Tom Skinner

Learn about the influential Black evangelist

Tom Skinner died 30 years ago this June.

After a short bout with leukemia he passed away on June 17, 1994. He was just 52 years old.

In that short time he made an indelible, if under-appreciated, mark on the landscape of evangelicalism in the United States, and on me.

I first learned about Tom Skinner around 2015 from a friend who told me about this Black evangelical who message and story resembled mine.

He was a Black Chistian who closely interacted with white evangelicals. Their acceptance of him depended on him “sticking to the gospel” and not talking about so-called social issues.

When he did, he faced their anger and ostracism. Yet he remained faithful to Jesus and to his calling to preach the gospel in all its heavenly and earthly implications.

Skinner was a remarkable preacher and evangelist. Early in his ministry, some referred to him as “the Black Billy Graham” and white evangelicals celebrated him.

He preached to crowds of inner city Black people and connected with his audiences in a way white evangelicals never could, if they tried at all.

“All the pictures of Christ were pictures of an Anglo-Saxon, middle-class, Protestant Republican. There is no way that I can relate to that kind of Christ.”

But he soon fell out of favor with many white evangelicals because, in the tumult of the late 1960s and 1970s, Skinner insisted that the gospel spoke not only to issues of spirituality but racism and material justice.

In the crescendo of his most well-known speech, “the U.S. Racial Crisis and World Evangelism” delivered at an evangelical missions conference he said,

Proclaim liberation to the captives, preach sight to the blind, set at liberty them that are bruised, go into the world and tell men who are bound mentally, spiritually and physically, "The liberator has come!"

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Skinner continued his ministry in various forms. he became chaplain for the football team in Washington dC and committed himself to leadership training and equipping Christians to “infiltrate” the culture with the gospel.

In his work he was joined by fellow Black evangelicals such as Bill Pannell and his second wife, Barbara William Skinner.

There is much more to say and laern about tom Skinner.

Join me for this teach-in today (6/30) at 4 pm ET via Zoom. It’s free but you need to register. See you soon!

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Did you ever meet or hear Tom Skinner preach? Share with us in the comments!