Bishop Joseph Tolton

Bishop Joseph William Tolton is the President and Founder of Interconnected Justice and the Executive Director of The Fellowship Global, an arm of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries that is focused on cultivating inclusive Christian spaces for LGBTQ+ Christians throughout Africa and beyond.

Tolton was born in the late 1960s and raised in New York City. He was raised in the Pentecostal Church; when he was young, even as young as 6 years old, his neighbors and family would hear him preaching by himself in his room, where he said that his window sill was his first pulpit. Tolton felt called to ministry very early in his life. Joseph Tolton grew up in Harlem, but because his mother was adamant that he got the best education possible, he mostly traveled out of his neighborhood to attend predominantly Jewish schools. His experience growing up with and connecting with Jewish community, who worked hard to maintain that sense of identity for themselves, and his lifelong experience in the Pentecostal church which heavily identified with being a global movement, really sparked his interest and focus on transnational work.

Tolton graduated high school in the 1980s when the AIDS crisis in the United States was reaching a fever pitch; he witnessed the mass exodus of Black people from the Church as the Church struggled to respond to the epidemic. For years, he believed that his sexuality was a demon he needed to pray away. He’d asked clergy to pray for him to become straight, and believed that HIV/AIDS was a curse from God. After a long journey of trying to pray away his sexuality, he left that church. Instead of shunning his queerness, Tolton instead joined a group of other LGBTQ+ Christian leaders who worked together to create their own kind of reformation: one that worked to combine the vibrant spirit of the Black churches they grew up in with radically inclusive teachings.

In 2006, Joseph Tolton started a church in Harlem called the Rehoboth Temple that soon joined a collection of 30 affirming churches nationwide. When news broke about the new anti-gay laws in Uganda in 2009, he and his colleagues realized that there was a much bigger and more sinister story happening. He began to investigate the relationships between the American conservative evangelical movement and the new anti-gay sentiments across Africa. When he was invited to visit Uganda in September 2010 by Bishop Dr. Christopher Senyonjo, his life took on a new focus of transnational solidarity. After this trip, he became a missionary and began his work as the Bishop of Global Ministries for the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries. He also got more plugged into activism in the United States, helping to rally Black voters to support the ballot initiative for marriage equality in Maryland in 2012.

Since then, he has been working alongside the Rev. Dr. Yvette Flunder with The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries as the Bishop of East Africa; they work to serve LGBTQ+ Africans and help resource and support affirming churches. He also has been hard at work in recent years to start and grow Interconnected Justice, an organization setting out to cultivate a Pan-African transnational solidarity across the globe.

Bishop Joseph William Tolton received his Bachelor’s degree in Religion from Vassar College in 1989 and earned his Master of Business Administration from Columbia Business School in 1998. Some of Tolton's published writings include: Some of Bishop Tolton’s writings include "Black America must go global to defeat Project 2025" in the New Pittsburgh Courier and "South Africa's unrest is something Black people across the globe should care about" in The Grio.

(This biographical statement written by Caro Beresford Wood for a fall 2024 Queer & Trans Theologies Class at the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities from the sources below. )

Biography Date: February 2026

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