This article was published in Faithfully Magazine No. 2 (Summer 2017).
BJ Thompson had to be shocked by the system before he could become a shock to the system.
The 35-year-old can identify at least two forks
in his life’s path. At each, he suffered the deep soul grief that comes with watching unjust structures put their full weight on the throat of Black America.
Thompson answered each of these wake-up calls, deciding his story would be told in action verbs and proper nouns, working for change in the lives of specific people.
He packed up his education and energy, investing it all in one idea: When just people enter places of cultural power, those places will become just, too.
That idea moved Thompson and his family from Memphis to Atlanta, where he planted himself at one of the great seats of Black learning in the United States. At Morehouse College, he has taken up a quiet, methodical, messy form of activism—building relationships.
“We’re building a well where people live,” Thompson said of his work with The Navigators, a parachurch organization that has been making disciples for Jesus Christ at college campuses, military bases and prisons for nearly 85 years.
The Dallas native grew up in an environment that treated church like a house, not a home. Faith was tied up in sentiment and tradition. It was a moral good, not a spiritual sanctuary.
To Thompson, religion was like a divine good-luck charm—“something that’s warding off evil.”
“You don’t know what it does. You don’t know the extent of its power,” he said. “All you know is that sometimes you need it when you’re in sticky situations.”
As a freshman at the University of North Texas, Thompson’s trinket faith stopped doing its job. Brick by brick, he had constructed a universe with himself at the center, and eventually daylight began pouring through the cracks.
When it became painfully clear that he could not supply the power for his own life, Thompson turned to God in genuine faith.
That was not the only awakening God had planned for Thompson at North Texas. A freshman sociology class provided language for a sorrow he had always felt, but could not describe.
The class pored over case studies and surveyed social theories used to justify the erection of ghettos and the isolation of Blacks. During these lectures, Thompson saw his professor drawing a picture of his community, of real people with real names and faces. “The rest of the class was nodding in agreeance,” he recalled. “I was sitting there, shrinking in my seat with tears in my eyes because I realized for the first time that my life was a byproduct of a social experiment.”
He thought of friends lost to violence, others whose spark was extinguished by incarceration. He pictured a father who was not absent, but was not present either.
To provide, Thompson’s father worked a backbreaking schedule. A lack of better options was something Thompson’s father, and by extension his family, tangibly felt. That deficit of opportunity was, in part, a function of choices his father made.
But school systems that only paid lip service to Brown vs. the Board of Education also bore responsibility. By not taking serious their responsibility and mandate to educate Black students as rigorously as White students, they failed to equip and prepare people like Thompson’s dad for greater opportunities.
Pushing through the pain to even closer scrutiny, Thompson noticed gaps in the ways adults had talked to him about systems and injustice. They gave “particular warnings,” he said, about how not to end up in the system: Do not get girls pregnant. Do not hang around gangs.
But they never found words to tell him about the cold, calculated nature of systems that, in an almost surgical fashion, worked to choke the life out of people of color.
Institutions designed to educate, move the economy and deliver justice were bedrock for some Americans; but, as Thompson saw, these institutions operated in a fashion that provided Blacks far less power than their White counterparts.
It was as if these revelations had pulled him from the safety of the beach and thrown him into the ocean. Wave after wave overwhelmed him as Thompson considered the dark truths behind his social condition. He let himself grieve, then vowed to do the hard work of redemption.
He wanted to create a new “ecosystem” and release “equalizers” into it, people who would turn these systems upside down or, in truth, make them go right-side up.
The timing of Thompson’s rebirth is not lost on him.
“If I would have been awakened to those systems prior to being awakened in my soul, I probably would have been awakened to either anger or to manipulation,” he said.
Now having eyes to see, Thompson gave himself to real places and real people. He and his wife moved to Memphis in 2006 to apply what they had learned in school. Joining them there was college friend Lecrae Moore.
Moore would later become known simply as Lecrae, and help pioneer a new age of gospel-motivated hip- hop. Thompson was part of the inner circle that helped launched the Unashamed Movement and Reach Records, an epicenter of artful, faithful rap.
He worked as outreach director for ReachLife, which took the music’s message into communities through leadership development, conferences and other activities.
The two also made regular trips to a local juvenile facility—Thompson would speak to the young inmates and Moore would rap.
But they did not just offer winsome words; they lived distinct lives. Thompson believes the desires for justice and righteousness God has written on his heart must become flesh, and that following Jesus means dwelling among the people he chooses to love. During his years in Memphis, the ideas and ideals that had resonated at North Texas became scuffed and shaped by reality. His house became a haven for high school students who struggled with literacy; his relationship with his wife an example to young men for whom marriage was an unfamiliar concept.
During Thompson’s time in Memphis, he also helped found Build A Better Us, an organization that exists to encourage stronger marriages through conferences and resources across multiple media platforms.
God was doing things in Memphis, and in Thompson’s life. And then came the second great awakening.
