14 Primary Focuses
A Strategic Vision for the African-American Church in the 21st Century
These fourteen focuses are not fourteen programs competing for calendar space. They are fourteen dimensions of a single, integrated vision — a church that is Fearless in its identity, Intentional in its formation, and Transformational in its impact.
Exalt
Exalt the Christ of the Scriptures
Everything we do begins and ends here: lifting high the person and supremacy of Jesus Christ as revealed in the whole counsel of Scripture. He is not a symbol or a slogan — He is the risen King, and our worship, preaching, and way of life exist to magnify Him alone. Because He promised it: when He is lifted up, He draws all people to Himself.
Explain
Explain Contextually the Scriptures
We are committed to the kind of biblical teaching that honors the text — its history, its grammar, its intention — and then brings it to bear on the specific complexities of 21st-century life. This is not inspiration-lite. It is the rigorous, faithful work of a people who know that the Word is not just motivational; it is formational. We teach the Bible so that people understand it, not merely feel it.
Engage
Engage the Church Community
We are not a crowd — we are a covenant community, purpose-planted and accountable to one another. This means creating a culture where the gathering is not optional and the fellowship is not superficial: authentic relationships, shared burdens, mutual accountability, and the kind of love that shows up before it is asked. The church is not the building we attend. It is the people we are becoming together.
Equip
Equip the Converted
Salvation is not the finish line — it is the starting gun. Every person who walks through our doors carries gifts, callings, and capacities that were not given for spectating. Our assignment is to identify those gifts, develop them intentionally, and deploy them in the specific places God has prepared. The bench is a holding area, not a destination. We are moving our people into the field.
Evangelize
Evangelize Communities and Countries
The Gospel is not a private possession — it is the most urgent public announcement in human history. We embrace our dual calling as salt and light: beginning in the neighborhoods God has stationed us in and extending to the ends of the earth. Evangelism is not a program we run; it is the posture of a people who know that hope, withheld, is not faithfulness — it is negligence.
Esteem
Esteem Our Culture
We celebrate the God-given beauty, resilience, creativity, and spiritual depth of African American culture — not in spite of the Gospel, but as an expression of it. We resist every effort to sever us from our history or diminish our identity, and we hold our culture accountable to biblical truth while honoring its unique gifts to the Body of Christ and the world. To be fearfully and wonderfully made includes every dimension of who we are.
Establish
Establish Continuity
A church that plans only for today abandons the people of tomorrow. We commit to the intentional, prayerful, and transparent work of leadership succession — ensuring that the mission God has given us outlasts the leaders He has used to carry it. This is the Moses-Joshua principle: faithful leaders identify and empower their successors before the transition, not after the crisis.
Enlist
Enlist Cooperative Partners
The Kingdom advances through covenant partnerships — with businesses, institutions, and organizations whose work aligns with community transformation and human flourishing. We follow the model of Lydia: faith and the marketplace are not enemies. They are allies. Our partnerships are not transactional arrangements; they are covenantal commitments built on shared values and mutual accountability.
Empower
Empower the Family
The Black family is not incidental to the mission of the church — it is its first and most urgent arena. We commit to forming families that are spiritually anchored, emotionally whole, financially building, and generationally purposeful: equipping fathers to lead, honoring mothers as the structural load-bearing presence of the household, and building children in identity and purpose. We will not allow economic pressure, cultural assault, or historical wound to write the final chapter of the Black family's story.
Educate
Educate and Advocate
The Black church was always a schoolhouse — a center of intellectual formation and community advocacy — and we reclaim that identity now. In a season when African American Studies are under attack, HBCU funding is threatened, and public schools are failing to form the whole child, we stand at the school door as mentors, advocates, and builders of educational pipelines. Wisdom begins with the fear of God, and the pursuit of it is non-negotiable for every family and community we touch.
Economize
Economic Empowerment
We reject both the prosperity gospel that reduces God to a vending machine and the poverty theology that baptizes suffering as virtue. We embrace instead the Deuteronomy 8:18 covenant: God gives the power to produce wealth, and that power is for covenant purposes — family budgets, community development, small business growth, and generational wealth transfer. What a people builds together, together they sustain.
Engage Politically
Engage the Political Sphere
The Black church has never confused silence with faithfulness — and neither will we. We reclaim the prophetic tradition that carried Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, and John Lewis into arenas where justice demanded a voice. We engage the political sphere not as partisans but as prophets, holding Micah 6:8 in one hand and Romans 13 in the other, speaking up for those the system has left behind.
Embrace Wholeness
Embrace Mental and Physical Wholeness
We break the silence. The African American community carries the specific weight of intergenerational trauma, chronic illness, and the physical toll of systemic stress — and the church has too often been the last place these realities were named. We commit to a culture of wholeness in which healing is not weakness but stewardship: treating body, soul, and spirit as covenant partners in the full, abundant life God declares possible through the Jubilee.
Establish a Covenant
Establish a Covenant of African American Churches
The next movement of God in Fort Wayne, Indiana will not be built by one church alone — it will be built by churches in covenant. We commit to the formal, accountable, and lasting pursuit of unity among the African American churches of this city: not a merger, not a committee, but a named covenant that says what you carry, I need — and what I carry, you need. Fort Wayne is our Jerusalem. We do not go to Samaria or the ends of the earth until we have first demonstrated what the Kingdom looks like when the churches of a single city choose covenant over competition.
"Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen."
Ephesians 3:20–21 (ESV)