LOUISVILLE — “Back Talk,” an online broadcast hosted by McCormick Theological Seminary President the Rev. Dr. Maisha I. Handy, featured a half-hour interview with the Rev. David Black, the pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Chicago. On Sept. 19, Black was struck on the head by pepper balls fired at him by federal immigration enforcement personnel while Black was peacefully protesting at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Broadview, Illinois.

The Rev. Dr. Marilyn Pagán-Banks, a McCormick Seminary alumna and the executive director of A Just Harvest in Chicago, appeared in a separate segment of the hour-long broadcast, which can be viewed here.

Black is introduced at 32:11, and he explained what led to him joining the protests at the Broadview detention center.

“To me, it was clear that my call as a Christian is to be in places where people are being persecuted and oppressed. Jesus himself went to hell to liberate the captives,” Black told Handy. “To me, Broadview is an incarnate instance of the gates of hell in Chicagoland. To me, there’s no question of where Christians are called to be and proclaim the good news right now.”

Black said that on the day he was fired upon, he moved toward three ICE officers standing on a roof intending to speak with them, but “it was clear they weren’t engaging. They seemed to be in some twisted way enjoying the way they were intimidating the crowd.”

Black quoted Jesus for the officers: Repent and believe the good news, that the kingdom of God has come near. That’s when they fired on him with pepper balls, striking him at least seven times, including twice in the head and once in the face. Black received help from fellow protestors and medical attention, but “within a few minutes, the gates of hell opened and ICE agents came pouring out, shoving people onto the concrete. There were no warnings, no provocation. Protestors were using their words, and they came at us with guns and their fists.”

“One of the reasons it has sparked the wildfire that it has is people recognize this is actually the consequence of Christian witness in the middle of an empire that calls itself Christian, and yet violently persecutes people who engage in real Bible-based, Jesus-centered Christian witness,” Black said, noting that people of faith and people of no faith are joining the cause. “Jesus never said you all have to be Christians and go to church,” he noted. “He said to do this work in my name, and people are doing that work in real time. It’s a revival, and it’s been so powerful to be part of it. I’m so grateful for what God is doing in Chicago.”

Handy asked: What does the church need to do to understand what’s at stake, and how do we sustain protest over time?

That’s “the question for this moment” as immigration officials have moved into Charlotte, North Carolina “and they have said explicitly they intend to raid Spanish-speaking churches” there, Black said. “I want my Christian siblings to remember to keep it simple.”

“The good news is the Bible tells us many times that God uses the foolish to shame the wise and the weak to bring down the strong. We can show up in that foolishness and that weakness and know God will move through us more powerfully when we don’t have pretense about knowing what we are doing,” Black said. It was Jesus’ practice to show up, “and that’s what we are called to do in this moment, particularly Christians of privilege.”

“We can show up in the simplicity of our faith,” Black said. “We don’t need to sit around and wait until we’re perfect and we know everything and can move in strength. We can show up in our weakness and in our foolishness.”

Handy asked Black how his activism “is working with your pastoral responsibilities. Is your congregation with you?”

“This is a church where the windows are full of bullet holes” from the 1950s and 1960s when First Presbyterian Church of Chicago was a sanctuary for the Blackstone Rangers.

In more recent weeks, “we have been thrust into the national spotlight, and there have been lots of conversations and concerns about church safety. It’s challenging — there’s no doubt about that,” Black said. “But I continue to see that God’s strength shows up in our weakness.”

Black said he’s “so grateful to the people of the church and their witness. None of this would have been possible without them.”

“This is not a question of passing the right laws” regarding immigration reform, Black said. “We can’t remove evil in that way. We can’t make it un-evil through the tools of that system. We have to use the Holy Spirit, not the tools of the devil that built this system of white supremacy.”

When Black was a seminarian, “a lot of my field placements were places where I got to experiment a little bit in ministry but was seen as an intern. I didn’t get to experience the authority of pastoral leadership until much later.” The church he now serves has a pastoral residency program where many seminarians are women or queer or trans people “who have been given a sense by our society that they really don’t have authority,” he said. People in the program “are seen and treated with a vested spiritual authority, and that matters.”

“If there is a way for seminaries to prepare people to understand and take responsibility for the authority they have as pastors in public and to be really bold in that witness, I would love to see that,” Black said. “The world needs people to step up and be bold and take those risks.”

Handy thanked Black for his public witness, and advised viewers to “find the small ways you can show up every day to resist empire.”

Working toward food justice in the Windy City

Pagán-Banks was named McCormick Seminary’s 2025 Alumna of the Year for what Handy called “her bold community-ordered leadership that centers mutual aid, public accountability and radical hospitality in the face of shrinking public and spiritual spaces.”

Handy asked her what faithful public witness looks like in the age of ICE.

“I have not had the opportunity to be part of actions yet. However, I have been present locally, which is very important for our community at this time,” Pagán-Banks replied. One way A Just Harvest has been showing up is at school patrols  “to make sure kids and parents are safe.”

In addition, A Just Harvest “has been addressing food apartheid” in Chicago, Pagán-Banks said. “These things are intentional. There is no lack of food in the United States of America. We open our doors to anybody. You can come in and people will say, ‘Welcome! What’s your ZIP Code?’ We don’t want to shame people.”

Pagán-Banks said the current climate has put a premium on delivering food to people rather than asking them to come get it. “More and more people are calling to have their food delivered because they cannot come outside and try to get it on their own,’” she said. “We were doing this even before ICE. This is personal for us.”

“There is the sense that the reality we are living through is an opportunity for the church, faith leaders and communities to show up and be community again,” Handy told her. “If we don’t take care of each other, we’re not going to make it.”

Pagán-Banks pointed out the slogan on her T-shirt, “organize the church.”

“There’s space for all of us. It can be folding flyers and sending them out,” she said. “Right now there is no excuse for people sitting on the sidelines. We have opportunities everywhere.”

In “all the chaos,” A Just Harvest is innovating with a popup café to serve clients better, she said.

“We are saying, ‘Y’all aren’t going to steal our joy,” Pagán-Banks said. “If we can’t feel some joy, we give up.”

She urged viewers not to just be present “in spaces that are about the faith community. Show up in other spaces too, and work behind the scenes. I want folks to feel like there is so much power in that work.”

It’s important for seminaries “to engage in justice work and also prepare leaders for this work. It doesn’t have to look a certain way,” Pagán-Banks said. Seminaries can “train our pastors to understand this isn’t something you squeeze in. It’s part of our ministry to do this work, to accompany our community in these tough times.”

“We need to reclaim our ‘turning the tables’ attitude as a church,” she told Handy. “As churches, we have no business sitting on the sidelines. There’s something for everyone to do.”