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How might we imagine the Christian faith differently in this anxious age? Not as a relic kept behind glass, nor as a cudgel we swing at our enemies, but as a living inheritance: a faith old enough to have buried every empire that mocked it, and young enough to make us new. I have spent my life inside that conviction, and I have no intention of surrendering it now.

Let me be honest with you, because honesty is where trust begins. The tumult of the last decade has often left me weary. I have watched a church I love grow restless with the very truths that made her, trading her birthright for a seat at the table of power. I have watch the secular worldview of the Enlightenment Era infiltrate and seduce the church away from her first love. I have watched the sacred reduced to a brand, faith sold like any other product to consumers taught to want it. And I have felt, in my own bones, the pull of a cynicism that whispers the old words no longer work.

The Apostle Paul saw our moment coming. He warned that a time would arrive when people “will not endure sound doctrine,” when, “wanting to have their ears tickled,” they would gather teachers to tell them only what they longed to hear (2 Timothy 4:3). We are living in that time. Deconstruction is mistaken for wisdom, novelty for insight, and the loudest voice for the truest one. A historian would recognize the pattern. The American church stands today where the imperial church once stood, tempted to confuse the gospel of a crucified Galilean with the machinery of empire.

But I was formed in the Black Baptist church, and that tradition does not permit an easy despair. It gave me a gospel-soaked hope, the kind that learned to sing in a minor key and still call it praise. My fathers in the faith, the late Rev. Dr. C.A.W. Clark Sr., and Rev. Dr. E.K. Bailey, preached to people who had every earthly reason to quit and refused to. So I dare to believe the ancient words still work. Through the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord once told a fracturing people exactly what to do: “ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it” (Jeremiah 6:16). As a thought leader and public theologian, Reclaiming Orthodoxy is my attempt to walk that path in public, and to invite you to walk it with me.

Here is what I hope we will do together. I want to probe, in essays and the occasional video an unhurried conversation, the choices and forces that brought the church to this moment. I want to recover the faith “once for all handed down to the saints” (Jude 3), not as nostalgia, but as a summons and a rule of life. I want to build a community of inquiry that refuses our lazy divisions: the scholar and the saint in the pew, the skeptic and the believer, the pulpit and the seminary, seated at one table and asking together what a faithful future will actually require of us.

I intend to bring my whole self to that table. Christian and biblical student. Teacher and writer. A son of the Black church, a husband, and a father. I do not come as a man who has it all resolved. I come as one still working out his own salvation, willing to be vulnerable on the page, to earn your trust slowly, in love.

We will draw first on Scripture, read closely and honestly, and then on the deep wells the Spirit has given the church across the centuries: the creeds and councils, the Rule of Faith, the Fathers and the reformers, and the singers and sufferers of the Black tradition. We will read history and literature and culture, in conversation with minds like Esau McCaulley, Vince Bantu, N.T. Wright, and D.A. Carson. We will engage the mind of the pulpit with the likes of Gardner C. Taylor, Eric Mason, Tony Evans, and Martin Luther King, Jr. From time to time, we will engage the intellectual insights of a wounded seer like James Baldwin who named our sins more plainly than we wished. We will consider how the gospel shaped the lives of great Christian activist such as Fredrick Douglas, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Fannie Lou Hamer. We will wrestle with the ghosts of the past and the burdens of the present, our eyes fixed on something steadier than our anxieties. For “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8), and that is the ground I mean to stand on.

Most of what we make here will be free and open to all, because I am trying to build what I might call a community of the faithful: a fellowship of the curious and the committed, of the certain and the still-searching. Opinion pieces, long-form essays, teaching, and archival work will remain available to anyone who wants them. For those who wish to walk more closely, there will be room to go deeper, to read together, and to talk in real time about the questions our moment presses on us. However you come, the aim never changes. It is not content. It is communion.

This is the mission I preach and the one I mean to live: to love God, to live with purpose, and to lead others to do the same. If that stirs something in you, you may already belong here. Come, let us ask for the ancient paths, and discover that they still lead us home.

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