Adelle Banks is the projects editor and a national reporter for Religion News Service, covering topics including religion and race, congregational issues, and research on faith and society. An award- winning journalist, Banks joined RNS in 1995. She previously was the religion reporter at the Orlando Sentinel and a reporter at The Providence Journal and newspapers in the upstate New York communities of Syracuse and Binghamton. She also is co-author of the book, Becoming a Future-Ready Church: 8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower the Next Generation of Leaders.
Banks’s freelance work includes, over the last decade, dozens of interviews with experts on leadership of congregations, colleges, and universities. Banks was honored in 2024 with the Religion News Association’s lifetime achievement award, in 2023 at The Unsung She-Roes Awards: Centering and Celebrating Black Women in Ministry for outstanding media coverage, and in 2022 with the Washington Association of Black Journalists’s inaugural lifetime achievement award. Banks also spearheaded RNS projects that won Wilbur Awards from the Religion Communicators Council in 2021 and 2014.
Banks has received first-place Associated Church Press awards and was the third-place winner of the 2021 Best In-Depth Newswriting on Religion Award from the American Academy of Religion. A Mount Holyoke College graduate, she has also been the religion reporter for two regional newspapers. Banks is a speaker on religion and journalism at gatherings of faith leaders, students, scholars, and communicators.
