a fresh expression mission stream

Black Church Initiative

A part of Fresh Expressions - Rooted in the Black Church’s legacy of faith, resilience, and community engagement.

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.


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.

Enslaved African Americans gathered inside a plantation church, many kneeling at the altar.

 Osborn & Durbec, enslaved congregation at Rockville Plantation church, Charleston, South Carolina, 1860. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-stereo-1s03923.

Richard Allen and other AME bishops, surrounded by images of AME institutions, education, publishing, and missions.

 Bishops of the A.M.E. Church, J.H. Daniels, circa 1876. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-pga-03643

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.”

A group of African American men and women gathered outside First African Church immediately following the Civil War.

 First African Church, Richmond, Virginia, 1865. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-cwpb-02904/02905

A storefront church embedded in the ordinary commercial life of a Black Chicago neighborhood.

 Edwin Rosskam, Storefront church and lunch wagon, Chicago, April 1941. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8a15868

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.

Civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., surrounded by marchers and signs.

 Warren K. Leffler, Civil rights march on Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, U.S. News & World Report Collection, LC-DIG-ppmsca-04297

People dance and gather during a Juneteenth celebration in Washington, D.C.


 Carol M. Highsmith, dancers and marchers at the Juneteenth Celebration on Black Lives Matter Plaza, Washington, D.C., 2020. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-highsm-63685

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

Join the 2027 Cohort

The 2027 pilot cohort will bring together a limited number of pastors and teams from historically Black churches for nine sessions from January through November. Most sessions will be held online on Thursdays, with an in-person gathering for pastors in Charlotte, North Carolina, sometime in May/June focused on spiritual formation. Together, participants move through four stages:


  1. Awaken (Jan – Mar).  Church teams awaken the need, reframe church, and reclaim mission.
  2. Renew (Apr – June). Pastors take an inward journey and gather in Charlotte to listen to God.
  3. Ignite (Jul – Sep). Teams cast vision, then experiment and prototype.
  4. Lead & Send (Oct – Nov). Pastors learn to lead change, and teams are commissioned to launch.


Note: Applications for January 2027 are closed, but we are curating a list of other interested congregations for the next cohort. 

Session times: to be announced.

“I’m excited about what God is going to do through this cohort. The Black Church has innovated under constant constraint. We built schools, banks, and freedom movements out of almost nothing. That same creative, Spirit-led imagination is what our congregations need right now. This initiative gives pastors and church teams the space to listen to God and to their neighborhoods, and to try new ways of being church together. My hope is that every congregation leaves this journey with a renewed vision and a real plan for joining God’s mission beyond its walls.”


— Rev. Dr. Kevin J. Griffin, Pastor, First. Mt. Calvary Baptist Church, Charlotte, NC

Stay Connected

Want to learn more, bring your church team, or hear about future cohorts? Sign up for updates from the Black Church Initiative.

Black Church Initiative

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