A few weeks ago, I received a ton of blowback for asking a question about why the prosperity gospel is more prevalent in black majority churches. I fielded all kinds of accusations, but there was one commentator who stuck up for me and she gave me her perspective. April Chapman had an incredible video on this subject and I wanted to have her on to talk not only about that topic, but also to share her incredible testimony of how God saved her from abortion. She has an incredible pro-life story about going through her own abortions and then God saving her and changing her perspective on life and on children.
00:15:36.860And so it sounds like because you went down after you had had an abortion, there was something in you either that day or even before that felt that what you did was wrong and that there was some kind of brokenness.
00:15:49.880And so a lot of people might not know that prosperity sermons, there is a mixture of truth in it.
00:15:57.360So it's a possibility that you heard something that was true that started to kind of prick your heart, but it was also mixed in with this, well, do this and God will reward you.
00:16:09.860It was the performance of I need to do something so that God will accept me.
00:16:14.920And then it was, oh, this is the key to success in life.
00:16:21.380And I had never heard the prosperity message before that all of my problems would, you know, just disappear and God would be pleased with me if I pursued these things.
00:16:33.180And so I spent years pursuing that, experienced a lot of more brokenness, a lot of more bad relationships.
00:16:40.940And this is what's so, so bothersome and burdensome about that prosperity message is that it never gets, it never preaches to the heart of the matter that it's your indwelling sin.
00:16:53.200It makes you look to something else out there as the solution to make things better.
00:17:00.040And so after years of doing that, I finally meet the guy who is my now husband and he finds out that I go to new birth and he's like, yeah, this, that's going to be a no for me.
00:17:15.260It wasn't the first person that challenged my thoughts about prosperity doctrine, but it was the first person that kind of came to me and just flat out said, that man is a false teacher.
00:17:25.300And if you think I'm going there, you've got another thing coming.
00:17:30.360But that intrigued me because I was like, well, what's wrong with him?
00:17:38.960And so he spent some time just kind of showing me that what he was preaching wasn't in the Bible.
00:17:45.200And that put me on this path of questioning a lot of things, a lot of things about what the Bible actually taught concerning giving and our posture to give and prosperity.
00:17:59.040And through the course of all of that, I would say I did not hear the gospel for the very first time until about 2014, 2015.
00:18:10.740I was on Facebook and there was an individual who basically was saying, nope, that's not true.
00:18:17.820You're dead in your sin and your trespasses.
00:18:22.740It was in the course of a very heated debate and exchange over some other false doctrines that I had affirmed that I was like, that's not true.
00:18:37.740And what that what that disagreement did was drive me to the scriptures.
00:18:41.640And I was brought to my knees in Ephesians 2, where I read where, yes, Paul is explaining to these Ephesian individuals who they are in Christ now.
00:18:57.080But I'm reading it like, wait a minute.
00:19:47.700So we were we I had left there and we were on a journey of some other bad churches that just weren't as bad.
00:19:55.220But the Lord was using my husband who we now realize that he was an infant in the faith and may not have been able to articulate with, you know, theological clarity, all the things that was wrong.
00:20:11.500But he knew enough to know that's unbiblical.
00:20:13.920And if it's not in the scriptures, I can't do it.
00:20:16.720And then the Lord used that and social media, as crazy as social media is, the Lord used it in my salvific journey.
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00:22:13.060What are the altar calls at this church if it's not like, hey, you're a sinner and Jesus died for you?
00:22:19.160I don't recall in the years that I was there ever hearing a plain gospel message preached.
00:22:26.880It was a lot of you are called to win.
00:22:31.520The motto at new birth at the time back then was taking authority.
00:22:35.260So to take authority over your life and your circumstances, we are supposed to be these kingdom people and we're supposed to be conquering and dominating in every sphere of life and influence.
00:22:50.020But it was apart from the work of the Spirit, like somehow you were doing all these things in your flesh.
00:22:57.040There was a lot of scripture being ripped out of context, a lot of over-spiritualizing, a lot of estrogen-rich sermons, which appeal to women.
00:23:08.380Yeah, what do you mean by estrogen-rich sermons?
00:23:10.580Meaning it was just like, you know, you've been down for so long and, you know, you've been dating that guy, you know, he don't love you.
00:23:19.240I mean, it was just, it was a lot of preaching to our pain as opposed to saying, as Jesus would put it, you know,
00:23:30.160So the reason why you love the darkness rather than the light, because your deeds are evil, it was more of celebrating and, like I said, pointing to other things external, outside of yourself that were the problem.
00:23:48.580And then providing this connection between season, harvest, favor, breakthrough, and increase.
00:23:55.840So the seed, and then the devil or the enemy, all of these other things that are out there that are against you, you're not going to have to experience those things anymore.
00:24:10.440And it was still very performative because you never felt like you were giving enough.
00:24:15.200And then if you gave and God still didn't show up for you, now you're looking at, well, maybe I need to give more money.
00:26:05.740And now looking back post-salvation, I can see, oh, these good works I'm doing, it's because it's God working in me both to will and to do his good pleasure.
00:26:16.600And the people around me get to just experience that.
00:26:20.200But it's a work of the spirit that's actually doing that.
00:26:24.080You mentioned that you had had an abortion years prior from when you actually were saved and understood the gospel.
00:26:31.300Can you talk about the redemption from that?
00:26:35.400Did you have to kind of like reckon with that at some point when you realized, oh, wow, that was sin and I need to deal with this?
00:26:44.100I didn't really deal with that one or the subsequent one in my very early 20s until after the Lord had saved me.
00:26:52.720Post-subortive women do a very good job of suppressing the truth in their unrighteousness.
00:26:58.100Just trying to block it out and filling the emptiness and the guilt and the shame with other things.
00:27:06.220And I had several years of doing that, bad relationships, you know, just not trying to find some sort of way to silence the pain that I was experiencing.
00:27:20.560What I did was it it caused me to double down with a feminist mindset.
00:27:26.500So I was very I was very much a feminist, very liberal in my thinking.
00:27:31.320I was pro-choice, even though I knew that that view was incompatible with the scriptures.
00:27:36.500I had reconciled in my mind that it was somehow OK.
00:27:40.500And so over the course of some years, once I got saved, the Lord brought those things back to my remembrance and allowed me to go through a series of or a season, I would say, of healing.
00:27:56.160But you first have to acknowledge that what you did was sinful.
00:28:39.520But God enabled me and strengthened me and equipped me to do that.
00:28:43.900It's all a part of the story and the journey.
00:28:46.580But definitely humanizing those image bearers, talking about what I did in very real terms, but then accepting the free grace of God that he bestows upon all those who repent and believe.
00:29:01.580And then trusting, trusting in what the scriptures actually say.
00:29:06.920No one is beyond the point of being redeemable.
00:29:11.960The scriptures have been such a healing balm for me in that.
00:29:17.240And then God was able to bless the fruit of my womb.
00:29:22.160I didn't think that I would ever be somebody's mama.
00:29:26.000I was just like, because that second, that second abortion was so traumatic physically that I just thought that it could not happen for me.
00:29:36.820Are you able to talk about what happened?
00:29:40.320There was, there is an abortionist in Atlanta by the name of, I don't even have a problem saying his name, Tyrone Malloy, who has harmed and maimed and injured so many women.
00:30:12.820And then within 24 hours, I was in the ER trying to preserve what was left of my reproductive organs because it was an incomplete procedure.
00:35:35.180These policies are horrible because I'm thinking as a mom now, I'm thinking I've got to protect this baby and we've got to educate this baby.
00:35:43.600And I'm concerned about what he's eating.
00:35:45.880All of a sudden, GMOs and organic foods and cloth diapering.
00:35:51.100But I come I become completely crunchy overnight.
00:35:54.600Your audience knows when I say crunchy, they know what I mean.
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00:37:09.540I would love to talk a little bit more about your political evolution and when you started to become pro-life and you said that you were an Obama supporter.
00:37:25.640And so I don't know where your husband was in all of this, but talk about that a little bit more, how your eyes started to open and you started to consider, okay, can I be a conservative?
00:37:35.200Right. Well, my husband's incredibly conservative, but like most Black Americans in this country, we may have been raised conservatively, but it never matched our politics.
00:37:48.180Long story for why it is, can't get into it right now, but it's just how it kind of is.
00:37:54.500And so as a new wife and mom, we start seeing these cultural things happening in the world.
00:38:00.600And my husband is like, oh, heck to the no, absolutely not.
00:38:10.300And it just, it happened to him before it happened to me.
00:38:14.500But feminism has always been on my husband's radar as the one thing that was destroying this country.
00:38:23.380And I never even considered myself a feminist, but I was very feminist minded.
00:38:30.340And during, after Obama's second term, we started seeing economically how liberalism wasn't working for us because we're small business owners now.
00:38:45.200While we were small business owners, we started to realize that the people who were pouring into us the most and helping us economically did not look like us.
00:38:57.720These people were cheering for us, giving us the cheat code to our industry and how to win.
00:39:03.860Just like colleagues, people that you knew.
00:39:49.780In fact, we were experiencing the opposite.
00:39:51.380The ones that were trying to help us weather the 2012, 2013 real estate crisis were the ones who did not look like us and wanted us to win.
00:40:03.720And so our lived experience wasn't matching all of the hands up, don't shoot, and all of those colloquialisms that we started to see happen.
00:40:15.020And then as I'm bearing more children and I am seeing culturally all of these conversations about race.
00:40:24.480And I was just like, is this really happening in real life?
00:41:46.820And now that my sons are actually driving age, I still, how we raise them in terms of how you present yourself to the world, how you show up, being respectful,
00:41:59.700being of good character, following the law, those are the things that take you far in life.
00:42:09.080They have no concept of this victim mentality that was indoctrinated into me because me and my husband just never, we didn't raise them to view themselves that way.
00:42:21.640They view themselves as image bearers created in the image of God.
00:42:25.600And they know that if a man doesn't work, he does not eat.
00:42:30.340And if you don't provide value to the marketplace based on some gift, skill, talent, or ability, you will probably be poor.
00:42:38.620But that America is a ladder and you can start at the bottom rung and work your way up based on your own effort.
00:42:46.820If you are completely fed up with the public education options or maybe just the education options in general in your area, then it's probably time to try something new.
00:43:04.600You don't have to allow your child to be indoctrinated with secular progressivism every day.
00:44:03.180You mentioned earlier in our conversation that a part of your testimony is realizing that you had these ingrained assumptions about white people or maybe about people of all different kinds of ethnicities or they're just like that because they're white or because of their skin color.
00:44:26.280And I know you talked about in the furniture industry, some of those assumptions were dispelled.
00:44:30.700But can you unpack that a little bit more?
00:44:33.100What did that evolution look like for you?
00:44:35.160What I learned from that, the furniture industry is very gate.
00:44:38.880It's a gate kept community, meaning to get in, you either have to know someone, everything is on the hush hush.
00:44:46.960And when I found out that gaining entry into these markets and being able to compete had everything to do with being able to negotiate well, being trustworthy, it had nothing to do with ethnicity.
00:45:06.860I realized, first of all, I was doing business with a lot of Asians.
00:45:48.380And so, in my real life experience, I realized that, okay, I have this business and I'm serving the individuals in my community.
00:45:59.420But on the back end of the business, the ones that are feeding the products and the services that I offer my own community, they didn't look like me.
00:46:08.780And all they cared about was, what does your community want to buy?
00:46:13.380How do they want to style their space?
00:46:17.580And at the end of the day, I was able to compete in a marketplace where I was the minority, but I did it in America in a country where my ancestors at one point weren't allowed to do that.
00:46:36.700But once we understood the market, the world of capitalism and free markets, as Booker T. Washington taught, people only cared about, do you have a product and a service and a way to get paid?
00:46:50.280And is it better than the competitor down the street?
00:47:36.100They didn't look like us, you know, they but they had a lot of money and all they cared about was we were equals in the same industry.
00:47:46.380And there's enough out here for everyone.
00:47:48.820Now, if you want to get into a conversation as to whether they would want my son to date their daughter, okay, we can have a conversation about that.
00:47:56.340They may not have been accepting of that, but who cares?
00:48:46.600We're here to please God and God alone, right?
00:48:50.040We are here to make much of Christ and to be reflections of his glory in the earth by doing good to others.
00:48:56.960To have these assumptions about other people who don't look like you is very sinful because you're judging based off appearance, right?
00:49:07.120You're not allowing using any sort of righteous judgments.
00:49:11.820And so I find that I think Christians, Christians would do well to go to the Lord and repent of the hatred in their heart because that's really what this is.
00:49:24.340It's hatred in the heart on the basis of ethnicity.
00:49:27.220And I see it on on on in black people and in white people.
00:49:32.620There's this crazy Christian nationalism conversation that I did not see brewing where it's an overcorrection, just like on the woke side.
00:49:44.560It's an overcorrection of what was it's their response to the wokeness.
00:49:49.400But it's so far to the opposite side that it's equally sinful.
00:49:53.600A certain subset of people who might call themselves Christian nationalists.
00:49:58.680There's a whole conversation to be had about what Christian nationalism actually means, what it actually is and who belongs to it.
00:50:05.740So I don't hear you saying that everyone who might be a nationalist and a Christian is part of that.
00:50:10.960I thought I was a Christian nationalist because I was like Christian.
00:50:49.340Yeah, there's that whole other conversation to be had there.
00:50:52.520But certainly all of us have to repent of any presuppositions that are based on hate or bitterness or resentment because Ephesians 4 tells us to be rid of all of those things.
00:51:05.820And that is an obligation for the Christian.
00:51:09.200You've mentioned you mentioned in the video in the rebuttal about, you know, all the Eric Mason stuff that it was very difficult for you to find a solid church in Atlanta.
00:51:20.420So what did that process look like for you and your husband as y'all left the prosperity movement?
00:51:26.580And it was, well, one, when you're a new Christian, you don't even know what to look for.
00:51:31.360So I, we had a very hard time finding a solid, a biblically solid church where our family felt that we belonged.
00:51:43.480So instantly I took to YouTube because now that I'm this new creation, I know some of the heresies to stay away from.
00:51:52.220Well, that eliminates most of the churches.
00:51:54.200Most of the churches are going to fall into that category of either crazy, charismatic, unbiblical expressions or hyper prosperity or their NAR, the new apostolic reformation.
00:52:11.460I mean, there's so many different brands of bad doctrine.
00:52:15.540We went through three churches before we found a home.
00:52:18.920We knew what we weren't looking for, but we didn't know what we were looking for.
00:52:24.200In Atlanta, Atlanta is a theological desert, meaning there are only a select few congregations and they're all scattered out around the city, which makes it hard, depending on where you live, to find a solid church that preaches from the Bible.
00:52:42.600Or if you, I can't tell you how many calls I've made.
00:54:17.640So many pastors are unwilling to just stand on the authority of scripture and preach what accords with sound doctrine because many of them don't know it.
00:54:30.240It is how can I fill these butts in the seats and whatever I have to do to compromise the message to get those people in those seats, I will do that.
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00:55:48.080What's your encouragement for people who they're either hearing you and maybe they're thinking for the first time, oh gosh, I didn't realize I believe in the prosperity gospel.
00:55:58.260They know and they're trying to find the right church and it's hard to do.
00:56:02.260What encouragement or advice would you give them?
00:56:04.620The first thing is to get solid on what is the gospel, right?
00:56:09.700When you have a solid understanding of the gospel, it is very easy to identify a church that is inconsistent with that.
00:56:17.980And the gospel is this, is that we are all sinners.
00:56:23.320Adam sinned and we are fallen sons and daughters of Adam.
00:56:28.200And because of that sin, we must be reconciled to a righteous and holy God who can't look upon sin.
00:56:36.060And so because sin is the problem, there has to be a righteous substitute.
00:56:41.440Sin must be atoned for because the wages of sin is death.
00:56:45.580But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.
00:56:48.940So the only one who qualified to atone for the sins of his people is the sinless Savior and his name is Jesus.
00:56:58.540And our salvation doesn't come by doing good works or, you know, helping little old ladies across the street or making sure that, you know, you're not sleeping with your boyfriend, but you're doing something else.
00:57:11.220No, salvation comes by believing that the finished work of what Christ accomplished on that cross for his people can be applied to you by faith, believing in what Christ has done.
00:57:27.040So if you are caught up in a message of prosperity that says God wants you healthy and rich and to live your best life now, the bad news is this is as good as it's going to get for those who die apart from Christ.
00:57:45.580You eternal life, living in eternity with your creator can only come through faith in Jesus.