The Gospel According to Bill Pannell

Bill Pannell touched the lives of countless legions of others, including me

Bill Pannell died on Friday, October 11, at 95 years old. Bill Pannell 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 Bill Pannell’s life premiered at Fuller Theological Seminary. I strongly recommend that anyone who cares about the gospel of Jesus Christ watch this remarkable story of a Black evangelical in America.

Bill loved Jesus, and his son Peter told me that he could hear his father talking with Jesus throughout the day in home hospice care right up until he laid down in bed and couldn’t talk anymore. Bill Pannell 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 about ten years, and he inspired the William E. Pannell Center for Black Church Studies which continues on today at Fuller.

Bill Pannell 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, who were and are still so different from white evangelicals in America. And that made all the difference in this disciples pilgrimage that has now been documented for us. Throughout his whole life and ministry, he was an evangelist bringing people to Christ, but would never leave race out of the gospel message–as the 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.

As a white kid growing up in Detroit, 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. 

Pursuing those questions led me to Bill Pannell. People always loved Bill Pannell’s big and easy smile, and I remember his smile when I asked him my many questions after I would hear him speak a message that felt to me like what the gospel of Jesus was supposed to be–but wasn’t in my white world or church. Bill always wanted to bring the world into his message of Christ, not just ignore the world while telling people how they could escape the world and go to heaven. There was no escaping the world or not hearing how the gospel meant to change that world, when listening to Bill Pannell preach. In 1968, he wrote a book called My Friend the Enemy, which became a defining reality for me too as a young white man as I grew into a world where white Christians were the problem. The title of Bill’s book still stands for me today as an old man, as does the title of one of my other mentors' books, this one by a white man named William Stringfellow, called My People is the Enemy.

I used to kid Bill that he was the first Christian I ever met who regularly read the New York Review of Books, one of the most scholarly publications of our time. Bill was always a scholar, always learning, always relating the good news of Jesus to the real world that people lived in–especially those outsiders who felt the way he did–a Black man left outside the church by his white brothers and sisters inside the church. He confirmed for me how that was the biggest issue, the biggest problem, the biggest thing wrong with the American churches. And he became an elder to me for the rest of my life. 

Even more ironically and revealingly, Bill Pannell was a leader in the Black Plymouth Brethren churches in Detroit, the same churches I came from! When I asked my church why they had never told me about the Black churches in our city, 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. Bill kept smiling at all my questions.

Bill Pannell went on to work with Youth for Christ, before he left them to work alongside an evangelist from Harlem named Tom Skinner. The Pannell documentary has a powerful section on the famous keynote address Skinner preached to thousands of young people at Intervarsity’s annual conference in Urbana, Illinois in 1970, telling them that the true gospel message sets people free both spiritually and physically. So instead of just wanting to go to heaven, they needed to live and practice the gospel of the kingdom of God, “on earth as it is in heaven,” which the Lord’s Prayer calls us to do, and where Jesus’ message “sets the captives free” and “liberates the oppressed.” A thundering standing ovation followed from a mostly white crowd of students joining Black students on their feet. 

But what followed after that was many white evangelical critics attacking Skinner and Pannell for being “too political.” We started Sojourners about that same time, and with that same message. And to this day, when you speak about racism and poverty, you are called too political but the highly politicized message of White Christian Nationalism in support of Donald Trump is not a problem–painfully still for a majority of white evangelicals. 

I can remember an elder from my white Plymouth Brethren church taking me aside back then, being worried about all my trips into “the inner city” working with Black men and listening to Black preachers. He felt he needed to tell me, “Son, Christianity has nothing to do with racism. That’s political and our faith is personal.” That was the moment when I left my white Christianity behind and joined the secular student movements of my time against racism, poverty, and war. Because, if the religion that raised me had nothing to do with what was now turning my life upside down, then I wanted nothing to do with it either. But I never got quite shed of Jesus and the lives and witness of Black Christians like Bill Pannell and many others helped, eventually, to bring me back to faith.

I recall so many conversations and times with Bill Pannell over so many years, including my last visit with him just a few months ago in Pasadena. In 1973, we were assigned as the final two editors of the historic Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern on the night before the last day of a unique conference of younger and older evangelical leaders gathered together and issuing a statement that would be hardly recognizable as “evangelical” today. Bill and I also talked about this election, and how embarrassing white evangelical politics has become, as he put it “more and more American, and less and less Christian.” 

Son Peter also told me how when the hospice workers came to care for his Dad at home, they said to Bill,  “I know you, we came here to care for your wife Hazel (Bill’s beloved wife of nearly seventy years), and you were so loving to us. It’s so good to be back to be with you now.” That’s what Bill Pannell always did, try to love everyone around him because that’s what he believed Jesus would do.

Bill ends the documentary about his life with the word “integrity.” That word defined his whole life and he wanted that to be his legacy. White evangelicalism in America has lost its integrity. But the integrity of the gospel was what Bill Pannell was faithful to while most of his white brothers and sisters just left too many things out which are at the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Many people right now are filled with deep dread at how white American evangelicals are bringing a spirit of fear and hate into our world and politics. But Bill Pannell learned long ago that God “so loved the world,” enough to bring Jesus into it, and whose message he has tried to follow. I think he would counsel all of us these days, just to show our integrity by living out the gospel of Jesus with integrity, no matter what happens around us. That’s what Bill Pannell attempted to do with his life 

That’s why I recommend for you to now watch this incredible documentary. You will learn more about Jesus. To many of us, he was a prophet of God, but to his family and all those close he was just a wonderful man, husband, father, grandfather, friend, and teacher who always had that smile for you. Bill Pannell will always be an elder to me. May his soul rest in peace but ours continue to be activated and nourished by his spirit of just following Jesus.