About
Formed for this.
All of it.
This work did not happen by accident. It was built across generations, refined in classrooms and congregations, tested in crisis and sustained through forty years of deliberate practice. What you find here is the fruit of that formation.
The Work
Pastor. Preacher. Publisher. General Officer of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. A vocation planted early, cultivated carefully, and deepened with every decade of practice.
The current work is the presidency and publishership of the AME Sunday School Union and AMEC Publishing House, one of the oldest Black publishing institutions in America. To steward resources that have formed congregations for more than a century demands both theological seriousness and institutional care, and it receives both.
Before this, there were pastorates in South Carolina and Nashville. Executive leadership at Greater Allen AME Cathedral in New York. The planting of a new AME community in Nashville. Four continents. Countless rooms where the stakes were high and the work was real. Each season added something. None of it was wasted.
The most honest thing we can do is simply notice what God is doing, what the people around us need, and what is stirring in our own souls.
Formation
Morehouse College. Union Theological Seminary. Payne Theological Seminary. Union in particular, studying under scholars who demanded that tradition be held with both rigor and care, shaped an approach to ministry that has never been satisfied with easy answers or inherited assumptions.
Third-generation AME ministry. A grandfather who preached. A father who preached. A boyhood in which visiting shut-ins was simply what the family did on a Tuesday. Formation like that does not come from a curriculum. It comes from being raised inside a way of life until it becomes your own.
The formation continues. Every morning, with a lectionary text, a notebook, and enough quiet to hear what needs to be heard. That discipline is not incidental to the work. It is the source of it.
Writing and Digital Ministry
The Local Church Leadership Series was written because the people who keep congregations alive, the trustees, stewards, class leaders, and lay ministers who show up without being asked, deserve resources that take them seriously. That work does.
INSIGHT: Life in the Spirit and Virtual Grace grew from the same conviction: that formation requires daily structure, not occasional inspiration. Virtual Grace gathers Monday through Saturday at 11 AM Central. It has become a genuine community for people across the country who need more than a Sunday. Visit it at virtualgrace.church.
The Belin Group
The Belin Group exists for congregations, leaders, and institutions who understand that lasting work requires more than a good strategy. It requires formation. The advisory work, the speaking, the frameworks and resources, all of it is in service of one conviction: that the inner life of a leader determines the outer life of everything they lead.
Heritage
Where This Comes From
Third-generation AME ministry. A grandfather who stood in the pulpit. A father who did the same. A household where prayer was the very atmosphere of daily life. The work of caring for people, of showing up without being summoned, was simply what the family did. That is the ground everything else grew from.
Forty years of sitting with people in the hardest moments of their lives teaches you how to be fully present in any room. No matter the address.
Four continents of preaching, teaching, and learning have added breadth to what that formation gave in depth. The communities encountered along the way, their resilience, their creativity, their insistence on God in the middle of everything, have shaped this work as surely as any seminary or institution.
The conversation
begins whenever
you are ready.
Whether the need is advisory counsel, a speaking engagement, or simply an introduction to this work, the door is open. Every engagement begins with a conversation, and every conversation begins with listening.
For a full account of this work and background, there is also a formal biography.