Starlette Thomas is an author, activist, visual artist and race abolitionist. She is an associate editor and the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative at Good Faith Media, a communications ministry dedicated to leading didactic dialogues on race and its progeny, which empower Christian believers, leaders and thinkers to passionately, pastorally and prophetically speak about the sociopolitical construct of race and the myriad injustices that intersect in their churches, communities and country.

A womanist in ministry, Starlette is graduate of both Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School and Buffalo State College. She has served as an associate and interim pastor as well as a denominational leader. She regularly preaches and teaches in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region and her sermons have been featured by Sojourners. 

She has written for Baptists Together, a publication of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Woman’s Missionary Union’s (WMU) Missions Mosaic, Formations, a publication of Smyth & Helwys Publishing Company and Herald, a publication of Baptist News Global.  Starlette is a contributing author for the book Faith Forward: A Dialogue on Children, Youth & a New Kind of Christianity.

The Raceless Gospel podcast is now in its second season. The theme is “Bodywork” and addresses the damage that the church in North America has done to itself. Known for its finger-pointing, it is an invitation for us to take a long hard look at “Christ’s hands and feet.” No sweaty hands or cold feet, it’s an embodied conversation that is calling for a complete overhaul from the inside out. Not one part of the body, this body of believers needs work.

Starlette was awarded a pastoral study grant from the Louisville Institute and the Lily Foundation to study the social construct of race in the malformation of Christian community.  Examining the work of Rev. Dr. Clarence Jordan, whose farm turned “demonstration plot” in Americus, Georgia, refused to agree to the social arrangements of segregation because of his Christian convictions, Starlette now takes this dirt to the Church.  Her thesis is titled, “Afraid of Koinonia: How life on this farm reveals the fear of Christian community.”  To read more about the project’s aim, click here.

An unrepentant academician and bibliophile, she is presently pursuing a Doctor of Ministry degree at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., writing her project paper on segregation in the North American church, baptismal identity and a raceless gospel for a “kin-dom” coming.