I was eighteen when I surrendered my life to Jesus. I had been raised in the church, cradled in pews, fed on hymns, but somewhere between heartbreak and defiance, between the independence I gripped like a prize and the misrepresentations of God that blurred my vision, I let it slip through my fingers. My mother had planted seeds of faith, but I was a man of my own making—or so I thought. Months before college, I found myself at the Georgia Dome, a face in a sea of believers for Passion Conference. And there, caught between the weight of my own rebellion and the boundless mercy of God, I saw something I had never seen before: glory, grace, and worship that wasn’t performance but surrender.
These ideas—God’s glory, radical grace, extravagant worship—were the anchors of the Passion movement and quickly became anchors for me. But long before Passion gave them a platform, long before they echoed through auditoriums packed with seekers, a North African thinker was already wrestling them into language. Seventeen centuries before I stumbled into that stadium, Saint Augustine of Hippo was doing battle with the same questions.
Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste, a Roman outpost in what is now Algeria. His mother, a devoted Christian, prayed over him and poured faith into him, while his father stood apart, a man of the empire, unclaimed by the Gospel—just like me. Augustine was bright, ambitious, and lost—seeking knowledge, pleasure, status, anything that would quiet the unrest in his soul—just like me. He fathered a child out of wedlock and gained prestige as a scholar, but still, the questions gnawed at him. And then, in a moment of reckoning, the words of Paul in Romans 13 cut through the noise, and Augustine surrendered and got baptized—just like me. Four years later, he was ordained. By 396, he was Bishop of Hippo, a position he would hold until his death.
When I first converted, I was encouraged to pick up Augustine’s Confessions, a spiritual autobiography reflecting on God’s grace in his life. That book gave shape to those three theological anchors that transformed my faith.
“You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”
— St. Augustine
Restlessness is woven into the Black experience, the dissonance of faith passed down in the same hands that once held chains. It is the knowledge that the Gospel was used to justify the whip, and yet, within it, we found a liberation deeper than history itself. Augustine’s words gave voice to a tension I had long felt but never fully named: to be human is to search, to ache, to long for something more.
Augustine understood that we were made for glory—not our own, but God’s. That every restless chase after power, wealth, and validation was just a shadow play, a weary search for something we had turned our backs on. That history itself bends toward God’s majesty and that to reject it is to reject our own design. “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever. Amen.” – Romans 11:36. If sin, then, is the rejection of God’s glory, then the Gospel is the revelation that His glory is fully displayed in redemption.
But think about this—a holy God not only created humanity for Himself, but when we rejected Him, He pursued us again. In his battle against Pelagianism—a teaching that minimized the necessity of divine grace—Augustine stressed our absolute dependence on God’s mercy. He knew that God, in all His power, chooses to love without condition, chase without tiring, and redeem without reluctance, not just displaying grace but radical grace.
And what else could we do in response but worship? Not as routine or ritual but as the natural outpouring of awe. Augustine saw worship not as a ceremony but as a life set ablaze. Worship was more than a song; it was the turning of the soul, the bending of will, the body in motion, testifying to the One who calls it beloved.
In the years since my own conversion, I have heard, time and again, that Christianity is the “white man’s religion.” That my faith is, at best, borrowed and, at worst, brainwashed. That the Gospel was never meant for hands like mine, and as someone who loves the skin God knit me in and the culture He raised me in, I struggled with that accusation. There were moments I wavered, moments when the seminary professors’ quotes of slaveholders, overlooking Black theological heroes, peers at the barbershop debating the tenets of Christianity, or simply the long shadow of history in this country that stubbornly seems destined to repeat itself left me exhausted.
But then I remember: I do not have to twist the scriptures, rewrite history, or code-switch my personhood to love both God and my people. We do not have to bend to belong. Only bow. The truth is, we have always been here. Not just in pews but in pulpits. Not just as converts but as theologians. Not just as hearers of the Word but as its keepers and shapers. From Bishop Noel Jones to Jackie Hill Perry. From Augustine to Athanasius. From the Ethiopian eunuch to Zipporah.
We were made for God’s glory. How else do you explain the rich theological truths carved from study, suffering, and song that have shaped the global church? We are recipients of radical grace. How else do you explain the faith that endures, even when the Gospel was twisted into chains? We must worship extravagantly. How else do you explain the passion of our praise?
I’m not a father yet, but if I’m ever so privileged as to have the opportunity to raise a son in the way of God, I hope to name one of my children after Saint Augustine. I’m forever indebted to his spiritual revelations and anchoring biography, which taught me I have a place too. A North African bishop, a man with melanin in the Roman world, wrestling with the same truths that still shake us today. Our faith is not borrowed—it is ours. And it always has been.
Faith—real faith—isn’t something you inherit, like an old family heirloom. It’s something you wake up to one day, realizing it has been chasing you all along.
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