Died: Bill Pannell, Black Evangelical Who Raised the Issue of Racism

Bill Pannell, a Black evangelical who pushed white evangelicals to recognize their captivity to the culture of American racism, died on October 11 at age 95. 

The evangelist and seminary professor argued that the Good News is all about reconciliation—between God and humanity, but also horizontally, between people—and Christians are called to the ministry of reconciliation. But white Christians who claimed the name evangel, he said, could only seem to muster occasional interest in racism, even though it was the most acute division in American society, the area in the greatest need of reconciliation. 

And then they mostly asked Black people to do the reconciling.

“It’s like inviting someone to comment on the quality of the dinner when you haven’t [invited them] to the table,” Pannell said in the 2024 documentary The Gospel According to Bill Pannell. “Most of the evangelical movement could only go so far. They could only go so far.”

Pannell wrote about his experience of racism in My Friend, The Enemy, published in 1968. He described how pervasive assumptions of white supremacy impacted him and his sense of dignity and worth, growing up. He found his dignity restored by the gospel, but then discovered, to his dismay, that the people who preached it to him were not interested in addressing the social problems caused by that sort of sin.

Twenty-five years later, he wrote about racism again. Watching the city of Los Angeles consumed by six days of riots following the acquittal of four police officers who severely beat a Black man named Rodney King, Pannell warned white evangelicals about the possibility of a coming race war. Americans could not afford to keep ignoring the problems caused by racism, he argued, and Christians are uniquely called to reconciliation.

The book was republished 28 years after that, in 2021, as four more officers in another city appeared in another court to face more charges of “unreasonable force” following the death of a Black man named George Floyd. Pannell couldn’t help but notice that while the names and dates had changed, the problem persisted. And white evangelicals still seemed captive to a culture deeply invested in ignoring the issue.

“Somehow or other in my lifetime,” Pannell said, “the evangelical movement became more and more American and less and less Christian.”

Pannell was born on June 25, 1929, to William and Olive Davison Pannell. He was the eldest of eight children and was raised as part of a tiny Black minority in Sturgis, Michigan. The census counted fewer than 200 Black people in Sturgis in 1930, which was less than half a percent of the population of St. Joseph County. Some of the Black people, like Pannell’s stepfather, Joseph Perkins, wouldn’t have lived there at all, but they had jobs just across the border in Indiana in towns where they weren’t allowed to stay after dark.

Pannell recalled later he never heard the word racism as a child, and yet the sense of it pervaded everything.

“I was aware that I was different and that the difference made a difference in a white world,” he said. “You belong and yet you don’t. You are embraced—but not really.”

Pannell excelled in sports and was a high-scoring shooting guard for the basketball team. And yet off the court, he was not accepted as an equal by his peers or their parents. He was not made to feel welcome.

The one significant exception was Eunice Randall. A pastor’s daughter, she invited Pannell to a party for young people at Sturgis Missionary Church. He went and found a community of people eager to embrace him. Pannell started attending the church, went forward during an altar call, and accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior. 

The church gave Pannell a Bible and told him to read it. He did—and discovered a sense of worth and dignity he’d never known before. He was peeling potatoes at a segregated country club and reading Ephesians 1:4–14 when it hit him.

“To think that God has chosen me before the foundations of the world—had his eye on me, chose me, picked me out, plucked me out of the tribe as it were, made me his own. If that’s true, whew! Lord have mercy,” Pannell later said. “I really am somebody, no matter what anybody else says.”

After high school, Pannell went to Fort Wayne Bible College with the encouragement and financial support of a Black housekeeper, or “domestic,” named Mildred Bedford. She had somehow saved $500 and gave it to him, he recalled in the 2024 documentary, telling him he needed to “strike while the iron’s hot.”

In Fort Wayne, he learned he needed to go out into “all the world” to preach the gospel, but received very little education about that world, Pannell later recalled.

“I didn’t know from beans,” he said.

Nevertheless, the young Black man became an evangelist, traveling around the country with white classmates to lead revivals and crusades, calling people to come forward, confess their sins, and accept Jesus. It gave Pannell another perspective on American racism. Christians across the country were happy to have him lead the singing as people got saved, he noticed, but they wouldn’t want him to live in their communities.

“A singing Negro has always been welcome,” he wrote in My Friend, The Enemy, “as long as he is a vagabond.” 

Pannell said evangelicals in the north were not fighting to maintain segregation—but he noticed they wouldn’t speak out against it either. Their silence seemed to handcuff him to his suitcase, he wrote, making sure he never unpacked, never made himself at home.

Pannell decided he needed to learn more from Black Christians. At 25, he moved to Detroit to work under B. M. Nottage, a Plymouth Brethren minister from the Bahamas who evangelized in Black communities across the US. Nottage and his two older brothers started gospel halls and Brethren assemblies in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit. In the Detroit alone, they founded Gospel Chapel, Grace Gospel Chapel, Berean Bible Chapel, River Rouge Bible Chapel, the Open Door Rescue Mission, and Bethany Tabernacle, where Pannell joined Nottage as an associate pastor in 1954.

The young evangelist considered Nottage a mentor and a father figure. Pannell lived with him in a back room and in 1955 married his secretary, Hazel Scott, who was from Memphis. 

After a decade, Pannell went back to working with white evangelicals. In 1964, he joined Youth For Christ, the evangelistic ministry that launched Billy Graham’s career. 

He quickly found himself unsettled, however, by the way white evangelicals cared about Black people’s souls but not their civil rights, economic conditions, educational opportunities, or housing. When practical issues impacting the well being of Black people came up, Pannell said, the white evangelicals objected that they didn’t want to get distracted by politics. Other issues, however, did not seem like a distraction: prayer in schools, liberals on the Supreme Court, and communism around the globe.

Some problems seemed to merit social and political action, “but mention the inhumanity of a society which with unbelievable indifference imprisons ‘the souls of black folks,’” Pannell wrote, “and these crusaders begin mumbling about sin.” He tried to argue the impact of racism couldn’t just be waved away like that but was mostly unsuccessful.

Much of white evangelicalism seemed to be captured by the culture of the suburbs, Pannell said. As white people fled cities following desegregation, white evangelicals went with them. Born-again Christians came to identify so strongly with their white, middle-class, family-focused, conservative communities, Pannell said, that they found it impossible to understand or even consider the concerns of their minority brothers and sisters.

In the 1990s he pointed to Christianity Today as an example.

“It ought to be called Suburban Christianity Today,” he wrote in The Coming Race Wars. “Its board of directors comes from suburbia, as do most of its writers, most of its editors, and all of its management elite. Not surprisingly, this is reflected in the values espoused in the magazine.”

There were some white evangelicals, of course, who did want to address the problem of American racism. Pannell said they expressed hope for racial reconciliation and encouraged him and other Black evangelicals to work on the issue. But their focus would quickly wander, their interest fade. Few seemed committed to anything that would require change.

“Long after all the coffee was drunk and the little sandwiches eaten, the uneasy smiles were retracted and it became clear that reconciliation with most of these saints was still a ways off,” Pannell said. “In fact, it was a long ways off.”

He came to believe that, in the meantime, white evangelicals didn’t have the moral authority to evangelize Black people. Ignoring the reality of racism undermined their ability to proclaim the gospel.

“Don’t preach love to me. Especially if you intend I do all the loving,” Pannell wrote. “What right has the oppressor to demand that his victim be saved from sin? You may be scripturally and evangelistically correct, but you are ethically wrong. You have the right message, but your timing is off.”

Pannell wrote his book on racism, and it came out in 1968, the same year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and it seemed like hope for peaceful change vanished in America. Pannell left Youth For Christ and joined a group of Black evangelists led by Tom Skinner. Pannell thought he was done with white evangelicals.

A few years later, however, he was approached by David Allan Hubbard, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, and asked to join the board of trustees. Pannell wasn’t interested. But Hubbard argued the evangelical school was not interested in affirmative action of symbolic representations of diversity. Fuller believed Black leadership was essential to its mission.

“Almost everybody needed one of us,” Pannell said. “He didn’t seem to be playing that game. He said, ‘We don’t think we can model the kingdom of God well monoculturally.’ Whoa!”

Pannell joined the board in 1971, becoming the first Black board member. He left the board to join the faculty in ’74, becoming the first Black professor. He ran an innovative program for the theological education of Black pastors, which later became the African American Church Studies Program and in 2015 was renamed the William E. Pannell Center for Black Church Studies.

Pannell spent the rest of his career teaching and mentoring Black ministers. He was, on occasion, drawn back to the task of challenging white evangelicals to take racism seriously but noted that despite “some paroxysms of curiosity” about the theology of racial reconciliation, little seemed to change.

And yet he continued to believe that white evangelicals could change.

“The evangelical movement could be born again,” Pannell said. “I would issue a call back to the cross, back to repentance, and I would ask that God would, somehow or other, save us from our cultural captivity.”

Pannell’s eldest son, Philip, died in 2015; his wife, Hazel, died in 2021. He is survived by his son Peter.

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