It started like a familiar moment during a Sunday morning service during the holiday season: children stood before the congregation, ready to share what they were thankful for. But a now-viral social media clip from a Dallas church did not unfold as a comforting moment of communal joy. Instead, it exposed something tender and unsettling about how the church sometimes responds to honesty, especially when the truth comes through the fragile voice of a child.
A young girl was asked why she was thankful for her stepmother. Initially hesitating, she reached for words with the kind of courage children often need to tell the truth in front of adults. Once she finally spoke, she made it plain. Her stepmother listens to her in a way her biological mother does not. Rather than receiving her confession with gentleness, an adult declared that “the enemy” was influencing her. The child was then surrounded in a manner meant to mimic an exorcism when what she truly needed was a moment of pastoral care and the guidance of a trained counselor. A moment intended for gratitude shifted into a moment marked by fear, misinterpretation, and the silencing of a vulnerable truth.
This is not a call to condemn the church, but a reminder to call the church back to itself.
The Church Was Born for Justice, Dignity and Truth
The Black church has always been more than a gathering place. It has been a birthplace of movements, a refuge for people carrying generational burdens, and a site where spiritual conviction fueled organized resistance. According to a 2024 study by Valerie L. Myers, historically Black churches served as centers of economic support, education, political organizing, mutual aid and emotional refuge for African American communities.
This legacy shapes people’s communal expectations of what the church should represent. Those expectations generally are not that truth will not be punished, vulnerability will not be dismissed, and the church will be a place where people are held with dignity.
However, Myers’ research also reveals that many contemporary congregations struggle to carry the weight of this historic calling. According to her findings, Black churches now offer an average of 2.5 social programs, and nearly one-third offer none. This does not reflect a lack of compassion or calling. Instead, it shows that some congregations lack the depth of infrastructure needed to meet the full range of emotional, social and communal needs in today’s world.
Spiritual Bypassing Cannot Replace Pastoral Care
Although difficult to accept, the leaders at the Dallas church would stand and say that the moment was not meant to be rooted in malice. While grossly misguided, it reflected a sincere but misdirected spiritual reflex. Many churches hold strong moral and traditional norms, but, according to Myers, these norms often do not translate into programs and actions that address the emotional, relational or psychological needs associated with them.
This creates environments in which spiritual language is used to respond to situations that actually require emotional discernment and professional intervention. When adults more readily identify discomfort as a spiritual attack instead of an expression of pain, they bypass what is human in favor of what they presume is holy. Spiritual bypassing is when religious language replaces the difficult work of care and when ritual becomes more important than relationship. And a child should never have to fear telling the truth in church.
But Jesus never bypassed pain. He spoke to the heart of people’s wounds and listened to stories that others dismissed. Jesus also dignified people before He directed them. His ministry treated truth as the beginning of healing, not the beginning of correction.
Prayer Needs Partners. Policy, Advocacy, and Preparation Matter
The belief that God will make a way is one of the pillars of Black faith. But history teaches us that God often works through strategy, systems and collective action. According to Myers, major movements shaped by the Black church, including the rise of HBCUs, the Negro Health Movement, and the Civil Rights Movement, succeeded because faith partnered with advocacy, education and policy engagement.
The study makes this point unmistakably clear: it is unrealistic to assume that churches can meet all the unmet needs of African American communities without broader structural support, technical training and policy partnerships.
If we want the church to remain a place of justice, then discipleship must include emotional literacy, trauma-informed care, child development, mental health collaboration and partnerships with practitioners who understand the complexities of Black life today.
Justice is not separate from discipleship; it is discipleship.
This Is Not a Crisis of Condemnation. It Is a Moment of Invitation
The Dallas video alone is not evidence that the church has lost its power. It is, however. evidence that the church is being called to reclaim its purpose and call in and call out those who perpetuate harm as doctrinal divinity. The Black church has always moved in cycles of expansion, contraction and renewal, often reigniting in seasons of community crisis. We are living in such a season. Jesus never punished honesty, and he never rebuked vulnerability. If the church is to follow Him, then it must build communities where truth is not treated like trouble and where every child learns and experiences the safety of the sanctuary.