This question comes up in an era of so many leaving the American church. There are quite a few stories of why many left. There are also stories of why people stayed.

The Holy Post Podcast is bringing out a series with folks who have been vilified by the white evangelical church … and yet they still follow Jesus. Why?

This podcast is an interview with Lecrae and worth your time.

This column by Esau McCaulley, along with his new book, How Far to the Promised Land?, deals more deeply with the lifelong struggle of one black man deeply committed to Christ and battling white evangelicals who want to write him off.

I’ve just started Esau’s book and it is beautiful writing. He dealt with poverty and an absentee father, but the book shows life is far more complicated than just the spare details.

These two paragraphs from Esau’s column are powerful:

I came to see that the rightness of Christianity, despite the evil done in its name, was not first posed during my strolls around campus or email exchanges with high school friends at different universities. It occurred a century before on the Bone plantation. I believe that my ancestors wrestled with the questions of faith when the evil was not literary or historical, but a material thing of flesh and blood. How did they manage to see goodness in this religion?

I think that for them, the Black church did not just provide an answer. It was the answer. In a world that proclaimed that the enslaver was lord of all, the idea that something more mighty ordered the tide of events that swept up their lives was the hope needed to survive the day. What if belief in the unrelenting love of God combined with trust in with his power to bend history was not a tool to make chains but to break them?

Why have so many stayed as believers? There are those still following Christ who could easily push the matter aside and blame how they were treated, or how they saw others treated. But, somehow, the realization comes, like with Esau, something else is there. More importantly, someone ELSE is there. It is finding Jesus and clinging to him.

For so many, we may simply say, “Where else can we go? He alone has the words of life!”