Dear ALEC[tion] Family,

I want to welcome you personally to The ALEC[tion] Formation Class and tell you how very thankful I am that you have decided to join.

I mean that more deeply than I know how to put into a welcome letter.

I am not old, but I have lived long enough now to know that there are meetings in life that are not merely meetings, conversations that are not merely conversations, and moments that, while we are living them, may appear to be only another moment in the long succession of days God has given us, but somewhere down the road we look back and discover that something happened there. Something was added to us. Something was taken away. Something we had always looked at suddenly became visible to us.

I have had many such moments in my own life.

I am the son of Jimmy Fred. I am my mother's son. I am a brother, a father, a minister, an author, and a man who has been blessed beyond my ability to tell it. I have known God in the pages of my Bible. There are tear stains even now on the pages of Ephesians that fell there because God overwhelmed my soul with His glory. I have known Him behind the pulpit, in the barbershop, in my community, in history, in the lives and words of people who came long before me, and, perhaps most humbling of all, I have found Him in places where I had once been convinced He could not be.

God has been good to me!

He has allowed me to live long enough to discover that some of the things I thought I knew needed to be examined again; that some of the people I thought had nothing to teach me had already been teaching me; and that sometimes, in order to understand where we are going, we have to have the humility to come back through where we have been. That journey has changed me.

It has caused me to look again at my father and mother, at the people who raised me, at the Black men and women whose lives made mine possible, at the church, at America, at history, at Scripture, at race, at prophecy, and ultimately at myself.

I have had to acknowledge. And I have discovered that acknowledgment, when it is honest, does not have to leave us bitter. It can teach us how to love. And love, when it is true, will not permit us to remain forever at a safe distance from one another. It requires us to engage.

This formation is very dear to me because the message, the structure, and the philosophy behind it did not come to me merely as material for a class. No, it was given to me by God. If ever God did speak to me, it was when He gave me ALEC[tion]. And though ALEC[tion] is new, it is also old and tried. It has been worked into me through life. Through study. Through mistakes. Through tears. Through people. Through years of attempting to understand how we became what we are and believing, sometimes against everything that stood before my eyes, that the human family does not have to remain what history has made of us.

I believe there is more for us. I believe there is more in you.

I do not know all of you yet. I do not know the roads that you have traveled to arrive here, what your fathers and mothers put into you, what has wounded you, what has strengthened you, what you have had to overcome, or what God has been quietly preparing you for while you thought you were simply living your life. But I am anxious to know you.

I want to hear you. I want to learn your name. I want to know something of your story. I love to know the Revelation of Jesus Christ in people, and if I enter this formation believing that I am the only one who has something to give, I will have already missed something God intended for me to receive.

I will teach you what has been given to me. I will give you what I have, but I am fully persuaded that somewhere in these weeks you will give something to me too. Perhaps that is part of why we have met.

I believe God has always been working through the human family, through generations, through nations, through people we recognized and people we dismissed, through history we celebrated and history we would rather forget, moving His purpose through time while we understood only fragments of what we were seeing.

“Prophecy is history foretold and history is prophecy fulfilled.”

And here we stand, you and I, living somewhere between what has already been and what has not yet appeared.

That means our lives are not insignificant. Our conversations are not insignificant. The way we see one another is not insignificant. What we heal is not insignificant.

And what we leave unresolved for another generation to inherit is not insignificant either. There are generations behind us whose voices still speak. There are generations ahead of us who cannot yet speak for themselves. We stand between them.

What a tremendous place to stand. What a tremendous responsibility. And what a tremendous opportunity.

I cannot tell you everything that will happen in your life as a result of what we share here. I would not presume to. But I do believe that when truth is acknowledged, when love is allowed to do its work, when human beings have the courage to engage one another, and when what we receive is carefully cultivated, something must live that was not living before.

My prayer is that something will live in you. That you will see something you could not see. That you will recover something you did not know had been lost. That you will recognize something God had already placed in you.

That you will leave with greater love for people, not an imaginary people without flaws or history or wounds, but the real human family into which God placed us.

And perhaps, somewhere years from now, you will find yourself standing in a place you cannot presently imagine, speaking to someone you have not yet met, and something that was planted during our time together will rise up in you and give you language for that moment.

If that happens, ALEC[tion] will still be living.

So I welcome you with an open heart. Bring your history. Bring your questions. Bring your convictions. Bring your experiences. Bring the things you understand and even the things you do not yet understand.

Bring you.

I am thankful that our roads have met at this particular place in history, and I am genuinely excited to see what God will allow us to discover in one another.

May something be acknowledged among us. May love be enlarged among us. May we truly engage one another. And may God give us the grace to cultivate something that will live long after we are gone.

Welcome to The ALEC[tion] Formation Class.

I am so very glad you are here.

Bro. Steph
Stephen P. Hargrave
Founder & Visionary Overseer
Real Black Excellence

P.S. Enjoy a few pictures of me and my family.