Doug Cunningham and Bryan Loritts, two pastors from very different backgrounds, have spent decades navigating the complex intersection of faith, race, and justice within American Christianity. Their journeys—one chronicled in Cunningham’s memoir Beyond the White Church, the other in Loritts’ personal reflections and ministry—reveal the persistent challenges and quiet triumphs of those seeking to build more inclusive, justice-oriented churches in environments often resistant to change.
For Cunningham, the story begins at the Pacific School of Religion, where, as a white second-year student, he met Rebecca, a Deaconess from the Philippines. It was a love story, yes, but also the start of a deeper awakening. At PSR, Cunningham encountered the teachings of professors like Fr. Daniel Berrigan and the hard truths shared by classmates like Don Matthews, who bluntly told him, “As ethnic students, we’re constantly fighting racism…” According to the Asian Journal, this was a pivotal moment: Cunningham’s journey from obliviousness to awareness of his own white privilege had begun.
Rebecca’s return to the Philippines prompted Cunningham to pursue a three-year United Methodist Mission internship there. His immersion was intense and, at times, harrowing. He married Rebecca, experienced firsthand the stereotypes Filipinos held about Americans, and, in the waning days of the Marcos dictatorship, found himself swept up in a protest—complete with water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets. A visit to the Bataan Export Processing Zone opened his eyes to the exploitation of Filipino workers, many of whom shared beds in shifts and lived in crowded dormitories. These experiences, as described in Beyond the White Church, became the foundation for Cunningham’s lifelong commitment to social justice through faith.
Back in the United States, Cunningham’s ministry in predominantly white congregations was marked by resistance. His vision of a church “crossing boundaries of race, class, sexual orientation, gender and age” was often met with hesitation or outright opposition from white church leadership. Yet, undeterred, he founded New Day Church (NDC) in the Bronx—a congregation where, as the Asian Journal reports, “everyone is welcome and challenged to cross boundaries.” NDC’s radical inclusivity extended to sharing preaching duties, a role typically reserved for pastors, and to organizing around local issues. Their partnership with the Kingsbridge Redevelopment Alliance (KARA) led to a significant victory: the city revised its development plans for the Kingsbridge Armory to include living wage jobs, not just minimum wage positions.
While NDC thrived as a local model of inclusivity and activism, Cunningham found that reforming the broader United Methodist Church (UMC) was a far steeper climb. Efforts to sensitize the UMC to white privilege and racial inequity met with entrenched resistance, both from congregations and the church hierarchy. In 2020, the New York Annual Conference chapter of Black Methodists for Church Renewal released an open letter outlining steps to combat racism in the church. Yet, as Cunningham observed a few years later, “We are more concerned about the comfort of white moderates and conservatives than equity for Black pastors and churches.” He mourned “the dozens of creative, effective, and committed pastors who have left local church ministry because of this inequity and harm.”
Bryan Loritts’ journey, while rooted in a different tradition, echoes many of the same themes. When his son Jaden expressed a desire to become a pastor, Loritts advised him to spend his formative years in Black institutions. “The Black church had buttressed my own father and me when we felt lonely and frustrated in our ministry to white evangelicals,” Loritts wrote, reflecting on the challenges of being a Black minister in predominantly white spaces.
Loritts’ father, Crawford Loritts Jr., was deeply influenced by civil rights hero John Perkins and evangelist Tom Skinner, and co-founded a church with Tony Evans. Yet, even with such a legacy, Bryan Loritts has always felt uneasy with the label “Black evangelical.” As he explained, “The dividing line between white and Black evangelicals in America, after all, is their activism—or lack thereof—on racial justice issues.”
Historically, British evangelicals like William Wilberforce led the abolition of slavery and other social reforms, but in America, a split between fundamentalists and modernists left most white evangelicals disengaged from racial justice. The Black church, in contrast, maintained both orthodox faith and a commitment to social action. Over time, some Black believers entered predominantly white or multicultural churches, creating a new category of Black evangelicals—often outspoken on racial issues, but isolated from the support of historically Black institutions.
Loritts’ own experience at a predominantly white evangelical Bible college in 1992 was marked by silence after the acquittal of officers involved in the Rodney King beating. “Not a single thing was said, nor a prayer offered for King, his family, or the city at large,” he recalled. This mirrored his father’s experience decades earlier, after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The silence, then and now, speaks volumes.
By 2021, Loritts noted, racial division in the nation had only deepened. His father, upon retirement, confessed he had never seen the country so divided—a striking admission from a man who had lived through Jim Crow. Sociologists Korie Edwards and Rebecca Kim describe minority Christians in majority-white cultures as “estranged pioneers,” a term Loritts finds apt. He likens the experience to the biblical story of Jonah, called to minister to a hostile majority, and warns of the dangers of loneliness, frustration, and bitterness for those who serve cross-culturally without adequate support.
Loritts offers practical advice: Black evangelicals should seek institutions that fully embrace their identities, avoid bitterness, and speak truth prophetically but lovingly to white evangelicals. He cautions against measuring one’s Blackness by ministry context, referencing recent calls from Black Christians to leave evangelicalism as “a sad truth as old as the Book of Acts.” He stresses the importance of mentorship by Black Christians, regular “furloughs” in Black spaces to recharge, and economic empowerment to avoid dependence on institutions that might compromise justice for funding.
Both Cunningham and Loritts agree: the work is hard and often lonely, but faithfulness, not fruitfulness, is the true calling. Their stories challenge American Christianity to reckon with its past and present, to cross boundaries, and to build churches where justice and belonging are not just aspirations, but lived realities.
In the end, the journeys of Cunningham and Loritts offer hope—and a blueprint—for those who refuse to accept comfort at the expense of justice, and who believe that faith, at its best, means crossing boundaries to build something new.
