Chuck was spending a week at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Roman Catholic Trappist monastery located about an hour south of Louisville, Kentucky. The monastery was set on fifteen hundred acres of undeveloped land marked by trails hikers have carved over decades. Home to monks who live there year-round, the monastery opened itself to members of the public who wanted to participate in silent retreats. The visits were unstructured and self-guided, following Thomas Merton’s exhortation to “entertain silence in the heart and listen for the voice of God.” Every year, Chuck made a pilgrimage to the abbey to deepen his relationship with God and safeguard his ongoing commitment to recovery from his pornography addiction.
In the summer of 2017, his visit to the abbey coincided with a one-month sabbatical from Crossroads. He had been on staff for a decade, and the church gave people a special gift when they reached the milestone. Chuck asked for four weeks off. It had been an eventful ten years. Chuck had gone into recovery and successfully managed his addiction. He had become the lead pastor of the church’s largest and original campus, Oakley. He and Maria had three children and steadily nurtured their relationship. He had founded and launched Undivided during one of the most tumultuous election years in American history and had become part of a campaign that won universal preschool for poor Black children in his city.
As he anticipated his sabbatical, controversy over Tensing’s second trial persisted. A new trial date had been set for June, and a series of competing courtroom motions around the trial had dominated local news in the preceding months. Lawyers debated what evidence was admissible in the second trial, resulting in a ruling that prosecutors could not present the Confederate battle flag T-shirt Tensing wore at the time of the shooting. How, Chuck wondered, could Tensing’s views of Black men be irrelevant in the eyes of the law?
The Tensing controversy also forced Chuck to grapple with his own public leadership in trying to advance racial justice. During the 2016 campaign for Issue 44, Troy had asked Chuck to join the board of directors for the Amos Project. As a member of the board, Chuck had cosigned a letter from the Countdown to Conviction, a coalition of organizations across Cincinnati who joined forces to pressure the city to seek justice for Samuel DuBose. Step by step, Chuck was taking increasingly public stances, even controversial ones, on issues of racial justice.
He was simultaneously navigating the pressures of continuing to pastor the Oakley community at Crossroads, where controversies around the Tensing trial had become very pointed. Tensing was related to one of the eleven people who constituted the original founding team of the church. Tensing himself sometimes attended services at Oakley as unobtrusively as possible. The details of the church’s relationship to Tensing were not public at the time, and even most people in Undivided and the Justice Team did not know. But as campus pastor, Chuck knew.
Among Christian faith traditions, evangelicalism has always had a particularly strong focus on second chances. The controversy around Tensing and his actions, however, tested the limits of Chuck’s forgiveness. In America’s fight over who belongs, who deserves dignity, and who gets to decide, even the clergy responsible for shepherding our souls sometimes struggle. How do I hold the tension in that moment when I’m pastoring to both sides of this experience? he asked himself. But at the same time, what does it look like to be a voice for truth?
The Black church of his youth had always inculcated a strong sense of Black pride in Chuck, which came to fruition through his activities in college. Chuck had been president of the Black Student Union and worked to elevate Black voices on campus. He immersed himself in authors like Michael Eric Dyson, Carter G. Woodson, and a set of Black nationalist poets known as the Last Poets to deepen his understanding of Black intellectual traditions. All of those experiences formed the backdrop to his work with Undivided, and he was proud of the impact he thought they were having. Following Undivided’s success in 2016, Chuck didn’t want the response to Tensing’s second trial to be a moment when the church would “shrink back” from antiracism.
These tensions followed Chuck into his month-long sabbatical. He spent the first week at a Colorado retreat designed to provide respite for pastors experiencing burnout. Chuck wasn’t necessarily feeling burned out—he was buoyed by Undivided and the success of Issue 44—but he wanted to be proactive in his self-care. At the retreat center, he spent a couple of hours each morning with a counselor.
“Can you fully be who you are at Crossroads?” Chuck’s counselor asked him.
The question stayed with Chuck as he left Colorado and joined his family for two weeks of vacation in Florida. On June 23, 2017, the final day of his vacation, he drove home with Maria and their three kids from Florida to Ohio in the pouring rain. The radio news announced that the second Tensing trial had been declared a mistrial. This outcome came on the heels of a series of acquittals or mistrials of law enforcement officers involved in the fatal shooting of unarmed Black men around the country. Chuck and Maria were in shock.
“How is it possible that not a single one of them is guilty? How is it that in all of these cases—not most, not some, not fifty percent, but in one hundred percent of these cases—no officer ever gets found guilty?” Chuck sputtered with anger. He thought about his older half brother, Smitty, who had been the “enforcer” in their childhood neighborhood, feared and respected for his physical strength and quick temper. He had protected Chuck, who was nicknamed Little Smitty so that everyone knew they were related.
“You could be free,” his brother said to Chuck many years later, “because of what I did. You could see the other side of life.” Chuck thought about how vulnerable Smitty was to overpolicing. The failure of the second Tensing trial felt personal. Chuck knew he could not remain silent.
After returning to Ohio with his family, Chuck left for the final week of his sabbatical at the Kentucky abbey. He used the time to reflect on the trial, and on everything else that had been unfolding at Crossroads. What was God calling him to do in this moment? In times of indecision, Chuck always tried to lean into his relationship with God to discern insight. Now, he opened himself to the anger and frustration that he sometimes felt like he had to contain, including at Crossroads. He let himself scream and cry in the woods and viscerally experience the pain. Then he wondered what to do.
During the week, Chuck couldn’t help but notice what he perceived to be important coincidences. The monks at the abbey, and the guests they tended to draw, were almost all white. In that setting, Chuck was surprised to see a white person reading Michael Eric Dyson’s book Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America. In all the years Chuck had been coming to the abbey, he had never seen anybody read a book like that.
Later that week, again to his surprise, he saw another person from Crossroads, a white woman who was involved in the church’s student ministry. They could not talk to each other because of the silent retreat, but they nodded their hellos. As her time at the abbey concluded, this woman was allowed to speak, and she handed Chuck a small bottle of bubbles, like the ones children played with at birthday parties and picnics. She had spent the week reading a book about the concept of flow by theologian Richard Rohr. For her, the bubbles were a way to remember her flow. She told Chuck she thought God was asking her to give him bubbles so he could be in the flow, too. Interesting, Chuck thought. What flow is God asking me to join?
There was another Black person at the abbey that week, someone from Cincinnati Chuck knew through their involvement in Issue 44. Never having seen a Black person at the abbey before, Chuck was struck by the coincidence. At one point, Chuck went to the one room in the retreat center where people were allowed to talk. When he arrived, he saw that his Black friend and the gentleman who was reading Dyson’s book were both there. The three of them entered into a conversation about racial justice and the controversies around police shootings of unarmed Black men in America.
Evangelical Christians often interpret coincidences as signs from God. Chuck was no exception. God’s with me in my reflection on the Tensing trial, he concluded.
After years of tiptoeing around issues of race within the church, Chuck felt that instead of containing his anger, God was calling him to share it. When Chuck returned from sabbatical, he knew what he had to do. At Crossroads the next week, he was scheduled to deliver a Spark Talk, which were talks given by different members of the community to introduce and ignite new thinking. Crossroads integrated Spark Talks into weekly services during the summer instead of regular homilies, in an effort to stanch flagging summer attendance. By then, it had been two years since Chuck had delivered his first sermon about race, and more than a year since Undivided had begun. Chuck decided to use the Spark Talk as an opportunity to speak more forcefully about his anger over injustice.
“I knew that one of the things that I was not allowing myself to do was to be fully myself, to be at Crossroads and be angry,” Chuck recalled. “I was very, very afraid, quite frankly, of showing my anger. But I knew I had to let people into my heart as a Black man.”
Over three days, Chuck went through seven different drafts, incorporating feedback from his colleague Lynn, his older brother, and others. He thought carefully about what to say and how to say it.
Megachurches like Crossroads put a premium on the production value of the service, believing that more people would be drawn to Jesus if the services were more enjoyable. Leaders at Bill Hybels’s Willow Creek, for example, advised those who were to speak onstage how to cut their hair and where to buy their clothes. Often, speakers at Willow Creek texted pictures of themselves dressed up for services to obtain approval of their outfits before they went onstage. The attention to appearance was part of a broader effort to fit into an image of hipness the entire production sought to cultivate. Although, as Brian was careful to say, Crossroads was not a Willow clone, they maintained a similarly high production value for all their content.
Each Saturday, anyone scheduled to speak or perform onstage at Crossroads services participated in a rehearsal run by a professional production manager with a cue sheet scripted down to the minute. At one rehearsal, the producer opened by noting that they had sixty-seven minutes of content, but were aiming for seventy minutes of production. “Let’s get this right,” she said. Brian, who was preaching that weekend, was pacing around the auditorium before he had to go onstage. When it was his turn, he bounded onto the stage and began his sermon, preaching into the mostly empty auditorium. He told a story of “taking a whiz” behind a tree while visiting Israel. “I’m standing there thinking, ‘I wonder if Jesus peed on this tree?’ ” He paused for an anticipated chuckle, then worried aloud that he was speaking too long. “Keep going and we’ll fix it later,” the producer said. By the end of his rehearsal, Brian was about five minutes over. The production team huddled with the teaching team to identify places to cut.
Chuck did a full rehearsal of his Spark Talk. During the debrief, the producers first focused on the run of show. Chuck had originally been slated to speak between two other speakers—a woman who was to talk about her experience donating a kidney and a scientist who would talk about the relationship of faith and science, as well as his interest in model rockets. During the rehearsal, the producers decided to move Chuck to the end, to give the audience more time to sit with his message instead of moving quickly into a lighthearted discussion of model rocketry.
Then, one of the producers spoke up hesitantly. “Are you sure you want to be so…um…forceful?” she asked.
“How will that message land on Crossroads’ ears?” another producer asked.
“I am very thankful for your feedback,” Chuck said, “but this is the message I need to deliver. It needs to be said.”
On the day of the event, Chuck took the stage about an hour into the service. He wore jeans and a light blue collared knit shirt. He had a small goatee and was holding his notes on a small iPad. During his speech, he checked his notes more often than usual to make sure he stayed on script.
Chuck started the talk with an easy tone, reflecting on his sabbatical and joking. “I realized I had emotions that I had been muting for a long time,” he said. “See, I don’t know if you have a Black friend in your life, which, by the way, I highly recommend.” The audience laughed. Chuck paused and laughed with them. “But if you do, last week was probably a tough week for them,” he resumed. For the first time on the Crossroads main stage, Chuck admitted he was angry—angry that not a single conviction had emerged from all the police shootings of Black Americans. “I am angry about that. I am angry about that, and I think you should be disturbed by it, too.” The audience applauded.
“Given this, what am I left to conclude about the dignity of my humanity as a Black person in this country? Or the safety of my two sons when they become drivers in the state of Ohio?” He projected a picture of himself standing on a grassy hill with his two young sons. The evening sun lit Cincinnati’s skyline in the background, and Chuck stood behind his sons with his hands affectionately on their shoulders. His older son wore a button-down shirt with a bow tie, and his younger son, barely reaching above Chuck’s waist, wore a long-sleeved Henley with three buttons on top. Chuck and both boys smiled broadly into the camera, and Chuck’s younger son impishly scrunched his nose.
Chuck challenged his audience to consider their own complicity as white Christians. Chuck described a Black friend of his, who attended a megachurch like Crossroads, as someone who is “trusted, highly successful, and a mature follower of Jesus.” Then he read a text his friend had sent almost in its entirety. “The American Christian church has no answers for our divided nation. The God of the Bible has been reduced to a well-orchestrated marketing production designed to deliver comfort to itching ears.”
Chuck was using the text as a means of confessing his doubts about his ability to stay in a predominantly white church. “I don’t know if I can stay in a white evangelical space if my white brothers and sisters are not grieving with me in this moment.”
The room was silent.
Chuck grounded his grief in biblical interpretation, then concluded by challenging people to take an honest look at the church, and then an honest look at themselves. “Let’s be a church that is known for our love! There is a reason that most megachurches are predominantly one race or another. It is hard. But [at] Crossroads, we do hard things! Let’s be a church that is known for our love.” Chuck’s impassioned plea drew wide applause.
He ended with a prayer based on Psalm 86:11, where David prayed, “Put me together, one heart and mind; then, undivided, I’ll worship in joyful fear.”
This sermon, which people in Undivided referred to as “Chuck’s lament,” put the Undivided agenda more centrally on the Crossroads agenda. But it also caused immediate controversy. “Boy did I get blowback on that one,” Chuck remembered.
Many congregants approached Chuck after the service. Some Black people thanked him for expressing what was in their hearts. Five or six white people approached him to express their consternation about what he said. Assured in their righteousness, they peppered him with questions, believing they could present countervailing facts and arguments to undercut their pastor. They objected to Chuck showing pictures of his two young Black sons, arguing that it was a threatening image. Anthea Butler, a Black professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania, has argued that a commitment to racial subjugation has always been the singular factor that united white evangelicals. Chuck viscerally felt that truth when people perceived his young sons as a threat. How can those little boys seem threatening? he thought.
Several days later, Chuck received a call from the executive teaching pastor of Crossroads, his boss and, he surmised, the emissary of the Spiritual Board. Chuck was not privy to board discussions, but he guessed they had gotten pushback from influential voices in the church. “It’s power, right? I know they heard from wealthy, influential people who give disproportionately to the church.” He guessed that his boss was reaching out to him because of the opposition.
“Hey, Chuck, I’m just calling to check in. How are you feeling after the weekend?” his boss asked.
“I stand by what I said,” Chuck answered. “This [racism] is a problem. And it’s not right.” He referred to the Crossroads notion of the “seven hills we die on.” Those were the seven core tenets of the church, the first of which was authenticity. “How can I not say something?” Chuck asked. Chuck did not say this out loud, but was thinking, Look at my track record. My track record is not divisive. In 2016, you trusted me to come up with a message that was right for bridging within the church. That message didn’t offend you because it didn’t disagree with your worldview. But I don’t want to be ostracized now that I spoke a message that does—because, in fact, it does not disagree with Scripture. It’s like, if I come through with the “Can we all get along?” message, I’m getting pats on the back, you love me. But when I start to point to discriminatory systems and structures that need to change, then I’m like the prophets in the Old Testament. Chuck was thinking of biblical stories about prophets who spoke truth about God, only to be shunned by their communities for speaking out.
Habit pushed Chuck to hold those feelings inside, and his boss did not challenge him further.
“I get it,” Chuck recalled his boss saying. “I get your anger, I really do.” Chuck wondered if he did. “At the board level,” his boss continued, “the question is how do we navigate these tricky waters. We’re not going to do anything for the sake of not offending people, but we have to ask how we take people on a journey. How do we help people build understanding?”
The church did not ask Chuck to apologize or retract his words, but Chuck felt that the phone call was a sign that powerful leaders in the church would be closely watching what he did moving forward. Surveillance can sometimes constrain more than punishment. That’s how power works, you know? Chuck thought.
Five years later, Chuck reflected on his lament: “People saw me for who I was. And I survived it. It gave me the chance to say what I wanted to say in a way that made me feel more authentic. But I kept realizing how deeply emotional this was for white people to hear it. It was almost like, Ooh. I told them I was Black and they’re realizing I’m Black now. Now I’m not nice Chuck, I’m not your Pastor Chuck. Only, He’s Black. He might think like other Black people think.”
Chuck kept thinking about people’s reaction to the picture of his beloved boys. He realized that he had been avoiding a crucial question: How far was he willing to go to pursue antiracism? What would he give up?