WELCOME!
JOIN US
CALL IN FOR VIRTUAL SUNDAY SCHOOL
At 9:10 AM for 9:15 AM (EST) Sunday School
Phone number: 1-609-663-4533
CALL IN FOR VIRTUAL INTERCESSORY PRAYER
At 9:10 AM for 9:15 AM (EST) Saturdays
Phone number: 1-609-663-4533
ZOOM FOR VIRTUAL BIBLE
STUDY
At 7 PM (EST) Wednesdays
Meeting ID: 831 9042 2196
Passcode: SBC
One tap mobile for phone access
+13017158592,,83190422196#,,,,
*470321# US (Washington DC)
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Evening Vespers
Our pastor, Rev. Dr. James Henry Harris, does evening vespers nightly for your spiritual growth. Call the church at (804) 353-7682 if you are interested in our robo call. Please leave your name, phone number and the reason for your call so we can stay in touch with you.
Grant Committee
Survey
SBC Members, please complete this brief survey no later than July 13, 2025, by clicking HERE for the survey. Thank you.
Recognizing
Graduates
Second Baptist Church recognized all 2024-2025 high school, college, graduate, certificate holder, and technical school graduates on Sunday, June 22, 2025.
Kathryn Threatt, JD, a 2025 graduate of the University of Richmond School of Law, gave the charge to the other eight graduates during the morning worship service. She received a Juris Doctor Degree and Certificate in Intellectual Property Law.
The graduates received gifts and certificates of congratulations as parents, friends and the congregation looked on, then accolades at the end of the service.
CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE GRADUATES!
Second Baptist Church's sanctuary in-person services begin at 11 a.m. (Eastern Time) each Sunday.
Doors open at 10 a.m.
WE INVITE YOU
TO WORSHIP
WITH US at
1400 Idlewood Avenue,
Richmond, VA 23220!
Don't forget
your tithes and
offerings
JOIN US ON ZOOM
Second Baptist Church (West End) is inviting you to View our Service on Zoom at 11 A.M. (Eastern Time) each
Sunday Morning.
Click HERE to Join Zoom Meeting
Or
Join Via Computer
Meeting ID: 831 9042 2196
Passcode: SBC
Join Via Telephone
Dial 1-301-715-8592, then put in
the Meeting ID: 831 9042 2196,
then push #, then push# again.
ALSO......
Access to Sunday Worship @SBC remains via the telephone number 1-617-769-8209 at 11 a.m. (EST).
Rev. Dr. James Henry Harris is pastor.
FOOD PANTRY GIVEAWAY FOR
THOSE WHO ATTEND SBC
SBC Pastor Harris and the Missions Ministry invite all church attendees to our Food Pantry giveaway on 1st and 3rd Sundays immediately after Church Services.
Members and the community are invited and encouraged to take advantage of this fresh and frozen food twice every month.
Invite family and friends to participate!
“Black Suffering:
Silent Pain, Hidden Hope”
A PERSPECTIVE ON
BLACK SUFFERING
STRAIGHT FROM A
PASTOR WHO KNOWS
FIRSTHAND
The book explores many timely atrocities, such as the Memorial Day 2020 police killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, and the plight of Black people amid the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic. Nat Turner, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and even Job of the Bible are part of his call to consciousness.
Drawing on decades of personal experience as a pastor, theologian, and educator, Harris gives voice to suffering's practical impact on church leaders as they seek to forge a path forward to address this huge and troubling issue. The book “Black Suffering” identifies Black suffering, shines a light on the insidious normalization of the phenomenon, and begins a larger conversation about correcting the historical weight of suffering carried by Black people.
The book combines elements of memoir, philosophy, historical analysis, literary criticism, sermonic discourse, and even creative nonfiction to present a "remix" of the suffering experienced daily by Black people.
Where to buy “Black Suffering”
“Black Suffering: Silent Pain, Hidden Hope” by James Henry Harris is available on Amazon.com, BarenesandNoble.com, Walmart.com, Target.com, Christianbook.com, Cokesbury.com and fortresspress.com.
"My understanding of suffering and pain is shaped by the experience of being surrounded by suffering as a youth. We worked in the tobacco fields from sunup to sundown, year after year, to the point where I began to hate the whole enterprise and determined I would not be a prisoner of poverty and economic injustice. To be poor is to suffer in silence or in protest. It is to suffer hunger, poor health, and ridicule by the rest of society. I know the meaning of the gratuitous amelioration of suffering, and I know the searing pain of a toothache that lasts for endless days and nights because we could neither afford to go to the dentist nor the doctor unless it was a serious life-or-death issue. And my daddy was the judge of that."
─ Excerpt from “Black Suffering: Silent Pain, Hidden Hope” by James Henry Harris
The book "N" by Pastor J.H. Harris is now available to buy
"N: My Encounter with Racism and the Forbidden Word in an American Classic"
By James Henry Harris
Black Theologian and Scholar James Henry Harris Confronts the Use of Notorious Racial Slur in Mark Twain Classic — and Its Ugly History in American Life
James Henry Harris, pastor of Second Baptist Church (on the West End of Richmond, Virginia), was bombarded with the ugliest racial epithet more than 200 times while taking a graduate course on an American classic. That’s how often the forbidden word is used in "Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."
Harris, reading the novel for the first time at age 53, and the only Black person in the class, recounts the trauma of that experience in his powerful memoir, N: My Encounter with Racism and the Forbidden Word in An American Classic (Fortress Press, October 26, 2021).
“I was teetering on the brink of falling apart,” Harris says of encountering Twain's frequent use of the epithet week after week, in a classroom setting where the white instructor and white students felt no compunction about reading the word aloud and using it in discussions of the text. “My plight as a Black man in class was a metaphor, a symbol of the past, present, and postmodern condition of American society,” he writes.
The damage of racist slurs is unrelenting. A recent example is how the epithet was wielded against Black police officers protecting the members of Congress from the Trump-supporting mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Historically the word was (and still is) used by white Americans to degrade and destroy the Black mind and body. “It was not only a denial of respect but an intentional and systemic use of a derogatory term to infuse Black consciousness with the notion of ‘nothingness’; an ontological denial of being,” Harris says. “But it did not work because Blacks always had common sense enough to know and believe that they could not and would not be defined by their oppressor. This systematic oppression and denial of Black life from the Middle Passage to the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others reflects centuries of white supremacist ideology and practice throughout government, business, politics, education, and white church life.”
AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE AT Fortress Press. CLICK HERE
And at Amazon.com
Paperback, $18.99
ISBN: 9781506479163
PUB DATE: October 26, 2021
