Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once called eleven o'clock on Sunday morning "the most segregated hour" in America. People ask me about that quote a lot, usually right after they find out what I do for a living. They ask it like it's a riddle, like the answer is complicated. It isn't. I've spent over a decade in vocational ministry, on staff at four different congregations, three of them majority-white. I have an answer now, and I didn't arrive at it from a seminary classroom. I arrived at it the hard way.
Here is my answer: Sunday is segregated because white churches, by and large, want it that way. Not always consciously. Not always maliciously. But structurally, functionally, and repeatedly — the pattern holds. This is not a theory to me. It's a decade of my life.
I want to tell you about four churches. I want to tell you what happened at each one, in order, because the pattern doesn't show itself in a single story. It shows itself in the accumulation. And then I want to tell you where I'm taking all of it now — because this isn't an article about giving up on the white American church. It's about why I've decided to stop asking to be let in, and started building something of my own instead, here in Rochester.
Ive had some unique experiences in white churches. One of the most memorable was a Presbyterian congregation in Falls Church. I was young, eager, and I believed — genuinely believed — that if I worked hard enough, loved the congregation well enough, and led with theological faithfulness, the color of my skin would eventually stop being the loudest thing in the room.
It didn't take long to learn otherwise.
The friction started small, the way it almost always does. I'd make a pastoral call, or a decision about how to run a ministry program, and it would circle back to the church secretary's desk before it ever got a fair hearing. She would question my decisions — not just ask about them, but interrogate them, as if I needed her sign-off to do the job I was ordained and hired to do. When I called with routine questions, questions any staff member has a right to ask, she hung up on me. More than once.
I want to be careful here, because I know how this sounds when a Black man says it about a white woman in a church office: he's playing the race card. I didn't reach for that explanation quickly. I gave it time. I gave her the benefit of the doubt more times than I can count, because that's what you're trained to do, and honestly, it's what you want to do, because the alternative is exhausting. But eventually the pattern was too consistent to explain any other way. My white colleagues didn't get hung up on. My white colleagues' pastoral decisions didn't get second-guessed by administrative staff who had no theological authority to do so.
So I did what I thought any professional would do. I brought it to the staff. I said, plainly, that I would not tolerate being treated that way — not by her, not by anyone. I said it because I believed the church, of all institutions, should be a place where you can name a problem and expect it to be addressed rather than punished.
I was fired.
I filed a complaint. The church settled with me rather than litigate it. I'm not going to pretend that settlement made me whole, because it didn't. What it confirmed, though, was something I needed confirmed: I wasn't imagining it. An institution that presumably had lawyers look at the facts of my case decided it was cheaper and safer to pay me than to defend what had happened to me. That tells you something. It told me something I'd carry into every church that came after.
My second stop was Herndon UMC, another majority-white congregation. The pastor there was Korean American, and for a while, I thought maybe this would be different — a fellow person of color in leadership, someone who might understand what it costs to navigate white institutional spaces without the built-in credibility that comes from simply looking like everyone else in the pews. Problem was, he simply was not good at his job. He was late to staff, missed multiple days, took weeks to respond to important emails, and was not there when he said he would be. I brought this up multiple times.
What actually happened surprised me in a different way. Over time, the pastor's preaching started to drift — subtly at first, then less subtly — toward a prosperity gospel framework. Give and you'll receive. Faith as a transaction. Blessing as evidence of righteousness, lack as evidence of its absence. If you've spent any real time in Scripture, you know how theologically thin that ground is, and how dangerous it becomes when it's fed to a congregation that trusts their pastor to feed them something true.
I did what I was trained to do, and what I believe any minister with a conscience is obligated to do: I raised the concern. I put it in writing, in an email, because I wanted a record and I wanted to be precise about what I was seeing and why it worried me theologically. I wasn't trying to embarrass him. I wasn't trying to stage a coup. I was trying to have the kind of hard, honest conversation that colleagues in ministry are supposed to be able to have with each other.
He told me the conversation was over. Cut off, just like that. No real engagement with the substance of what I'd raised — just a door closing.
So I did the next thing polity allows for: I asked for elder intervention. That's not a radical move. That's the system working as designed — when a staff conflict can't be resolved between two people, you bring in the governing body that exists for exactly that purpose.
I was terminated.
Let that sit for a second. I didn't go around him. I didn't go to the congregation. I didn't leak anything or stage a public confrontation. I used the process that the church itself had built for handling disagreement, and the process delivered me a pink slip. I've thought about that a lot since — about how often the "proper channels" a Black staff member is told to use turn out to be the very channels that end his employment once he uses them.
Bridgewater UMC is the hardest one for me to write about, honestly, because it's the one with the least anger in it and the most grief.
I loved those families. I mean that without qualification. Three years there, and it was some of the most genuine, warm ministry relationship I'd experienced in a white congregation up to that point. I wasn't fighting for my dignity every week. I was doing the actual work — visiting the sick, teaching, walking with families through hard seasons, building something with people who, as far as I could tell, actually wanted me there.
Then a new pastor came. White, male, and — this part matters — someone I genuinely tried to build a relationship with. I didn't wait for him to reach out to me. I initiated. I tried to involve him in ministry planning, to hand him context on the families we served, to make the transition collaborative instead of territorial. I wanted him to succeed, and I wanted us to succeed together.
He brushed it off. Not dramatically — there was no blowup, no confrontation I could point to and say "there, that's where it went wrong." Just a slow, not responding to emails or text to go over schedule lead to steady disengagement. And then, right before the start of a new school year — a timing that gutted the families I'd built relationships with, kids who'd have to start the fall without the person who'd walked with them — I got an email. My position had been eliminated.
Not "we need to talk." Not a conversation. An email, timed to land right when it would do the most damage to the ministries I'd spent three years building, informing me the role no longer existed. There wasn't even a opportunity to say goodbye or an invite to come to Sunday church to be recognized.
I want to name something here, because I think it's one of the truest and least-discussed dynamics in white church spaces: a Black staff member's job security is almost always tied to the personal comfort of whoever currently holds power, not to the quality or fruit of his work. Three years of faithful, loved, effective ministry didn't buy me any institutional standing. It bought me the goodwill of a congregation and a predecessor pastor — goodwill that evaporated the moment a new white leader decided he didn't need to build on what I'd started.
The last one is the most recent, and it's the one that finally, fully clarified things for me.
I applied. I waited — three months of the process, the interviews, the vetting, the getting-to-know-you conversations that these processes require. Eventually, I received an offer. A real offer, in writing. I signed it.
The day after I signed, I was told there were "questions" about my past involvement with Black Lives Matter.
I knew immediately where this was going. You develop a kind of second sense for it after enough years of this — a feeling in your chest before your mind has even finished processing what's being said to you. I knew, the moment those words were spoken, that the job I had just signed for no longer belonged to me in any real sense, whatever the paper said.
The next day, the offer was rescinded.
I want to sit with the absurdity of the sequence for a second, because I think it's important: they interviewed me, presumably researched me, extended a formal written offer, and I signed it — and then, only after ink was on paper, did my past public support for Black lives suddenly become disqualifying. Whatever "questions" they claimed to have about my history didn't emerge from nowhere the day after I signed. They emerged from somewhere, from someone, who decided that a Black minister publicly affirming that Black lives matter was a bridge too far for their pulpit — but only found the courage, or the votes, or the nerve to act on it once the ink had dried and the private conversations that offers set off inside a congregation had run their course.
That is not a hiring process. That is a filtering process, and I was the thing being filtered out, one day too late for it to look clean.
I didn't want to write this as four isolated grievances. I've read Isaac Adams's essay for 9Marks, "Why White Churches Are Hard for Black People," more than once over the years, and every time I re-read it, I recognize my own résumé in it. Adams names a set of dynamics that white churches tend to produce, often without anyone in leadership intending to produce them at all, and I want to hold my four stories up against a few of them, because I think naming the pattern matters more than naming any single villain.
Privilege shows up as the freedom to ignore. Adams points out that white congregants and leaders have the standing to simply not think about the issues that shape Black experience, while Black staff and members don't get that luxury — those issues live in our bodies whether the majority wants to engage them or not. Every one of my four situations bears this out. Nobody at Falls Church had to reckon with why a Black associate pastor's pastoral judgment kept getting second-guessed by administrative staff. Nobody at Bridgewater had to reckon with what it costs a Black man to build three years of trust only to watch it get erased by email. The privilege isn't usually cruelty. It's the freedom to never have to notice.
Black ministers are welcomed as long as they don't disturb anything. Adams writes about black people being treated more like projects than peers — useful for the appearance of diversity, but not trusted with real authority to challenge, question, or lead change. Look at the through-line in my own history: at Herndon, the moment I exercised the actual authority my role was supposed to carry — questioning theology in writing, invoking the church's own process for resolving disagreement — the response wasn't dialogue. It was termination. Authority for a Black pastor, in these spaces, tends to be theoretical right up until the moment he tries to use it.
"Proper channels" work differently depending on who's using them. This isn't a point Adams makes in so many words, but it's the connective tissue between Herndon and Falls Church for me. I used the systems each church had built — chain of command, elder boards, formal complaints — exactly as designed. In both cases, using those systems in good faith is the thing that ended my employment. I don't think that's a coincidence repeated twice. I think it's a design feature nobody wants to admit is a design feature.
The rescission at Pittsford is what happens when the mask finally slips. Adams opens his essay quoting Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem about the mask Black people wear in a white world — the smile that covers the wound. For most of my career, the mask stayed on. Churches found softer language: role eliminations, performance concerns, "it just wasn't a fit." Pittsford didn't even bother with the mask. They told me, plainly, that my public support for Black lives had become a "question" worth rescinding a signed offer over. That is not a subtle dynamic. That is the thing Adams's whole essay is circling, stated out loud, in writing, the day after I'd already signed.
I share all of this not because I think every white Christian, or every white church, is complicit in what happened to me. Adams says as much in his own essay — these patterns aren't true of every white church or every white person, and I believe that, because I've met individual white believers along the way who saw me clearly and treated me with real integrity. But patterns are patterns precisely because they show up across different buildings, different denominations, different decades of my life, with different specific characters playing the same institutional role. Four churches. Four different sets of leadership. The same basic shape, over and over.
I know how this reads. I know the temptation is to file it under "aggrieved former employee airs grievances," and I'd be lying if I told you there's no grief in these pages, because there is. Grief for the families at Bridgewater I didn't get to say a proper goodbye to. Grief for the ministry at Herndon I believe could have flourished if a hard conversation had been allowed to actually happen. Grief, even, for Pittsford — for the congregation that will never know what could have been built there, because someone decided my past activism disqualified me before I'd preached a single sermon.
But I didn't write this to relitigate four job losses. I wrote it because I think the question — why is Sunday still the most segregated hour in America? — deserves an honest answer from someone who has lived on the inside of that segregation, not just studied it from a distance. And I think the honest answer is the one I gave at the start: it is the way white churches, as institutions, have chosen to keep it. Not every leader. Not every member. But often enough, at high enough a level, with enough consistency across a decade and four different congregations, that I no longer believe it's coincidence.
Here's where I land, though, and it's not despair.
After everything — the settlement, the terminations, the rescinded offer — I could have concluded that vocational ministry in mixed or majority-white spaces simply isn't safe for a Black man, and walked away from it altogether. There were seasons I came close to that conclusion. But I keep coming back to something underneath all four of these stories: in every one of them, I wasn't trying to burn anything down. I was trying to build — a healthier staff culture, a theologically sound pulpit, a genuine partnership with new leadership, a ministry home for my family. The building kept getting interrupted. It never stopped being what I actually wanted to do.
So that's what I'm doing now, here in Rochester. I'm not interested in relitigating the past four churches by trying to force a fifth one to finally get it right. I'm interested in building something new from the ground up — a church culture where color, quite simply, does not determine whose ministry decisions get questioned, whose contributions get valued, whose future gets protected when leadership changes, or whose past activism gets treated as a liability instead of a witness.
I don't say "color doesn't matter" the way it's often used — as a way to avoid seeing people, the very move Adams warns against in his essay, where trying to be "colorblind" quietly tells Black believers that the church has no room for who they actually are. I mean something more specific: a place where being Black doesn't come with an asterisk on your authority, an expiration date on your welcome, or a background check on your convictions. A place where a secretary doesn't get to overrule a pastor because of what he looks like. Where a hard theological question gets a hard theological answer instead of a severance email. Where a new leader's arrival is a beginning, not a countdown. Where three months of interviews and a signed offer actually mean something the next morning.
I've spent a decade learning, church by church, what doesn't work. I know exactly what I'm building against now. And for the first time in a long time, that clarity feels less like a wound and more like a foundation.
Sunday morning doesn't have to stay the most segregated hour in America. I don't believe that because I'm naive about what I've been through. I believe it because I've decided to stop waiting for someone else's institution to prove it, and start proving it myself.
I've held off on saying this plainly until the end, because I wanted the four stories to stand on their own first. But I don't think I can write honestly about why Sunday is still segregated without naming where I believe this pattern has culminated in recent years: MAGA Christianity.
I want to be precise about what I mean, because the phrase gets thrown around loosely. I'm not talking about every Christian who has ever voted for a particular candidate or party. I'm talking about a fusion I've watched take shape inside white congregations over the last decade — the same decade I've just walked you through — where Christian nationalism, grievance politics, and a "Make America Great Again" political identity get treated as compatible with, sometimes indistinguishable from, the gospel itself. I believe that fusion is an oxymoron. You cannot build your political identity on nostalgia for an America that was "great" for some at the direct expense of others, and call that the same faith that produced the Good Samaritan, the early church's radical economic sharing, or a Savior who was executed by an empire for threatening its order. Those two things are not the same tree. They cannot both be the fruit of the same root.
Here is what troubles me more than the existence of MAGA Christianity itself, though: the silence around it. In every one of the four churches I've described, I never heard a sermon, an elder meeting, or a congregational conversation where MAGA-aligned politics inside the church were named as a problem worth confronting with the same seriousness that, say, a disputed budget line or a worship style disagreement would receive. White Christians who would never personally use the language of Christian nationalism nonetheless sat in the same pews, served on the same sessions and elder boards, and said nothing while it grew louder around them. Adams's essay names this same dynamic in a different key — the discomfort or the not-knowing-what-they-don't-know that leads white believers to go mute rather than engage. I think that silence, extended long enough, stops being passive. It becomes its own form of endorsement. A church that will not name what is happening in its own membership is, functionally, tolerating it, and tolerance without resistance is how a fringe becomes a majority.
This is not an abstract concern for me. I was told, after my offer at First Presbyterian Church of Pittsford was rescinded, that one of the church's elders had run for local office in Monroe County under the MAGA banner. I want to be careful here, because I wasn't in the room for whatever conversation led to my offer being pulled, and I can't independently verify what role, if any, that elder's politics played in the "questions" I was suddenly told existed about my past support for Black Lives Matter. I'm reporting what I was told, not asserting something I witnessed firsthand. But I'd be lying to you and to myself if I said the timing and the politics felt unrelated. A congregation that has an elder running for office under a MAGA banner, and that same week discovers it has "questions" about a Black candidate's public support for Black lives, is not a coincidence I'm willing to pretend I don't see.
This is why I don't think the story I'm telling you is really about four bad experiences with four difficult individuals. I think it's about a slow, mostly silent tolerance that has let something genuinely incompatible with the gospel take root inside institutions that call themselves Christian — and I think that tolerance is precisely why this problem is not improving. It is getting worse. The mask Dunbar wrote about, the one Adams opens his essay with, used to at least require white Christian spaces to disguise the exclusion, to dress it up as something else — a personality conflict, a budget cut, a "fit" issue. What I'm describing now doesn't always bother with the disguise anymore. It shows up in elder meetings and campaign signs and doesn't feel the need to apologize for itself.
That's precisely why the work in Rochester matters to me as much as it does. It's not enough to build a church where color doesn't determine your standing. It has to also be a church willing to say, out loud and often, that there is no room at the table for a political identity built on exclusion — no quiet tolerance, no averted eyes, no elder board that treats it as someone else's business. Silence was the soil MAGA Christianity grew in. I don't intend to offer it that soil twice.
So here's where all of this is taking me. I'm not planting one church in Rochester. I'm working on five. (Learn more at www.SMSNovel.com)
One for the activist — the person who has been told, in church after church, that their conviction about justice is a distraction from "the real gospel," when it has never been anything but the gospel lived out loud.
One for the senior — the person who has given a lifetime to the church and has watched, too many times, as new leadership treats their decades of faithfulness as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a foundation to be honored.
One for the Deaf community, built in ASL from the ground up — not an interpreter stationed off to the side of someone else's service, but worship that belongs, natively and fully, to a Deaf congregation.
One for the foodie — because I believe some of the deepest fellowship happens over a shared table, and a church that gathers people around real food, cooked and shared with care, is doing something the New Testament would recognize immediately.
And one for those who need laughter — because grief and gravity aren't the only faithful postures. Joy is a discipline too, and some people need a church that will hand them permission to laugh again before it hands them anything else.
Five plants. One conviction underneath all of them: nobody should have to shrink, code-switch, or wait at the margins of somebody else's institution to find a church home that actually sees them. If my pain has taught me anything over this past decade, it's that I am not a unique case. I believe there are thousands of people like me in Rochester right now — people who've been pushed out, overlooked, tokenized, or quietly filtered out the way I was — who are still waiting for someone to build the thing they've been looking for instead of asking them, again, to make do with what already exists. That's the work now. Not one more attempt to finally be let all the way into someone else's church. Five new front doors, built by someone who knows exactly what it feels like to be shown the back one.
Jomo K. Johnson has served in vocational ministry for over a decade across Presbyterian and United Methodist congregations in Virginia and New York. He is currently building a new ministry in Rochester, New York.
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