(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.