Have you ever heard of Jehu Jones? Jehu Jones, was an emancipated slave from South Carolina, who came north to New York in 1832 to be ordained as the first Black Lutheran pastor, and settled in 1834 in Philadelphia where he started a Black Lutheran congregation.
Jones wasn’t the first Black Lutheran in America. That was a man named Emmanuel, baptized at what is now a Missouri Synod church in Manhattan, on Palm Sunday in 1669, nearly 355 years ago.
Then there is Daniel Alexander Payne, a free black, abolitionist preacher ordained in the New York Lutheran church.
Boston J. Drayton, ordained in the Lutheran church in South Carolina, was a Lutheran missionary to Liberia in 1845, rising to become the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Liberia.
In the post-reconstruction, Jim Crow era, Dr. Rosa Young, a Black teacher and missionary in rural Alabama, founded schools ultimately allied with the Lutheran church, and was the catalyst for the fastest growing Lutheran communities in America in the 1920’s, 29 black Lutheran congregations and 27 black Lutheran day schools in Wilcox County, Alabama, about 25 miles south of Selma.
The 20th Century saw other examples of great Black Lutheran leaders—Rev. Nelson Trout served an historically black Lutheran congregation in Compton, Community Lutheran, and became the first Black Lutheran bishop of an ELCA predecessor body. Also in LA, the Rev. Albert Starr became the director of the ELCA’s Multicultural Ministries for many years.
Chicago has been another center for Black Lutheranism. The Rev. Dr. James Echols became the first Black president of a Lutheran seminary when he was selected to lead the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago—he was president when I studied there for my M.Div, and later was my parishioner when I served there. Then there are the great black professors I had the privilege to study with while at LSTC, the Professors Pete Perry, and Richard Perry. A former student of LSTC and former colleague of mine, the Rev. Yehiel Currey, is now the first Black bishop of the Metro Chicago Synod. And then there is Lenny Duncan, the young, queer black pastor, scholar and writer—best known perhaps for his first book: Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US, who has shaken up the Lutheran church for nearly a decade, demanding “the church rise up, dust itself off, and take on forces of this world that act against God: whiteness, misogyny, nationalism, homophobia, and economic injustice.”
It is true: the ELCA remains the whitest denomination in the US. But we have a rich history thanks to the many Black leaders who have led and served, more often than not in challenging contexts, in Jesus’ name.
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