An Open Letter to the Black Church

How can we leverage Ai to get more prayers answered? Seeking the rage of the Black Christian for digital evangelism.

_{Our Lady of Regla. Harmonia Rosales. 2020}

I greet you in the name of Jesus, the most radical Jew in history. The Holy One of Israel, whom the world can not help but acknowledge for His transformative impact on humanity.

I am one of the millions of millennials struggling with my Christ walk. I write to you on behalf of confused, disappointed and disheartened young people all over the world who are seeking the fullness of God but not finding it in your temples.

First let me honor Pastors Festus and Anthonia Adeyeye of Abundant Life Christian Center. It is because of them that I still have a fervent belief in Christ. Though they have rarely seen me in the last six years, their messages have saved my life more times than I can count.

A proper introduction: best known as Lolade Siyonbola, you’re likely to recognize me if you google my name. You might have seen me on the news when I went viral in 2018 for sleeping on a Yale couch. My live-streamed videos of a “Karen” and four police officers harassing me was part of a heightened trend of racial profiling and was viewed millions of times, featured on CNN, Al-Jazeera and other platforms all over the world.

Since then I’ve graduated with my Masters from Yale, started a PhD in Sociology at Cambridge University, where I researched worldmaking through cultural production; and built a social enterprise to accelerate Black Liberation: NOIR Labs.

Many years prior, I was filled with the Holy Ghost — with evidence of speaking in tongues — at Pentecostal Tabernacle in Northwest Miami.

In desperation

It is my desperation for a pure, deep and thorough knowing of the True and Living God that has brought me here to you. I seek deep intimacy with a God that can Liberate Black people totally and permanently from the state in which we find ourselves. I need to believe THIS God exists. I must ask of the Black Church: is this the same God you seek?

The Resurrection. Third quarter of the 16th century. The Holy Monastery of Pantokrator, Mount Athos,Greece

I find myself utterly heartbroken that although the world is replete with temples claiming to do God’s work, the overwhelming majority of Black people remain afflicted by a combination of penury, sickness, incarceration, violence, isolation and depression.

It is devastating to look at the statistics on the experience of Black people throughout the world. A recent Yale study states that, in America alone, 80 million years worth of Black lives were lost between 1999 and 2020 due to racial violence. If you look at the endemic violence in Congo, Nigeria and across Africa, one could easily multiply this number by a hundred.

Consider the children orphaned by a system literally leaving them to beg for food to survive. Then consider representatives of the Church, living in luxury, silent on this suffering. Does this contrast not make you ill with rage and sadness? For many young people who have left the church, it certainly does.

Where do you stand?

As people of God, I want to believe that your response to the tragedy of Black suffering is to do everything in your power to bring sanctuary, salvation and hope to the maximum number of people across the globe.

The best of your ilk deliver messages on the power of Jesus so that lives may be saved, miracles may occur and fellowship may proliferate. You feed the poor and hungry. You clothe the naked. You go on missions to spread the Gospel. Many do truly transformative work. So why is it that our people are still disproportionately afflicted by endemic tragedy?

Could it be that there are not enough churches? Is this not your gospel? Is suffering of the oppressed not what Christ came to eliminate?

Or is it that these issues are not truly the priority of the modern day Church?

I struggle to accept the possibility that the Black Church is not consumed with the need to address these critical and urgent issues facing the majority of Black people. We once were. With tremendous results.

The Black Church in America was founded in response to the terror of chattel slavery. It was instrumental in ending that form of slavery as well as Jim Crow. The fundamental Black understanding of Christianity at that time dictated that they do so. As James Cone wrote,

“Black theology…proclaims the reality of the biblical God who is actively destroying everything that is against the manifestation of Black human dignity.”

I can’t seem to find any Black churches doing this today. Most address some of the personal challenges resulting from white supremacist pathology, but where are the Churches taking on the Spiritual and social warfare to totally heal Black bodies, minds and spirits at the highest level? I would love to serve in such a temple.

Cone also wrote that “religion unrelated to Black Liberation is irrelevant”. I write to you today in full and fervent agreement with this statement.

In an age where division, hatred and harm against Black people is at an all time high, how does religion get to exist outside of the urgent need for Liberation? Is it that we are drugged by incessant distraction? Or is it that funding from white supremacist institutions is subduing our ability to speak explicitly on the pulpit about the state of the Black race and those causing it?

WE NEED TO SEE YOUR RAGE.

Where is the rage of the Black Church in the face of the white conservatism sanctioning the social regression of this country? Where is the rage of the Black Church in response to racial terrorism perpetrated by KKK-infiltrated police forces?

We need to see your rage at the medical outcomes disproportionately costing Black lives. We need to see your rage that overturns the tables of the multinationals that have made your collective temple into a den of thieves.

We need to see that rage you have directed towards queerness and fornication and Ancestor worship targeting the very people and institutions who legislate, sanction and fund the psychological, medical and systemic terrorism of Black people across the globe.

How can we be expected to worship a God who looks the other way while we suffer at the hands of supremacist pathology?

Young people have overwhelmingly given up on the Church as a conduit for true social change. This can not possibly be Christ’s vision for us. Not the same Christ who faced down corrupt governments and religious leaders.

Don’t let “Faith Based Initiatives” be the reason God turns you away from heaven for allowing the proliferation of your people’s suffering.

We need to see your rage. Not necessarily your screaming and jumping. But your fervent passion for overturning the status quo–directed into the institution of systems that protect us, enlighten us, optimize our health; keeping us housed, fed, loved, and in communion.

Then we will feel properly protected by the Church. Then we will come back to your temples in droves. Then tithing won’t be an internal struggle, it’ll be the dues we pay to fund our collective Liberation.

We can not afford more loss

The Black Church faces peril, which can only do more harm to our people. I am of the belief that we desperately need the Church. But that must be a Church that truly serves our critical needs, with fervor; a Church that is not afraid to tackle the enemies of Black people head on.

We can not afford to have empty sanctuaries six days a week while graduates sleep under bridges. We can not afford to have billion dollar pastors and starving street children in the same cities. We have a saying in these activist streets, “eventually the poor will have nothing left to eat but the rich.”

The Church should be the place where the salve on the gaping sore between extreme wealth and extreme poverty is applied, ensuring that all of God’s people are with and not without.

Lauryn Hill said:

“The world is filled with way too many bright people for us to still have the problems we have. It’s going to be our shame that we don’t…invest with thought and consideration and care to solve the world’s problems…If we can do all these things we do digitally, technologically, economically, we can feed people, we can educate people…Poverty isn’t something that should even exist in this world at this point.

We have the answers. We have the technology. We have the wealth. We just have to be willing to share it. It just takes courageous folks who are not afraid to see the New World that’s on the horizon.”

Thinking Deeply

How can we invest in systems that make humans feel more seen, accepted, supported in the pursuit of their spiritual and life goals? How can we leverage Ai to ensure that more people get their prayers answered? How can we use brainwave technology to accelerate mastery of the scriptures, cultivating true holiness? How can we utilize nano-teaching to eliminate preventable disease in our communities? How can we use data to track the direct impact of individual ministries?

There are hordes of advantageous scientific and historical data that the Church has collectively chosen to ignore. This flies in the face of the message of the Gospel, costing uncountable lives and true salvation. The Church can either listen to young people and apply our thinking or become obsolete to the younger generations.

If the Holy Spirit truly dwells within you then I trust that you will receive this message well. If you are not already doing the radical work of truly Liberating Black people from within, I pray that God will give you the courage to do so.

The salvation of the planet depends on it.

I refuse to accept that you fear evil governments. Not when you serve the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. Besides, you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you.

I love you and want to see you thrive. Happy to talk more.

Let’s heal for real,

Olori Lolade

This piece benefited from significant editorial contributions from Yetunde Olowosoyo, my 14-yr-old daughter.

PS. If you need resources on accelerating this process, here are a few:

Resources

Portal X, a system for operationalizing the Liberation of Black people from within, at scale. Use it to track and exponentially grow your church’s impact.

Abundant Life Christian Center, a church with a message that truly produces rapid manifestations in members’ lives.

James Cone, who taught on the radical origins of the Black American Church.

Yahki Raphael, who teaches Black people how to truly heal ourselves through food wellness.

Myron Golden, who teaches us how to profit from our God-given genius and permanently escape poverty.

Dante Fortson, who teaches on the historic origins of Christ, the Bible, the Israelites.

Bankole Williams, who teaches on quantum mechanic theory in the Bible.

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