Rediscovering Early African Christianity | Courageous Conversations '21

what's up everybody this is lisa fields the founder and president of the g-3 project and you're about to watch a conversation from courageous conversations 2021 however before we get into that i want to cordially invite you to courageous conversations 2022 the theme this year is the scholar and the skeptic we're back in washington dc at national community church with seven amazing conversations conversations like is there a god should we trust the bible is christianity a white man's religion does christianity oppress women is christianity homophobic and transphobic should we be spiritual or religious is christianity bad

for our mental health we want to give you a blueprint on how to have courageous conversations with gentleness and respect remember we sold out last time so make sure you register early and get your ticket now if you can't join us in person you have the virtual option as well register today at courageousconvo.org [Music] our next conversation is rediscovering early african christianity now if you've been following jude 3 for any amount of time you know that we're heavy on introducing people to the rich history of early african christian history and we want people to rediscover

it to not look at the whitewashed christian history you may have been taught in seminary but to look at the rich history of early african christianity we have four amazing panelists to help us with this conversation dr vince bontu dr david daniels dr esau macaulay and also dr alan waller today's panel will be moderated by jerome gang i hope you enjoyed this conversation well good afternoon good afternoon good afternoon uh to everyone here and to our virtual audience we are excited about this conference reclaiming christianity before we dive into the panel i want to give

you another reminder about being able to uh text in your questions using the qr code or the link go to www.pigeonhole.at and use the code cc21 that code again is cc21 we're going to dive right in because this is a very important topic because it has evangelistic effects when we think about how africa is either whitewashed or ignored as it relates to the rich african history of christianity long before the transatlantic slave trade uh so uh dr bantu i want to start with you you wrote a book called gospel hemano and in it you said

ethiopian theological literature as the concept of right or orthodox theology was of utmost importance to ancient christians of the african continent i want all of you to take a stab at it but i want to start with you dr bantu why is it important to rediscover early african christianity yeah that's that's a great question pastor gay i mean i would say just to jump it off that um it's important maybe for for two reasons number one because god made us black on purpose and he made all of us the way he made us intentionally so

sometimes we might think that racial or ethnic or cultural distinctions are some kind of just temporary reality and i think sometimes we subconsciously think that when we get to heaven we're all just going to be the same or but when john looked up he saw every nation tribe and tongue and so our diversity in the creation mandate god said fill the earth and cultivate it and so he intended for diversity and that includes blackness so it's a beautiful thing and it should be celebrated and known but the second reason is because specifically black people black

history black civilizations have been specifically targeted and especially within christianity christianity has even been perverted and weaponized against to terrorize black people so it's even more important in the writing of paul in first corinthians 12 to give greater honor to the parts of the body that have lacked it and to especially emphasize the contributions that africans have made in christianity since day one awesome dr mcconnell um hello oh i think that um on a basic level it's always important to counter a lie with the truth absolutely and there's a lot of people who are served

by making the history of christianity white and if you grow up at least what i did in a black context there's always been kind of like the black nationalist tradition in christianity the secular national tradition that it said well you became a christian just because of the slave trade and there are no the history of blackness in africa was uh was muslim or is not christian and so i just want to say sometimes we have to be honest about what we're going to recover so if part of what's happening in our day is a recovery

of the history of africa and we want to kind of adopt this pan-africanism well i said if you're going to go with pan-africanism and adopt the history of christianity i mean adopt the history of africa as a part of recovering black culture in america then you got to recover the christian part too and so you can't just if you're going to take egypt you got to take christian egypt and so what i want to say is the first thing you got to do is to tell the truth about what happened that doesn't solve all the

problems but that's that's one thing so it's important to recover it for the sake of a realistic reckoning of what does it mean to recover my african heritage because as far back as you can go there's some black guy yelling crisis wizard um and this is just true so on but on the other side um a lot of times the discourse especially in some way i'll say some some people won't say i said all some white christian spaces um there's this idea that they're when they talk about diversity they're inviting the people of color in

like it's theirs but like they're not inviting us in we were here too and so the important part is to say i'm not being invited to a party that you threw jesus through the party and we were always eating at the table from the beginning so both as it relates to dealing with kind of black nationalism that caused christianity a whitewashed religion and to look at white portions of christianity they want to pretend as if we could only be invited if we meet their standards and we had to say no y'all don't get to set

the standards god set those standards and that's the reason why i think it's important to recover all about history yeah that's so important um we know that martin luther a lot of times we start church history at the reformation in wittenberg but there were centuries of african christianity that preceded the protestant reformation in fact luther got a lot of his theology from ethiopian christians but they don't teach us that uh dr waller as a pastor of a large church and just understand evangelism can you expound on this why is it important to rediscover early african

christianity well again thank you for letting me be a part of this conversation and i agree with my brother first of all because it's the truth and just telling the truth about our faith is important to to recover our faith and to help our community embrace the faith then secondly it's important because we normalize the conversation and not trivialize the conversation i'm a little older up here and so you know when when the when those that are just a little older than i am came back in the late 60s to the church saying we've got

some questions that you all can't answer there was a departure out of the church and that departure with black men and in many cases educated just sort of said the church is not ready to answer these questions cornell west says in 1987 there was sort of a resurgence of the pan-african movement those of us who began to raise the question how can we be black and christian and then there was the trivializing of him so we were all doing the finding blacks in the bible stuff but the truth of the matter is finding blacks in

the bible isn't the hard thing you want if you want a real academic pursuit find some white folk i mean that that's the real academic pursuit and so we have to change the conversation it's our book it's our story we're not a meta-narrative we are the narrative and so it's important because if you're going to then do evangelism in an urban context then there are people raising the question why does your god not look like us and those of us now that the the whole world has access to our library so we can't hide behind

lies any longer we can't pretend like people can't find out this stuff and if we who sit in the pulpit or we who claim to be doctors and so forth are not willing to tell the truth we're going to lose another generation of people dr danes so my period i focus on is the 1400s 1500s and 1600s and one of the things we need to realize is that the slave trade was traumatic it was horrific but we're not merely living in the afterlives of slave trade we're living in the midst of the rise of modern

racism and so i argue that around 16 60 1700 is when modern racism occurred and so what was christianity prior to modern racism so let me just say a couple of things one is that there were europeans learning ethiopian languages especially gays from ethiopians in places like rome and other places in europe in the 1500s why were they learning it they wanted to learn the ethiopian bible to read the ethiopian bible why did they want to read it because they knew there were more books in that bible than any other books and they were trying

to figure out is there some knowledge that had been lost that christians and ethiopians had retained but not only did they try to learn the language and this is all the way up to the the 1600s that they're seeking to do that um not only that but they are also looking to ethiopia especially the catholics and the protestants to try to find a way of renewing the church just on the protestant side so some of you already know the fact that there is a person by name of michael the deacon who meets martin luther not

in ethiopia but this brother travels to germany to wittenberg to meet martin luther in his own home place where he's living and working and luther wants to interview him because he wants to learn is in my language ethiopian christianity a forerunner of protestantism he wants to know is the bible in the vernacular and not in latin and the brothers say yes it is he wants to know do they have communion of bread and wine which the catholics don't allow at that time and he said yes it does he says are the priests married in ethiopia

he said yes they are and he goes down is purgatory part of your teaching he says no it's not um do you recognize supremacy of the pope he says no we don't and so he realized that martin luther than i my argument is using ethiopia as a place to give a historical precedence to the biblical argument because the catholics said you're making this up this is all in your head and he's saying no all you need to do is look at the church in ethiopia the church in egypt the church in in greece and you'll

find out that there's historicity that's there and i'll end with this not only does martin luther meet with him not only is he interviewed but martin luther and philip mullington write letters of recommendation i really think it's more than that but let's just say it's all it is and those letters are sent throughout europe saying when this brother arrives treat him as if he is somebody that you need to respect because he is wow that's awesome that's awesome um you know in light of that like for some people a lot of this is new information

and a lot of that has to do with iconography and what we're presented with and so um the the answer to whitewashing isn't blackwatching but what we're saying is we need to present a full narrative but but i want to ask this anyone can take this one first as it relates to imagery and even revisionist history why is northern africa viewed or presented as southern europe did you catch that why is northern africa presented as southern europe one of the things and i think this goes into what happens in biblical studies and people need to

understand how blackness gets defined in north america versus what happens in the actual academy and this gets to the thing that you're talking about so in america we all know they have this thing called a one drop rule so if you have one drop of black blood you're black so if you got pulled over by the police in 1930 you couldn't say i'm mostly white can i mostly not get hit upside the head you're oppressed right now when we then flipped over and you this is all this is in all the literature and they're looking

for the black presence in the bible but this is the question he got to earlier the standards flipped so just think about this in america if you get pulled over one drop you're black but then who's black in the bible well then the only black people in the bible are people who look like me that's like dark black folks and so you had this high standard of in order to be considered black in bible times you had to be ethiopian but if you in america you had to be one drop and so what happens is

and the reason that even northern africa which has a lot of berber and lighter black people those people were kind of raised up effectively into whiteness or the fact that they had any color was eliminated while at the same time having a totally different standard of blackness in america and so what biblical scholars did in the 60s and the 70s which people say was trite but it was important we said okay then let's take that definition of black and say well then if you if you use that definition how many black people are in the

bible so in other words if those people who were in the old and new testament were pulled over by the police in alabama what would you have called them and if you ask it that way you get loads of black people and so that's what you've seen at least as a movement in biblical studies of how we began to talk about that and so people get mad around saying that we're playing fast and loose with the black game but even if you go back and read the early literature people like cooper are saying i'm going

to use this definition because you end up with mostly afro-asiatic peoples of some form in that region of the country in that region of the world during that time period dr bantu yeah definitely um you know i would definitely agree that like the way that we talk about race and categorized race today is very different than like the even you know the medieval period or the ancient period and all that i mean to add to that i i would say and denise bouell points this out in her book why this new race uh you know

looking at the function of race in early christianity that we don't even have a uniform way of talking about race in the world today it's not like we even have one i mean i'm biracial so i'm one thing in the u.s like esau said i'm black in the u.s but i go to south africa i'm colored and then i go to west africa and they're like oh you look white and so it's it's it's not even that we have a uniform one today um and it was the same thing back then and so the kind

of like what esau was saying you know definitely north africans were were able to participate in uh romanitas or be they were they were part of the roman empire i mean north africa egypt were civilizations that existed long before the roman empire but then they were all colonized uh right before or around the time of the emergence christianity so when christianity comes around egyptians north africans they're all roman citizens but they're clearly not white by modern standards but the tricky thing is that they were white by ancient standards and you know like esau was saying

back then a black person would have been seen as an ethiopian which is a racial term it's not an ethnic term ethiopia just means black person and it would get used to refer to people from south india south arabia actual ethiopia and nubia it was just it meant black that's all it meant and so we really should translate their e-word ethiopia as black because that's what they meant and that did not include egyptians north africans in fact egyptians and north africans often use that term in a denigrating way and they would often you look at

their sayings of the desert fathers and moses the black moses the ethiopians who was an egyptian monk in the 300s and lived among egyptian monks and yet they clearly distinguished him from the rest of them and they even looked down on him and he even looked down on himself and he called himself an ash-skinned burnt-faced one and then you have all other kinds of north african uh people who are looking down on that and they're attempting to play into roman culture greek greek and latin language and you have people like augustine in origin that highly

look up to you know european and roman concepts and origin actually even in his commentary on song and songs even caused blackness a marker of sinfulness so they were deeply racist north african egyptian north african people and they are today too i mean let's just be real if you like there's clear deep race issues in north africa today where people are more brown skinned and so i would say that's a large part of why it got seen that way because at that time you know kind of the pastor allen's point in that time also who

were the white people that we now call white they were the barbarians they were the people that lived up in northern and western europe so people on both sides of the mediterranean were around the same complexion whether they were in southern europe like now you have greek and southern italians today they're kind of olive and brown skin and people in northern africa they were they would all consider themselves white in comparison to the black people south of there and the white people to the north of them they called them barbarians but when the roman empire

falls and power shifts to western and northern europe in the holy roman empire and in the crusades now whiteness has an even higher standard and the people who in roman times would have considered themselves white which to esau's point today we would not have ever considered them white athanasius augustine any of those people that they've been driving around in southern alabama in the 50s they would have been considered black but in ancient times they were considered white but then whiteness gains a new form and a new face in the medieval period wow you do want

to address that dr davis i was good but but one of the things that happens in the uh 1400s 1500 1600s is that something is uncanny and the uncanniness is that the division is not based on skin color the division often is based on whether you're a christian or muslim or jew or not a monotheistic religion and so so therefore the part that i can't understand that's why i describe it before the rise of modern racism why in this period are there four people who are dark-skinned african descent who are consecrated as bishops in the

roman catholic church um two in the 1500s and two in the 1600s when you won't see that again for the most part until you get to 20th century i say the rise of modern racism why do you have in portugal which is the places that is the most receptive um recognizing a distinction between africans of noble descent especially congolese and then commoners commoners are the ones that are enslaved those of nobility are the ones that are welcome into the colleges and universities in portugal at that time um they they are able to become a few

of them become professors some of them like juan latinos recognized as a distinguished poet others of them um are part of the the the council of trent um the famous roman catholic uh council that that leads to um what becomes um the the catholic reformation um you also have the fact that right next to the saint saint peter's basilica is saint stephen's chapel um that allows for the ethiopians to have their liturgy engaged all these things that we won't see during the rise of modern racism where color will become the distinction where black will become

the name of the slave there are indians in india that are enslaved there's europeans in each eastern european slave but black will become the color of enslavement in my argument with the rise of modern racism so i think the challenge for me is what did christianity look like prior to modern racism so that we can better understand how we are so shaped by race today that we can't see race even when it's not there dr wallace would you like to address that no i'm good well so so for for people following us there are two

things i heard as remember the question is why is northern africa viewed as southern europe and we heard two r's revisionist history so we've made these african fathers and mothers and martyrs from black to white in our imagery uh but but then also a a rejection of the imago day in them and essentially racism so maybe that's three r's i want to do a follow-up on that uh what was the what was the method of the whitewashing of christianity so we we mentioned with three here three r's but what what was the method to get

us to this point because again it does have evangelistic effects people are rejecting christ as a result of misinformation presented as fact i think that sometimes we get mad and hear me to the like i'll say this we sometimes get upset when we see white depictions of jesus and what we need to understand is that in every single culture into which christianity goes china japan sub-saharan africa they all make jesus to look like them that is part of what it means to be art you want god who looks like you the difference is the ethiopian

jesus or the japanese jesus didn't go and colonize people and then plant that jesus in front of colonized people so in other words like the ethiopian jesus is still in ethiopia he's not running around everywhere else and so what happened then why jesus was on good way jesus was everywhere so so what happens is now now you have yourself in a context in which there are black people with the blonde and blue-eyed jesus and then in our context it goes into film um and then everybody in egypt is white and then like most everybody and

so you get this place where people didn't get conscious and they say well biblical scholars do the exact same thing they effectively make the standards for having black characters in the bible in the scholarship really high and then you have this place where black people are running around trying to find themselves in biblical texts and trying to recover our history and so part of it is the impact of colonialization not just those depictions because like you can go in my house we had black jesus and white jesus on the same wall and we never even

tried to reconcile them it was my mom's way of trying to balance those things out but i don't think the instinct of like a guy in italy to paint jesus looking italian was bad it's the fact that that guy then went and colonized people and then said that this god who you're looking at is the one who told me to do it yeah and just to build off of that um yeah i would say he he you're right i mean he painted that white jesus um you know in order to uh show that you know

i made in god's image as well but the other part of it and this is where i do have to say i think we can't only blame this on the modern period that even in antiquity there was a belief that blackness equated sin and depravity and that whiteness so that painter and all the painters that painted him with white uh they also were doing it with the belief that god and jesus could only be white because white equals purity and again that goes back to the tanhuma midrash where you have the curse of ham people

think that curse of hammond was invented by in the bottom period no that goes back to like late antique fourth century jewish midrash where they said that hams was cursed when it was actually kanan and all his black progeny occurs and then that's repeated by islamic medieval historians all throughout the seven eight nine ten hundreds so these anti-black sentiments are in white christianity european christianity judaism and islam in the medieval and in the late antique period uh from the very beginning that's how it became whitewashed because to your point he saw that yes and it

goes back to what i was saying earlier god intended uh to communicate the reality that all people are accepted in the body of christ and that all of us are made in god's image so therefore in an ideal world all of us can paint jesus looking like us uh and that did happen in fact uh the mogow caves in china you have an image of jesus looking chinese and that's amazing but the sad reality is because of sin white folks grabbed a hold of that white image of jesus and said no this is the only

way he can look and that's a process that yes the way it looked in the mind period was it the same as an antiquity no not exactly but it's certain there's certainly traces in the foundations of it and in multiple peoples i go through a three-step process that i'll say very quickly but the first of it was that before the fourth century uh to your point christianity was a global religion it was not associated with any one particular people group it was in the persian empire it was in india it was all over arabia it

was in ethiopia nubia north africa it was in europe it was a global faith it was not associated with any one culture in the fourth century constantine allegedly becomes a christian and that is when christianity became seen as oh that's a roman religion now it was never seen that way before in fact if anything the roman empire was the main empire persecuting people in the 200s it was safer to be a christian in iraq and iran in afghanistan which was the persian empire than it was in rome or italy or greece which was the roman

empire and the persian empire but when constantine appropriates christianity and roman christians began to articulate theology in greek hellenistic terms only and began to depict jesus as being later on as in the european period looking white only that that's the beginning of that process the second notch in that is the council of calciton which is a council we need to start talking about a lot more the council of chalcedon was the moment in 451 where the dominant church of the roman empire articulated christology in a way that suited hellenistic thinking and language that talked about

jesus being one person but two physicists uh and in ways and concepts that did not equate to persian or ethiopian language and they condemned as heretics the christians of africa and asia and the middle east that is a schism that lasted even to this day uh and then the third step of that is after the rise of islam those same christianities became deeply diminished in their own lands and european christian the rise of islam also weakened the roman empire it really effectively ended uh the eastern byzantine empires control the mediterranean that's when power shifted further

north and further west into the holy roman empire and that's when that christian world emerged which would later go into the crusades which would later go into transatlantic slave trade that and then you could build a scholasticism and and then go into a new world that completely forgot about or erased uh because they had already condemned them as heretics ever since 451 so ironically colonists when they went out and conquered the world they did not just encounter unchristian people in africa and the americas in south asia they also the portuguese also came to india and

they found christians that had been there for a thousand years and they colonized them and they said you're not real christians because you don't and that went back to 451 and they went into ethiopia and they said you're not real christians because you you didn't accept the council of cal seton and so that's that's the like kind of the short history of how it became whitewashed yeah i want to i want i want you guys to address the impact of that over 50 years ago tom skinner wrote how black is the gospel and so he

was he was addressing some of the same things we're still talking about now here in 2021. what are some of the effects of this whitewashing of christianity and africa what are some of the effects that we see of this well the effects are seen in our theology in our church how we look at ourselves how we look at our people how we interpret the text i'm not a scholar i'm a preacher and one of the one of the challenges why do we place so much emphasis on the acts 10 material and we disregard the acts

8 material acts 10 becomes so big because cornelius is brought to christ but then the acts 8 material is when the ethiopian eunuch uh is brought and then in the ethiopian eunuch and and the way they interpret that story so we've got a bunch of sisters named candice when in fact it was really ken decay and ken decay was the queen of queens and they interpreted eunuch and see slave when we see a secretary of treasuries we see someone very powerful and we see so there's this huge story about the beginnings of the gospel and

and the humanity and the ability and agency of black people that is totally downplayed and then this other story is lifted up what that causes is then our churches are viewed and some of this conference is even dealing with some of that stuff some people running over to white churches because they thought they would get more word and they thought they would get more word because we've been told it's their book and they interpret it right and we don't interpret it right and those are the effects so that uh when the old black preacher preaches

somehow he's ignorant and that's an effect so that when they suggest that you approach a text with the social grammatical approach to scripture where you ask about the sits and leaving and then after you ask about the situation you ask who is talking into whom are they talking and then what did they say and what would the original hearers have heard it and then you conserve that and ask what did the church say but then we as black people came along and we said well we don't just conserve we confront so after we've asked those

other questions we confront and say why does that say that but because of all of this other whitewashing when we say anything it's looked at with a jaundiced eye therefore what we have to do is not again as i was arguing we have to normalize a conversation except that we are black and we have agency and we are smart and we are capable and we are in the book and we are not we don't define ourselves in relationship to whiteness we are complete in ourselves all of that wrestling match the fact that we're having this

conversation is the effect of the white washing i'm sure there's not a white convention somewhere asking about black folk and why are they having this conversation or how can we do and so at some point we're going to have to throw off colonization by stop defining ourselves by white people or in comparison to white people but stand on our own feet thank you dr walla and if you're hearing snaps that's a millennial amen that's what that's amen that's a millennial amen dr danes would you like to address that at all yeah okay uh you you

say this i want to i want to quote an article that you actually contributed for the ju3 con uh uh ju3 project you say this the hysteria historians john thornton linda haywood and others have convinced me at least that amongst the 20 plus africans who were illegally transported to the virginia colony included christians the evidence includes a 1619 letter written by a local roman catholic bishop manuel bautista in which he expressed his outrage that the 4 000 plus african christians from dongo in west central africa had been captured by slave traders so this next question

is this can you can you break down and give us uh our other examples of christi christians and christianity in west africa before the transatlantic slave trade appreciate that um so the first thing i think the issue was that it was very very clear that there were christian there were blacks who were christians in the northeast part of africa which wasn't where the slave trade transatlantic slave trade was and so therefore even if one wanted to concede that historically one had the problem did africans who came over to north america encounter christianity for the first

time on the slave plantation and so the work of these scholars have helped me understand that no they were already africans who are christian who are who have been christian on the atlantic side of um the ocean uh african part um at least as early in a consistent way um as 1490 or so so that's before christopher columbus and that's before um obviously then the transatlantic slave trade that church which is the key church there there are christians in barrie and riches um where nigeria is there's christians uh in benin also where nigeria is there

are also some christians a little further north in senegambia but the continuous community was the one in the congo and it was not only content continuous but it was one to my amazement as john thornton another said that by 16 15 16 i'm sorry they open up a school system that has over a thousand students who are learning to read and to write um and and they're educating men and women europeans aren't doing that for the most part in any systematic way in 1516 but these congolese christians were and then king alfonso believed that we

should be like the church in europe which means we should have a bishop just like they have and so therefore he pushed for it the portuguese were against it um but the pope agreed with him and so they consecrated his son enrique and so and then they plan to open up a college in 1560s that they aren't able to open until about 1620 um and so you have this literate class um you have book culture um already in the congo in the 1500s and so it's out of that population that larger population that linda hayward

john thornton and others are saying that on that slave ship that arrives in 1619 are christians why might that be significant because that might mean that it is not the great awakening that brought africans to christianity it is not a preacher on a slave plantation that brought african christianity but as congolese christians who were forced over here but but they were christian when they were got on the boat and they were christians when they got off the boat and so when one then looks not at virginia but when one looks at what becomes new york

the dutch colony you will see by the 1630s there are africans who are probably of congolese descent who are part of the church there and what becomes new york um they they become free um by 1650 they become land holders by 1560s um and and and out of that there are african christians who are there if you recall in 1640 1640s in the legislature in maryland there is a person of african descent who's a legislator um who's there who is also a christian and then they're christians not only in virginia but there's christians in low

country south carolina and so therefore it looks like to me just to me based on that evidence that they are the ones that do the first evangelizing and that they are evangelizing a christianity that's not a slave religion um their evangelical christianity that is based upon the fact that there's a school system you're educated there's college it's based on text and not merely our morality that's right mccullen it's awesome i i don't know if i'm allowed to say this but one of the things if we're going to recover all of this stuff we've talked about

orthodoxy in the roman catholic church and what actually we're talking about without saying it it was actually was destroyed during the transatlantic slave trade with the liturgical heritage of african christianity that's right and if you go back looking at your roots i know nobody's going to amend that but it's true if you go back and look at the roots of african christianity it was deeply liturgical but if you go back and you actually listen to that stuff it's not liturgical in this european form it's liturgical with a little bit of soul to it and so

if you want to go back and recover like african christianity be careful um because you might end up with some liturgy in your services but i'm just glad that y'all mentioning that i'll leave it alone after that but i'm just telling y'all the truth but i want to say though the first black again using your formula the first africans who are protestant um goes to as early as 1560 with lucitano vicente lucitano who was an afro-portuguese roman catholic priest who converts to protestantism by the late 1550s ends up in wartenburg i can't pronounce it right

w-u-r-r-e-m but he ends up there but then you have the first group by 1590s in london who convert to protestantism um there um during the time time this year and you have protestants who are there so so so by 1600 you already have people of african descent on the orthodox side the catholic side and the protestant side dr bantu and then we'll go to our last question and open it up yeah dawg for sure um yeah um i would say uh just echoing a lot of what was said um you know and i got to

give a shout out where's pastor mace where are you at brother it's dark where you at my man um i got to give a shout out to pastor bates because pastor mays asked me to address this question at frequency a few years ago and and and i gave a workshop where i was just like well all i know of is basically i presented the uh not as well but i presented the information that dr dan was just talking about the history of the congo powerful history of christian an african nation that freely adopted christianity under

king nzinga and bemba in the 15 1500's and was a christian nation for 300 years and donna beatrice campavita is a powerful prophetess in congo whose name we need to know started a powerful movement where she was trying to kick out uh you know portuguese and belgian colonization in the congo uh and as we as dr daniel said some of us were already christians when we got here and one of the one of the biggest slave revolts in u.s history the stone rebellion in 1739 in south carolina was started by congolese christians who spoke french

and were already christians when they got here so the gospel of jesus christ gave african slaves in the americas the sense of freedom to fight for their freedom they they rallied a bunch of other african-americans and were making their way to florida uh and so it's a powerful history um one thing that that uh doc but one thing i was wondering about that was all i knew at the time and uh i was curious though about because the sad reality is still that even though it was independently accepted it still came from europeans and as

dr daniels mentioned there was a sense in which they had to try to emulate and emulate even dhoni beatriz called herself like the reincarnation of saint anthony of padua and so there was a highly europeanist now it was contextualized too there was a lot if you look at the crucifixes and different things that came from there was a mix of congolese and european christianity but you know somebody could say that still came from europe though it didn't come from west africa so maybe wonder okay you had all this christianity in north africa and in east

africa uh you know north africa egypt nubia ethiopia did any of that make its way into west and central africa as i mentioned earlier it was largely because of the oppression of european christianity that it didn't and so we never have to you know uh forget that but did it make it and i am i was so shocked to find out that it indeed did and that there is actually muslim historical records that show that christianity also didn't only come in from west africa through europeans but it also came because also those congolese were also

trading slaves with the portuguese as well uh in the slave castle so that congolese christian kingdom was participating in the translating slave trade but there were indigenous african christians who had the the historic i mean i think negro spirituals and gospels liturgical too but i gave it to me but they they were there were east africans that had that orthodox original uh african christianity the soulful i mean you talk about seoul you get the debt terrorists that's some soulful liturgical african music right there or saint jared but that christianity did make its way into western

central africa already just through migration because we talk about the transatlantic slave trade but we also have to talk about the trans-saharan slave trade and the trans-saharan also trade of spices and salt and also so through that from nubia mainly nubia christianity there is historical records from historians like ibn kaldun al makrizi and i i'm working on an article on this right now to put it all together and god is so good because you know it was at the same time that pastor mays asked me this question that i was actually in the process of

learning classical arabic and i just finished learning it so now i can slowly read these texts and like translate them and stuff and i found this the best one i had to put on facebook but the article ain't out yet but i had to put this one on facebook because i just wanted everybody to know there is a historian from the early 1300s 1300s uh from egypt his name is ibn al-dawadari and he talked to mansa musa in the 1300s who was the king of mali which is not the modern nation in mali but it's

basically all of west africa and he actually traveled he was a muslim he traveled over to mecca to make his pilgrimage and he stopped in egypt and he talked to this historian ibn al daradari who wrote down in his history that mansa musa said that there was an entire christian section of his kingdom now this is 1300 so this is over a century and a half before the the kingdom of the congo became christian and before any europeans ever came to the west african coats that mount moosa said there were christians in his kingdom and

not only that but the air he was the richest person in the world because he controlled the gold trade and not only that but the christian region of mali uh which would have been you know ghana senegal uh you know parts of nigeria that the christian section is actually the one that controlled the most of the gold trade and in fact he even said that when the muslims tried to overtake the that section to control the gold trade the gold stopped growing it stopped producing and so they left them alone and allowed the christians to

control the gold rich areas of the mali kingdom which is west africa so uh i didn't know that when you asked me so you know but uh but uh just yeah praise god to know the answer is yes it most certainly did but not only because i have to just echo so much what pastor allen just said we have to stop defining ourself by how much we measure up to our by white standards and we have to look at historical records and and african history on our own accord right one of the things that bothers

me a little bit about when we as black people recover african history is we only do it to the degree to which it influenced western and white christianity that we will say well how did african christianity influence western christianity and i'm like okay yeah let's talk about that but i don't really african african history is not only valuable in as far as it was influential or uh it made its way into western or white history african history and african civilizations are valuable in and of themselves and in their own right so it was really powerful

to me to learn of the fact that christianity made its way into west africa and it came from other africans thank you yeah yeah what's up everyone lisa fields here and i'm so excited about our new curriculum courageous conversations you heard about our popular conference courageous conversations where we invite the leading pastors thought leaders and scholars from conservative and progressive backgrounds for conversations but we not only want to have those conversations on stage at the conference but we want you to have them in your everyday life so we developed a curriculum for you to do

just that courageous conversations curriculum the tools you need for the conversations and culture you can get that today on amazon or on our website at g3project.org [Music] listen um so here's our last one before we begin to take in your questions and i and dr mccauley i want to refer to chapter 5 of your book reading wild black that you call black and proud and you say this the first encounter with jesus we are told came from those who wanted us docile and accepting of our earthly status while we waited for the sucker in the

world to come black christianity for some is an oxymoron because the christian story is not ours it is a fact hiding in plain sight that the three major centers of early african early christianity were patriarchs of rome antioch and alexandria so here's our last question dr mccauley i want you to start how do we decolonize because the the reality is we have a lot of black people who have a colonized view of their own history and even the content of africa how do we decolonize our view of africa um i'm not sure if i can

answer that particular question well but i may say something about how we deal with the relationship between african christianity and what happened here in america i think that we can recover africa and african christianity and that's important but at a certain point we have to deal with the trauma of what happened to being black in america and christianity was used against black people and christianity did do harm and recovering that african christianity doesn't actually undo that harm and there's a lot of black people who i think if i'm reading the culture well who are trying

to make sense of how can i be christian now when i'm trying to follow jesus and i know that jesus has done these horrible things people have done these horrible things in the name of jesus and if i can say one thing to that particular group of people one way of doing it is kind of an apologetic way look christianity existed before all of this stuff happened we've talked about that for an hour but also i think that what i see happening is even when people come to grips with that reality that history they just

choose too often a different form of whiteness so if they turn from evangelicalism to european processed theology you still just traded one filter of christianity for another and i think that whether it's in africa or whether it's in europe there is something called christianity there is something about the death and resurrection or return of jesus that is truly compelling to the person and so i would say what we need to be able to recover is the fact that that truth about what christianity is has taken root in a lot of places one of those places

is africa and if that helps us to function as christians then that's well and good um but i still think that even after you've recovered with that that you've recovered that truth you still have to deal with the trauma because we all have we talked about the last session we have these wounds of what the church has done to us and we have to find a way to kind of find jesus in in the ruins and if one of the places you find him you see the recovery of african spirituality then african christianity then that's

fine but i still think we can never get we can never lose sight of the thing itself which is the gospel that compels us and if it's important to us to hear which is true that gospels compel black people for thousands of years then go ahead and recover it dr wow but i appreciate the the work of carl ellis and he talks about christianity-ism you know there's there's a christianity-ism that was given to the black community in an attempt to erase everything that we've been talking about but it didn't erase at all and there's something

in the experience of christianity through an afro-sensitive lens that we have to hear and that can heal you know when we think about when i think about i am a conservative christian if i have to use that language as probably some the people in this room are but because i view my christianity through a afro-sensitive lens at fifty thousand feet in the air if you put me in the room with a evangelical or someone and ask us a theological question we probably answer it the same way but when we get on the ground it looks

very different in how you live it out yeah and that has to do with me being african and the community that i come from informed by a deep love for community and a deep understanding that was not killed and so i think the effects of that how we have to own that there is a particular way to read scripture with an afro i don't use afrocentric because i'm crystal centric only one thing in the middle but i read it through an african lens and i can land in places that are more egalitarian i can land

in places that build and don't seek to dominate and destroy and build hierarchies from the same text that they tried to use because i'm african and and that's what i think we're getting at and so we who do this hard work of reading the scripture and studying history have to ask in all of these eras what did it look like to be african what did it look like to be black and i keep coming back with there is something more than the individualistic christianity i'm saved and going to heaven anyhow in the bible then then

and and the african story helps us with that i'm reminded this when cornelius got the story his household came to christ but when the ethiopian eunuch got it the whole community came to christ there's something about what it means to be african that you don't keep it for yourself and there's something about being black that says this thing isn't just for me it's for all my people and when i read every text that way i come out with something very different than they give you at southern or truitt or anything else and so i i

own that i'm a graduate of southern baptist theological seminary i was there for the conservative takeover in 1990 and i saw the ugliness of it and i'm committed to the book but i'm committed to the book as as as as our african fathers gave it to us and as my granddaddy gave it to us that grandfather who couldn't read or write but somehow could get at the truth of the gospel of jesus christ thank you doctor dr dams you'd like to answer that before we yeah i want to say a man amen amen again um

so i already gave away my my card which is um i think the damage we're suffering under is because of modern racism um i think the again um there are theologians from there are theologian philosophers from erasmus to luther who are quoting ethiopian um christians did carl bart do that did paul tillich do that did you give did did hodges which is h a a hodge i mean i i modern racism truncated their vision even in a way i don't deny that that that discrimination existed a whole bunch of things but but i i see

something different i mean what letter of recommendation did bart or calvin or not calvin bart or tilik or give me the great theologians of the of the modern period which is modern racism when did they light a letter of recommendation um so so i i think i think something was different then so i think decolonizing is somehow trying to figure out how do we realize how we're shaped by modern racism and then figure out how we can envision a world a church and a reading of the bible that's after modern racism and the way that

i'm suggesting is that we look at pre-rise of moderation to struggle it's not all perfect but we're struggling to do that and i agree with you on the reference um so i and i'm i'm partly guilty but the reason why i like northrop's book about how africa discovered europe because for so long i was always told we were passive we were the object and afri and europe was the only one that was active and so i like the reversal i agree with you the reversal is not sufficient in and of itself we need to have

africa for its own integrity um that's there and so i think all of that is part of the decolonizing but but i don't think until we realize how deep we have been shaped by modern racism can we figure out how to move beyond it and and what i don't mean is merely slave trade um the war on poverty the war on drugs destroyed black families in the last 30 40 years and possibly the gains we made by 1960 many of them are lost because of what happened and why did that happen i want to say

it's the latest iteration of modern racism thank you so much we want to move into uh the the questions you guys sent in and this one has a lot of votes uh this question says this and anyone can take a stab at it first uh can you interact with willie james jennings work on suppressionism as it relates to representing jesus in one's own culture versus preserving his jewish identity and welcoming all of the cultures in it i think they might have been super sessionism yes yeah yeah yeah oh this new testament i can do that

um well it's precisely as jesus as jewish he goes to the rest of the world the jewishness of jesus was a sorry i feel like all i do is y'all are germans but they did it they got to hold the l um so the jewishness of jesus is one manifestation of german liberalism and the idea was in order for jesus to become universal he had to become yes less jewish so christianity goes from being a part of an exclusive religion judaism to a universal religion what becomes christianity but what actually is going on in the

text of the new testament is they're saying that the vision of the jewish scriptures this is genesis 12. god's going to use abraham's people to bless the world and that god says to abraham from the beginning you're going to be you're going to have children from every family and every ethnic group in the world and so jesus asked the davidic king has by definition in view all the ethnic groups in the world and so it is precisely jesus asked the jewish messiah did you get a picture of the worldwide people of god gathered from every

tribe tongue and nation and so you don't have to make jesus less of who he is to be universal it's him as the jewish messiah he reaches out to the rest of the world it's the jesus who is european who then conquers the rest of the world and says you must become like us in order to be a part of that kingdom which is the exact inverse of what jesus is doing and to that end paul who is trying to say that anybody who trusts jesus is on the team and so part of it might

be recovery of pauline theology justification by faith that allows not ethnic identity or any other market beyond faith in christ it's sufficient to be a part of god's family i want to add to that that um so again and again i'm overdoing it so i apologize to everybody but you take zagasabo who's a theologian in lisbon really imprisoned because of the move towards anti-ethiopianism but he is arguing he cannot understand this jesus of the european of the roman catholic church because to him jesus and ethiopia were still jewish because they said when they they looked

at the council of acts um they didn't give up being jewish and so the jew the ethiopians said the reason why we do circumcision the reason why um we have dietary rules is we're trying to follow the first century church and so so therefore the europeans were forced in that debate it's sort of a new re the new paul from uh um that that came out in the 1960s with with stindall and others the ethiopians were already arguing that in europe in the 1500s that to me is part of the recovery because then we can

say that that stindall didn't even realize he is merely echoing a discussion from centuries before it's a much larger conversation as to whether or not what becomes the new reading of paul this is in an african-american context wasn't already in the black church from the beginning because if you see something like jesus in the disinherited who he's talking about the jewishness of jesus over against the europeanness of jesus and that comes into modern biblical scholarship because of the perspective on paul when black passes in their churches were talking about king jesus and david and the

importance of the divided promises the entire time but that's a conversation for another day yeah no um but i would say um that and i'm i just got through writing a review on jennings's new book uh after whiteness and it's in our hymeno journal and so shout out meacham school of hymano we have uh only black biblical graduate level seminary that's part of what we're doing is that's how we decolonize our faith or not even decolonizing but also getting into our colonial theology like that's why i love ethiopian christianity uh and getting into that because

that's part of our work is again seeing du bois uh said that it's impossible for us to not see through the veil and i respectfully disagree i think it is possible for us to see who we are in christ jesus as black people not merely as again just to echo what was said not merely as simply a response to whiteness and so i think that um you know i think that's part of how we do that work and and yeah with with jennings's work i would also say that i think that he's him and carter

in in race theological account are in a way going to the opposite extreme of what dr mccauley was just saying where you had this move of stripping or trying to de-center or like kind of move jesus out of his hebraic jewish uh palestinian roots and in white christianity i think they're wrong by rooting that in like narcissism though because nazism wasn't normative for western christianity but racism and white supremacy was from the fourth century following uh but i think their motive is right so i think they're off a little bit there on the late antique

part um but i also think that they go to another extreme whether jennings literally says and i engage with him also in multiple peoples in the conclusion where he's uh basically saying that we are now second readers after israel and i'll say well no i think what paul says in galatians 328 is that there is no first or second reader but that all of us are uh equally you know we are african we don't have to go to the other extreme and say we have to put ourselves as jennings says put ourselves into israel's story

like we don't have to put ourselves into that we are african people and people of african descent and again you know we have this uh debate about you know that goes back to you know the sociologists from the 40s and 50s that franklin and herzkovitz about are we actually african or are we basically just dark-skinned americans and we lost everything african and i respectfully fall on the side of that that says no we're not from africa but we are people of african descent and you can't be around people from the continent and see the foods

i was just watching high on the hog too and see the dance moves and see the ways the rhythms and then look at the black church and say that there's nothing african in the ways in which african-americans live and breathe and function and that doesn't need to be some kind of imitation of israel not a rejection of jesus's hebrew roots either uh but also that's a part of sankofa going back and connecting to even our our colonial roots as well i want to move into the next one this got several votes uh did african christians

in history have a different view of spiritual beings and evil powers than what we have in american christianity today and and just so so people can understand the question some are of the perspective that african spirituality viewed everything as metaphysical um as opposed to necessarily literal evil or whatever so i think that's what they may be getting that dr bantu i think he was going to respond no i was going to say absol uh absolutely although i would say that in the rise of pentecostalism both in the diaspora and on the continent i think we're

seeing a return or a sankofa uh coming back to in many ways but but yeah many black people in the diaspora have received christianity through european colonialism and so in so doing have kind of adopted a spirituality that in many ways is more western and european and not connected african roots but yes clear most definitely ancient african christians did engage and view the spiritual world in a way that was uh very different than what we see today egyptian christians were still mummifying they were still wrapping up their corpses and putting them in temples nubian christians

even though after it became a nubian temple were still putting their graves in the mastabas which was the pre-christian practice uh you know the um the sun was highly venerated in that's almost like a pan-african religious concept that even made its way again through the diaspora the writings of phyllis wheatley is known for having a lot of sun veneration even though she was a christian um and in fact jupiter hammond uh critiques her for that two of the earliest published african-american writers uh critiques her says her writings are too pagan because they have this sun

veneration but you see that in ethiopian churches where you have before christianity king izana and his father they have the sun discs but even after christianity you have churches in lalabella that have sun images in them and so there were definitely and again i mentioned dipteras these are basically christian uh shamans that that go around dancing singing playing the drums and casting out demons and so there's definitely a much more of a a real sense of the palpable reality of spirits and principalities uh even that exists in creation and even in sacred mountains the desert

was seen as a spiritual place before christianity so that's where the christians built monasteries so i would say yes you definitely do those are some examples thank you for that dr bantu uh next up is this says how has anti-black how has anti-black ideology influenced our biblical anthropology how has anti-black idea ideology influenced by biblical anthropology well first of all it causes everyone to look at anything good in the bible as white and so we have all its influence our iconography it's influenced uh our theology its influence how we as i was trying to say

earlier um when we interpret scripture there's a piece of that puzzle that says we conserve meaning we ask what did the first persons who heard it understand it to be and then we say what has the church said it means but we in the african-american context confront and will say why you know and we ask why uh for instance why is mary magdalene her why is her sin always sexual there's nothing that says it was sexual we've just allowed white men to read into it that it's sexual why on the isle of malta were all

the words available to the commentators did they choose barbarians and so everything that is evil everything that is wrong becomes black or female everything that is good and everything that is strong is white and male and then that is handed down to us even down to it seemed i don't know but i heard in the question when we were talking about the jewishness of jesus why is ethnicity always polarizing why do i have to give up ethnicity to become universal isn't it possible that we can be fully black and for the world isn't it possible

that jesus can be fully fully jewish and died for everyone but it seems that in this present context that the only person that the only people that are allowed to be fully themselves and for everyone because they feel entitled to it is when you're white and so that that's the stuff that we wrestle with that's what anti-black does it reduces us it causes us to see the text it causes us to not see ourselves in good spaces and only see ourselves in bad spaces and so it is incumbent upon us who then do this work

to be unapologetically affirming of ourselves and not in over and against i i don't want to take too much time but that's even when we use the phrase black lives matter the reason that people then respond back with all lives matter or blue lives matter is because they don't understand that what we're saying is black lives matter too not only but when they say what they're saying they mean only and they assume we mean only that's what it means to be anti-black and that's the stuff that we have to fight i hope i'm not in

trouble now no no dr danes because you you've you've talked about the effects of racism so i want you to take a stab at this one first the question is this how do we talk to majority white churches pastors about the importance of early african christianity if they won't even listen when it comes to racism well uh i must apologize i'm from the generation that is tired of educating so we spent the last i don't know go song with the boys trying to educate so now it's their turn to educate themselves [Applause] all right that's

it that's it here we go we're pressed for time no no i agree what's what's the distinct difference between black hebrew israelites and christians discovering there that there are black people in the bible what's the difference between those two i mean we know there's a variety of hebrew israelism and there's even some that i would call brothers and sisters in christ and so i think you know there's an academic disagreement and then there's a theological disagreement the academic or the historical disagreement is that are we hebrews are we actually descendants of the biblical hebrews i

would say yeah probably there's a degree but as people of the diaspora we have a we have a lot of ethnicities and a lot of different ancestries that the middle passage and the auction block created and so do some of us have to yes because in that research i was just talking about i've also found some evidence for hebrews in west and central africa even before colonialism so do some of us have some degree of hebrew ancestry yeah probably i would say it's extremely negligible it's very minimal uh some of us there's some christians that

made it over we talked about there's a lot of muslims i would say even more actually muslims made it over through the middle passage but most of us most of our ancestors the overwhelming majority of them were practitioners of traditional african religion they were praying to the orishas and they were practicing traditional african religion and so but even aside from that if somebody wanted to say no i'm a hebrew that's my complete ancestry i'm all right well i disagree with you but if they're saying i believe jesus lived rose died again and rose again and

that he's the only way truth in the life and i just happen to believe that we are hebrews but i believe that salvation is open to everyone okay we're brothers and sisters in christ i disagree with you that we're as as hebrew as you think but um but i disagree with that but then you got hebrew israelites that are going further and saying we're hebrews and only hebrews i.e black people and then some variations of native americans and hispanic people only they can be saved and why people are excluded and that the the blood only

covers certain only covers people who are hebrew that's when i say well now you're changing and perverting the gospel and so we're no longer brothers and sisters of christ and i would also add and i'm going to stay way in my lane because i don't want to don't email me um insomuch as we wanna talk about the manifestation of the deuteronomic deuteronomic curses being visited upon black people through the slave trade that's just a horrible reading of the bible and at a certain point you just got to say that that's not what happened to us

like we were not enslaved because of anything other than the sinfulness of those who came and enslaved us it was in no sense of punishment and i know there's nuances i just want to say that particular thing is very wrong we need to say that plainly yeah yeah i was going to ask are you when you asked that question were you referring to the the religions or the brothers on the corner in philadelphia yeah yeah i think yeah i i would say i think the the distinction they made is a good one we may have

time for two but let's let's let's let's try to tackle this one gentlemen there's a perception that european missionaries played a huge role in spreading christianity in the southern part of africa how valid is this was christianity dominant before missionaries arrived everyone looking at you doctor i'll just i would say um i would not say christianity was dominant in southern africa uh you know it was present it was i would say it was one of the major religions again before before colonialism christianity was one of the major religions in central and west africa it was

the it was the dominant religion in uh north and east africa before slavery before colonialism in south africa to my knowledge it was not ever a dominant or even a major religion but that's an area that i'm also interested in so that might be the next one but i would say that but then to the other side of the question were white people a major part or missionary is a major part of spreading the gospel of spreading the bis rot of jesus christ the message of liberation and freedom no um but were they hand in

hand with soldiers and colonialists and were they kidnapping zulu and other african people and trying to enforce a particular european expression of christianity that led into apartheid yes they did that but i wouldn't call that spreading the gospel we we have exactly three minutes anyone else want to take a stab at that one all right i'll try to get one more in um this question here what what resources do we need to look into to find christians in west africa before the transatlantic before the atlantic slave trade there's material in the portuguese archives uh matter

of fact there there's a part of portuguese studies now that is focusing on the relationship between the congo and portugal um so so it's those materials there's um as a cecile vermont has shown there's both artwork and arts and sources that are there so you have to remember that um the portuguese were the first europeans to be along the atlantic coast for probably almost the first century going up to 1600 and so they have things in their archives and those things are still being discovered that's where material is um there there's for those of you

who do archaeology there are still archaeological remains uh from congolese christianity and the larger area that's there from the 1600s and from the 1700s so those are still there and yeah i'll just add to that um it was a great resource that i'm going to be looking into myself to learn more and also i would say uh really just read i mean the oldest african books on the continent were written by christians in egypt ethiopia nubia christianity preceded islam it proceeds so read these texts read this material read the arabic history of the patriarchs of

alexandria it is in english as well and it talks about the connections between christianity in egypt and in other parts of africa read the history the monasteries of nubia and egypt as well there's an english translation to that read the biographies of the ethiopian text and the last book i'll say is read a book uh that is called i forget exactly it's something like arabic sources for the history of west african history that's a chronicle of muslim historical text from like the eighth up until the 14th century in english translation that tells the history of

christianity i mean tells the history of africa and it includes christianity a lot in there dr mccauley last one i'm just gonna encourage you all to buy these two brothers books on the end here and the stuff that they write because we they do a lot of work that doesn't get it's easier to write a book about john or jesus y'all could buy that in a minute but this brother does something like the multitude of people so y'all didn't buy it like y'all should have and so if you want to support this kind of work

sign up for their classes invite them to your churches and this material needs to be there and the people who are dedicating their lives to doing this kind of work deserve the kind of platform so i want to encourage you all amen [Applause] to think about having these people come and and keep having your revivals i'm not like do all of that um but then like have have these brothers and sisters um come to your your churches and just teach the people because these are facts that are hiding in plain sight and those of you

and i'm gonna tell you right now you're not gonna make any money doing it so you got to make sure jesus tells you to do this but some of y'all needs to pick up the the they're leaving this this trail and they need to be another generation of scholars who pick that trail up and continue that work and do the work and making it accessible to the people dr mcclay thank you so much gentlemen thank you for this rich conversation will you give these gentlemen a hand thank you so much what's up everybody this is

lisa fields the founder and president of the g3 project and i'm so excited to come to you to talk about courageous conversations 2022 that's right we're at it again for another year the theme this year is the scholar and the skeptic we're back in washington d.c at national community church with seven amazing conversations conversations like is there a god should we trust the bible is christianity a white man's religion does christianity oppress women is christianity homophobic and transphobic should we be spiritual or religious is christianity bad for our mental health we want to give you

a blueprint on how to have courageous conversations with gentleness and respect remember we sold out last time so make sure you register early and get your ticket now if you can't join us in person you have the virtual option as well but don't miss this year register today at courageouscombos.org [Music] you