Pastor Jamal Bryant, the ex-husband of The Real Housewives of Potomac star, Gizelle Bryant, has planned to bring Black men back to church by starting a cannabis business at his.
Bryant shared his interesting plans via a sit down with actress and media personality Rashan Ali, on The Cool Soror podcast.
“I’m looking for people that smell like weed. New Birth is the largest land-owning Black church in America. My position to my deacons is ‘why aren’t we not raising cannabis?'” he said.
The senior pastor of Atlanta’s New Birth Missionary Baptist Church further explained his stance, saying that it would teach Black men how to handle business, among other things.
“I’ll be able to bring in Black males. They’re able to do it legally. I’m teaching them farming,” he said. “I’m helping them to enhance the ecosystem. This is the kind of conversation. So if the guy, Black boy, in Bankhead said ‘they growing weed at the church? Where do I join?’ I don’t need no pamphlet for him. He’s coming in. That’s the group I’m going after,” he said.
Bryant also discussed a variety of other topics, including his journey to becoming a pastor, community work, civil rights activism, and other things. He told a shocked Ali that he’s “mindful I’m not after Christians, I’m after people who don’t go to church.”
He added that a lot of churches “are just recycling people from other churches” and cited it as the reason new members haven’t been joining the religious institution.
In more bizarre church news, News Onyx reported–in August–that a former church elder was convicted of murdering his wife. At the time, Pastor Robert Lee Harris was convicted of first-degree murder on Aug. 19 for allegedly killing Tanisha Harris in Overland Park, Kansas. He had reportedly been serving as an elder at Repairers Kansas City Church in Missouri.
