The Refounding Charter

Article

I

Of Sacred Memory

We confess that the church does not begin its witness in the present hour. We are bound to the cloud of witnesses — to the enslaved who sang the gospel under the lash, to the abolitionist pulpits, to the conferences of conscience, to the saints whose names the archive has not yet learned to honor. We refuse historical amnesia as a form of complicity.

Article

II

Of Human Dignity

We confess that every human person bears the image of God — irrevocably, indivisibly, prior to law and beneath every law. Therefore the slave-trade, the lynch-tree, the dispossession of peoples, the criminalizing of poverty, the discarding of the unborn, and every modern erasure of the human are of one substance and one demonic logic, and the church is bound to name them so.

Article

III

Of Civic Theology

We confess that the gospel is a public claim. It convenes nations, instructs magistrates, and seats the silenced at the table where the human experience is taught. The civic realm is not foreign to the church; it is the field where the Lord's prayer — Thy Kingdom come, on earth as in heaven — is publicly contended for.

Article

IV

Of Ecumenical Witness

We confess one Lord, one faith, one baptism. ASMA gathers the Black church and the broader ecumenical body — Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed, Holiness, AME, CME, COGIC, and beyond — into a single confessional fellowship of public theology. We refuse partisan capture and denominational provincialism.

Article

V

Of Theological Fellowship and Spiritual Covenant

We confess that ASMA is the civic realm and justice initiative of Kingdom Culture International Fellowship. KCIF is our theological formation, our fellowship of doctrine, and our spiritual covenant relationship — not a hierarchy above us but a covenanted communion with us. We hold no separate financial, ecclesial, or doctrinal authority outside that covenant. Its accountability is our accountability.

Article

VI

Of the Anti-Revisionist Vocation

We confess a particular charge: to resist every revisionism that softens the slave-trade, sanitizes the lynch-tree, denies the colonization of peoples, or recasts the demonic plain meaning of these histories as politics. The archive is our witness. The footnote is our discipline. Memory is our weapon.

Article

VII

Of Vocalizing the Dehumanized

We confess our defining mission: to vocalize the dehumanized and to return the rights of input in the human experience. This is the philosophy that orders our scholarship, our cohorts, our Freedom Summer, our archive, our publications, and our pulpits.

Article

VIII

Of Submission to Christ

We confess Jesus Christ — crucified, risen, ascended, and returning — as the only Lord of conscience. To Him alone we owe ultimate allegiance. From Him alone we receive the courage to undertake this work, and to Him alone we render the account of it.