In the summer of 1993, Vince Bacote (pronounced bay-coat) was a graduate student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School trying to make sense of a conference on black evangelicalism he had just attended at Geneva College, a Christian college in western Pennsylvania.
“The experience was incredible and vexing all at once,” he said. Vince felt intellectually stimulated, while simultaneously feeling vexed by critiques he heard about mainstream evangelicalism. When classes resumed in the fall, he wrote an article entitled “Black and Evangelical: An Uneasy Tension.”
For years, Vince forgot about that piece. But his reflections as a 20-something became the seed for Black + Evangelical, a documentary that premiered in February 2025 and was released in June 2025. Produced by Christianity Today and Wheaton College as part of CT’s Big Tent Initiative, the film includes the voices of over 20 African American men and women who contributed to and challenged the evangelical world over the past 75 years.
“When people think of who tells stories about Christianity and evangelicals, they think of CT,” Vince said. “So for CT to be involved in telling that story is vital. CT’s Big Tent Initiative helps impact the church by partnering with others like me to help bring important stories to the broader church and world,” says Vince.
CT’s Big Tent Initiative is building bridges within the American Church across racial, denominational, and political divides. Projects like Black + Evangelical help bring to light the stories of American Christians that need to be heard.
As the documentary recounts, the American evangelical movement has not historically been a racially inclusive one. Though Billy Graham famously banned organizers from segregating his crusades, he declined to join Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington. Throughout the past several decades, racism and politics have often made white evangelical spaces hostile, uncomfortable, or inhospitable for many Black Bible-believing Christians.
“I want minorities who are evangelicals to know that their experience is not a unique experience. There are other people who have been where they’ve been,” says Vince.
The work is deeply personal to Vince, who has spent his entire professional life in historically white evangelical spaces. Today, Vince is a professor of theology at Wheaton, where he has worked for 26 years. But during his decades in the evangelical world, he has witnessed fellow Black Christians wrestle with the movement, decry it, and leave it.
“There’s a lot of discourse about what the evangelical movement really is. It’s fine to have these critiques, but I wanted to do something that’s not mainly a critique but ultimately something that leaves people with hope,” he said. “No experience of life in the church is without complication.”
The genesis of the project goes back to 2008, when Vince attended an event at Fuller Seminary for Black evangelicals and reconnected with Ron Potter, a scholar he first met at the Geneva College conference in 1993. As he listened to Potter throughout many discussions that weekend, he recognized that he had a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the figures and events in the last 70 years of black evangelicalism.
“I thought it’d be a great idea to put Ron in front of a camera and feed him questions,” said Vince.
Vince particularly wanted to build up the archive of information about Black evangelicals. He had found writing about this community, compared to research about the traditional black church, to be sparse.
“It’s important for people to understand that however you’re going to talk about black Christians in the United States, you also have to include this as part of what you’re talking about,” he said.
That same year, Vince mentioned his idea of an oral history project to Ed Gilbreath, who then served as director of digital and consumer media at UMI and had founded UrbanFaith.com. They picked up the conversation again in 2020, after Ed returned to Christianity Today as The Big Tent Initiative director. (He had two prior stints at the ministry.) Wheaton wanted to bring Potter to campus, and Gilbreath suggested that Christianity Today partner with the archival project, a proposal that Vince eagerly embraced.
Vince got to work, and what started as one 80-minute interview with Potter developed over the next three years into 24 interviews and 40 hours of video footage. He noted his conversation with Bill Pannell, a renowned professor and preacher from Fuller Seminary, who passed away last fall, as a particular highlight.
“He told me it was important for people to be both black and evangelical,” he said. “Bring your whole self, rather than censoring yourself. To me, that’s huge.”
As he worked on the project, Vince was connected with Dan Long, a filmmaker and alum of Fuller Seminary, and they decided to turn the interviews into a documentary, which they knew would give their material far more reach.
Vince appreciated that Christianity Today and Wheaton both jumped in on the project, noting that their presence helped raise money and attention to the project.
“CT is a valuable and trusted voice for helping us understand important stories and trends in the world, full of challenges old and new,” said Vince. “I have benefited from a wealth of resources over the decades, and CT continues to be a media ministry that helps the Church have greater discernment and faithfulness in a world that needs to encounter the greatest news of all.”
Beyond someone like himself as the target audience, Vince sees the film as also speaking to someone who grew up in a Baptist, AME, or other Black Church denominations before attending Wheaton or joining an evangelical Bible study. He also hopes it resonates with non-white Christians as well as the broader evangelical movement and church at large.
About 300 attended the film’s premiere earlier this year. When it ended, the audience gave it a standing ovation.
“It was shocking in the most positive way,” said Vince.
“I’ve gotten unsolicited emails from people talking about how seeing it has been helpful and informative and how it has resonated with them because it is connected with their experience,” he said. “For others, it is telling a story that they didn’t know that much about, and they see how much they need to much there is for them to learn about, and they’re willing to do that learning.”
