Modern Faith

The Story Behind Modern Faith

For a long time, I narrated this story to begin in 2017, which was my ultimate year of spiritual strain and growth. In the span of that year, I labored to complete and defend my dissertation for my Ph.D., and with much prayer, work, and guidance from my advisor, graduated with Ph.D in May. I still remember that feeling of accomplishment and relief. However, very soon thereafter, I experienced two pivotal cases church hurt and vocational trauma, one of which became excruciatingly public.
I was at a loss. In addition to the heartbreak and loneliness, I felt overwhelmed with theological questions about the nature of God and the nature of the church people. I’d just given my everything to completing a six-year-long academic program, in order to better serve my community and God’s people. What was God doing in all of this? What was I to make of these events and people? Was ministry really what I wanted to do with my life? Did I want to commit my life and service to the Church, an institution that was known for both its radical claims of love and its acts of violence, especially towards Black women?
After some months of processing, therapy, and rest, I began to realize that despite the discomfort and the sadness, these events signified a new chapter in my life and in my understanding. It was about more than just vocational trauma and spiritual violence. It was about far more that getting angry and abandoning my call. This was really about my walk with God, my understanding of who God is and how God operates, and how I live and move in relation to God and my communities.

I’d heard a lot of preachers speak about how setbacks are often blessings in disguise. For years, I resisted this notion because I didn’t want to give any credence to the idea that suffering had salvific or redemptive power. I had always believed that suffering for the sake of suffering is mere misery, and that salvation and redemption lied in one’s willingness to persevere through the suffering. This is what I still believe.

These events initiated a season of perseverance and growth. And the only way I knew to do this was to ask the necessary questions and have my necessary fights with God. After all, according to the witness of Jacob in Genesis 32, we serve a God who isn’t above picking fights with God’s people. And the blessing isn’t in whether or not we win (which is impossible); it’s in our willingness to wrestle.
In light of this, I now narrate this story as having begun in 2007, an entire decade prior to 2017. I was a first-year seminarian at Yale Divinity School. I remember sitting in one of my first graduate level Biblical Studies courses. During one particularly resonant lecture, the professor challenged the class to rethink the story of the Wall of Jericho in Joshua 6. I had only ever heard it taught from the perspective of the Isrealites, who had marched around the wall surrounding Canaan, shouted to God in praise on the seventh time around, watched it crumble and then proceeded to pillage the land and peoples on the other side. That day, the professor invited us to read the story from the perspective of the Canaanites. From this new angle, this was not the story of victory that I had grown up hearing. This was a story of genocide, empire, nationalism, and war. I’d never thought about how that “victory” for the Hebrew nation had impacted the Canaanites. I felt compassion for them. It made me think about my own people, and the histories of genocide and pillaging that my ancestors endured.
That is one memory from a year that changed my life. Even as a lifelong church girl, reading the Bible through historical and critical lenses was new to me. I don’t remember being encouraged to ask God hard questions and to go back and forth with God in inquisitive, analytical, and sometimes, scathing dialogue. Consequently, I didn’t know that these are the means of making one’s faith their very own.

Of personalizing one’s walk with God.
Of deconstructing inherited ideas in order to construct genuine values
Of attuning to the uniqueness of God’s voice in one’s ear
Of surrendering to the peculiarity of God’s call on one’s peculiar life.

So, my wrestle with God, my faith and my vocation did not begin in 2017. 2017 was a calling back to the drawing board. I had placed more confidence in the degrees and accolades that I had obtained than they deserved. My heart had been ravaged by the devastation, and my ministry was on auto-pilot. I had built invisible, yet palpable, forts to protect my heart and my spirit, especially from church people. I needed to hear what God was saying to me. I needed to refocus on what was unique about my ministry. I needed to take fresh inventory of my interests and abilities. While I was committed to my call to ministry, I deeply desired to do work that nourished my spirit and served the needs of my community. My faith had been jaded, and I needed it to be revitalized. The faith of my previous seasons was insufficient. I needed a modern faith.

My formal theological education is a privilege. It is also vital for the work of ministry that God has assigned me to do. But, this isn’t the case for the everyday seeker who desires to be grounded in their faith, inspired by the Spirit, and buoyed by and within a spiritual community. This isn’t the traditional path of the everyday teacher, artist, student or who desires to infuse their faith into their work, their art, their relationships, their learning, and their activism. This is why I launched Modern Faith. It is a podcast for young Black women who have become disillusioned by the toxicity of religion, but walks around with spiritual hunger and curiosity. It is a resource for those who have longed to hear a theological perspective on topics that many churches have deemed taboo. And, I’m not talking about that age-old condemnatory perspective. People are tired of that. I am tired of that. It is for those who love, or are intrigued by, God, in God’s many iterations and by God’s many names, but who aren’t here for religious intolerance, exclusivity, institutionalism, or politics.

It’s unfortunate that these things have caused many to abandon their faith altogether. Perhaps Modern Faith can be a step that you take towards a fresh, deep, and inquisitive faith in the God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever more (Hebrews 13:8).