The gospel according to Bill Pannell

(RNS) — Bill Pannell, who died on Friday (Oct. 11) at 95 years old, touched the lives of countless legions of others — including me when I was a teenage boy in Detroit, Michigan, where he was a pastor and leader in the Black church of my hometown.

Only three weeks before he died, a new documentary about his life premiered at Fuller Theological Seminary. I strongly recommend this remarkable story of a Black evangelical Christian to anyone who cares about the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Bill was the first Black trustee of the board of Fuller, the first Black faculty member at this global seminary, the dean of the Fuller Chapel for a decade, and inspired the William E. Pannell Center for Black Church Studies, which continues on today at Fuller.

Bill loved Jesus. His son Peter told me he could hear his father talking with Jesus throughout the day in home hospice care until he laid down in bed and couldn’t talk anymore. He was an evangelical in the truest and best sense of that word — he believed fervently that humanity needed to be reconciled to God, and to each other. But he was a Black evangelical, still so different from white evangelicals in America. That made all the difference in his pilgrimage.

Throughout his life and ministry, while bringing people to Christ, he would never leave race out of the gospel message — as white evangelicals around him almost all did. White evangelicals, as he recounts, “slept through the Civil Rights Movement,” the most important Christian movement in our time. White evangelicals chose to ignore racism, as it is easy to do when you are the race in charge of a society.

Growing up in Detroit, a white kid, I couldn’t figure that out either: How could the white Christians all around me refuse to recognize racism, which was the most recognizable thing going on in my city, country and church growing up. How could they just leave that out of their message? They taught me to sing a song … “All the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Maybe Jesus did, but the white Christians around me clearly didn’t love the Black children all around them. And they would never talk about it, nor answer my obvious questions. 

My pursuit of those questions led me to Bill Pannell. I remember his big, easy smile when I asked him my many questions, usually after hearing him speak a message that felt to me like what the gospel of Jesus was supposed to be, but wasn’t in my white church. Bill was a leader in the Black Plymouth Brethren churches in Detroit, the same churches I came from. I had no idea that there were actually Black Plymouth Brethren churches just a few miles away from us that we had never visited or even heard about. Bill kept smiling at all my questions.

A Black man left outside the church by his white brothers and sisters inside the church, he confirmed for me how that was the biggest issue, the biggest problem, the biggest thing wrong with the American churches. And he became an elder to me for the rest of my life. 

In 1968, he wrote a book called “My Friend the Enemy,” whose title alone became a defining reality for me as a young white man as I grew into a world where white Christians were the problem.

Bill was the first Christian I met who regularly read the New York Review of Books, one of the most scholarly publications of our time. He was always learning, always relating the good news of Jesus to the real world that people lived in. He wanted to bring the world into his message of Christ, not just ignore the world while telling people how they could escape it and go to heaven. There was no escaping the world or not hearing how the gospel meant to change that world when listening to him preach.

Bill went on to work with Youth for Christ, before he left them to work alongside an evangelist from Harlem named Tom Skinner. The Pannell documentary chronicles the famous keynote address Skinner preached to the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s annual conference in Urbana, Illinois, in 1970. Instead of just wanting to go to heaven, Skinner told the thousands of young people there, they needed to practice the gospel of the kingdom of God, “on earth as it is in heaven,” as the Lord’s Prayer calls us to do, where Jesus’ message “sets the captives free” and “liberates the oppressed.” A thundering standing ovation followed from a mostly white crowd of students. 

But after the speech, many white evangelical critics attacked Skinner and Pannell for being “too political,” and to this day, when you speak about racism and poverty, you are called too political. Yet white Christian nationalism in support of Donald Trump, though highly politicized, is somehow not a problem for a majority of white evangelicals. 

I remember an elder from my white Plymouth Brethren church taking me aside back then, being worried about all my trips into “the inner city” working with Black men and listening to Black preachers. He felt he needed to tell me, “Son, Christianity has nothing to do with racism. That’s political and our faith is personal.”

That was the moment when I left my white Christianity behind and joined the secular student movements of my time against racism, poverty and war. If the religion that had raised me had nothing to do with what was now turning my life upside-down, then I wanted nothing to do with it. The witness of Black Christians like Bill Pannell and many others helped, eventually, to bring me back to faith.

On my last visit with him a few months ago, we talked about the current presidential election and how embarrassing white evangelical politics has become, as he put it “more and more American, and less and less Christian.”

Bill ends the documentary about his life with the word “integrity.” That word defined his whole life, and he wanted that to be his legacy. White evangelicalism in America has lost its integrity. But the integrity of the gospel was what he was faithful to, while most of his white brothers and sisters left too many things out that are at the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Many people right now are filled with deep dread at how white American evangelicals are bringing a spirit of fear and hate into our world and politics. But Bill learned long ago that God “so loved the world” enough to bring Jesus into it, and whose message he has tried to follow. He would counsel all of us these days just to show our integrity by living out the gospel of Jesus with integrity, no matter what happens around us. That’s what Bill Pannell attempted to do with his life.

To many of us, he was a prophet of God, but to his family and all those close he was just a wonderful man, husband, father, grandfather, friend and teacher who always had that smile for you. Bill Pannell will always be an elder to me. May his soul rest in peace but ours continue to be activated and nourished by his spirit of just following Jesus.