A barbershop or beauty-salon conversation about faith and life
  • A gospel-music or spoken-word gathering for young adults
  • A cookout church or block party that becomes a regular community of faith
  • A community garden, wellness walk, or financial-literacy circle rooted in prayer and discipleship
Who It's For

  • Pastors who sense God calling their church into something new and want a community of peers for the journey
  • Church teams (lay leaders, ministry leaders, and emerging leaders) ready to dream and experiment together
  • Congregations in transition, facing changing neighborhoods, aging membership, or a desire to reach the next generation
  • Denominational and judicatory leaders who want to support vitality and innovation in Black congregations