My early childhood did not include traditional Sunday church services. We would go occasionally, but not consistently. Church was not a part of my life until my tweens.
My family attended a church that described itself as “non-denominational,” “multi-cultural,” and “urban”. The pastor was a white Texan man with pentecostal roots.
As far as multicultural, it did not stay the way. A group of bikers, mostly white, broke off from the congregation and started their own church. Leaving it a black church with a few white folk. After the exodus, the pastor made a comment from the pulpit: “It’s gettin’ kinda dark in here.”
Not long after that statement, the church, whose motto was “taking the city for Jesus”, decided to relocate to the majority white suburbs. The combination of that move and the pastor’s racial microaggression led my family to stop attending. Even though, I had confessed belief in Christ, I would not step foot into another church until my later college years.
For some of us, church hurt includes the voice of pastors from their pulpits expressing racial microaggressions.