...From White Supremacy in Worship

Brandi is joined by Sandra Van Opstal of Chasing Justice (https://chasingjustice.com/about/) to talk about white supremacy in how we see, experience, and practice worship. She offers invitations to reclaim our humanity from internalized racism, from...honestly, just bad music, and from practices that don't actually reflect who God is and what God is doing in the world. 

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and if you feel like it, join us on patreon for extra content as well as other available perks. 

Transcripts are available about a week after release on buzzsprout under the transcripts tab!

Patreon.com/brandinico

Taking our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress.
@reclaimingmytheology

Transcript

Reclaiming My Theology, Episode 10: Worship

Brandi: Hello, and welcome to Reclaiming My Theology, a podcast seeking to take our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress. As always, I’m your host, Brandi Miller, and I just wanted to, on the front end, thank everyone who has subscribed, rated, reviewed, and joined our Patreon. Because of the Patreon, we’re actually moving toward making videos and producing broader content for you to help you reclaim your theology as we do.

Today is a little bit of a change of pace as I’m joined by Sandra Van Opstal to talk about worship. We talk about how the values that we’ve discussed so far in the podcast are embodied in worship—more specifically, musical worship in predominantly white spaces.

In this, we reflect on various practices in these white spaces, and you might hear critiques of practices, styles, and songs that have been formative, important, or deeply meaningful to you. This conversation isn’t to take that away from you but rather to recognize that a single expression of worship is insufficient to fully encompass who God is and what God is about. It is instead to recognize the ways that white supremacy has, in effect, idolized white worship, sometimes over God Godself.

We must pay careful of the ways that worship itself has been captive to tools and practices of white supremacy. These tools most certainly include commodification, capitalism, and industrialization. We will likely in this episode mention your problematic fave, and I do that not to demonize necessarily but rather to name that we are responsible for the toxic things we support, are a part of, and let shape who we know God to be and the practices that come out of that.

So with that casual intro, enjoy this conversation about worship.

**

Brandi: So yeah. I really, um – thank you so much for being on. I really appreciate your time a ton. It’s such a gift to have you on here today!

Sandra: [Sandra laughs] It’s great to be here.

Brandi: So, right, you’re an author, speaker, pastor, you’ve done all kinds of things. But I would love for you to describe, for folks who don’t know who you are, Sandra, what does it mean to be you?

Sandra: [Sandra laughs] Well, I am, first and foremost, the daughter of two immigrants that came from Latin America, and I think that profoundly shapes who I am and what I do and what I care about and how I do what I do. I am a neighbor. I live on the west side of Chicago, and I live and I work and I congregate and I neighbor all within a one-mile radius. So. [Sandra laughs]

I’m a person who really believes that you can only talk about things so much, that you have to be able to speak out of what you live and that you have to live what you speak. So, I think that’s the most important things about me.

I have a lot of energy, so I like to do a lot of things at once. I like to spin a lot of plates at one time. [Brandi and Sandra laugh] And I’m not saying that I do any one of them, you know, really great, but I like to do a lot of things at one time. I have, like, a ton of interests, and ultimately, I think, um, I just wanna change the world. [Brandi and Sandra laugh]

Brandi: Casually. Well, I love that. So, I think that goes into the question I always ask every guest, too, is: What is your sense of vocation? What do you want to see happen in the world, and how does your work inform that?

Sandra: Yeah. I want to see the world be a more just place. I mean, I want to continue the revolution of making this world a better place and to see God’s peace reigning and to see people’s lives flourishing, and I think everything I do is probably towards that end—which is probably why I don’t sleep a lot. [Brandi and Sandra laugh] ’Cause I got a lot going on! There’s a lot going on.

I think for me, it means trying to really give the church – so, not necessarily the local church, although I do work in the context of a local church – I think, giving God’s people a sense of what life ought to be like. So, training and speaking and mentoring and provoking and disrupting. You know, anything that can wake people up to what we’re really supposed to be like in the world, and who God is, and what God’s world is supposed to be like, and how we ought to play a role in that. So, I think everything I do is probably towards that end, and it really manifests itself mostly in, like, speaking, in teaching, in training, in mentoring, and some of it’s just, like, neighboring and taking people to appointments and visiting the hospital and all the things we’re supposed to be doing. [Sandra laughs]

Brandi: Yes. I love that. I think that sometimes when folks move into speaking and writing and all of that stuff, it’s easy to become so abstracted from the ground that we are irrelevant and useless. And so I love that your intersection of vocation is around changing the world through – yeah, all of that stuff that you do that you probably, like, make your money doing, but then neighboring and raising two five-year-olds, which I cannot imagine. [Sandra laughs] So—[Brandi laughs]—blessings to you.

Sandra: Yeah, me neither. I started late, so I—[Brandi and Sandra laugh]—don’t know if I’m doing it right, but I’m doing it in community, so I’m getting some help.

Brandi: That sure helps. [Brandi laughs]

Sandra: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, because I think I – it’s not just that it bothers me, it actually infuriates me when people speak to and write on and even just – even if they have lots of studying in that area, it like – it irritates me when people pontificate on things they have no idea – like, they’re not proximate to, they don’t understand, they don’t know, you know. Like, they don’t know.

And so for me – and that was true even, like, in my early years, in, like, early ministry years. I was always like, “I don’t want to be like those kinds of people that just, like, preach and talk about stuff and blah blah blah and talk about it and, like, when you look at their life, their life doesn’t align at all with what they’re talking about.” So, I think I really wanted to find myself in a place where there was a – a lifestyle I was living that I could speak from. And I may not be doing it right, but at least I can speak to the journey of how I’m trying to do it from the space that I’m trying to do it in.

And I think especially as someone who is, you know, is pastoring and is neighboring in a context that is so – so diverse, socioeconomically, I find it even more irritating now. Because the people that oftentimes have the mic, or we have the luxury, or, you know, whatever, access of doing our own podcasts, writing our own books, you know, kind of speaking and writing into the public glare. The more we do that, the more and more separated we become from the people we’re actually writing for.

And I – like, I have congregants and leaders here locally who’ve been like, “Yeah, it’s really nice all the things your friends write, but they don’t know. It’s clear they don’t live here; it’s clear they’re not experiencing this. Like, that’s fine if they wanna read a bunch of books on it, and once, a long time ago, they had a connection to it, but they’re not messaging us the way we would talk about ourselves.”

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: And so that’s been huge for me, to say, like, “Do I have integrity in what I’m saying on issues of, you know, asset-based development, or on issues of advocacy and justice, or on issues of immigration, or whatever it is?” If I don’t have connections to people that can, like, call me, you know, and be like, “No, Sandra, that’s not how we would say it at all.”

Brandi: [Brandi laughs] Yeah.

Sandra: Or, “Really nice try, baby, but no, that’s not what we think.” So – so I do have a lot of those really polite – some people are polite to me, some people aren’t.

Brandi: [Brandi laughs] Yeah.

Sandra: I do have a lot of people that – they know me, locally. So, they’re not impressed by me! I think that’s the main thing. [Brandi and Sandra laugh] They are not impressed by the work that I do! [Sandra laughs]

Brandi: Yes. I feel like all of us need people who are just utterly unimpressed by the work that we do. [Brandi and Sandra laugh] Because I think that does provide a safeguard in some ways from – one of my biggest values is to make sure that I am not theorizing people out of their own experiences or theologizing people out of their own experiences, and it sounds like that’s a lot of what you’re trying to prevent from happening in your neighboring, as you say.

Sandra: Yeah, and I – I – it’s interesting, because my – even my education has been kind of separated by periods of different kinds of ministry. So I went to undergrad, and then I came on staff for the campus ministry, and then I was on staff with the campus ministry doing work with students on – you know, like, speaking to people who were suspicious about faith, trying to help people connect Jesus, and just doing all the work.

And then I went to seminary, and I heard how people actually think people that aren’t in the church believe, and I’m like, “Uh, y’all have not spent any time in the streets, have you?” [Brandi laughs] So I – I went and got the MDiv, and then I went into – that was during the time I was running the Urban program in Chicago and doing, kind of, partnership ministries, connecting and networking nonprofits and churches and students.

And then I went to pastor in a local church, and it’s like all the things I used – learned in seminary did not make sense in this setting, and I had to repackage the things I was gonna do and just relearn everything, really. And, um – even, like, though I had been preaching, for example, in a very diverse racial and cultural setting, it wasn’t really socioeconomically diverse. And so everybody there was, like, there to get a college degree, they were there to be upwardly mobile; no matter where they came from, they were headed somewhere else.

And so when I came to the local church, I was like, “Oh, now I have, like, a 65-year-old with a third-grade education and a 12-year-old who’s rolling his eyes at me, and someone who had been formerly incarcerated, and somebody who, like” – and I was just looking at all the different – “and someone who has a master’s degree.” I mean, they’re all just so different. And I’m like, “How do I do this intergenerational cross-class talking about Jesus in a way that’s relevant to all these people?”

So I had to relearn again. And then, you know, now I’m back in school while I’m also working. So, I think every time it’s given me a chance to go, “Oh, oh, yeah, that’s how we say it when we’re going to write a paper, but that’s not how we say it when we’re talking to people.”

So, anyway, I think that’s been probably a – a grace to my life that I’ve been in and out of school along the way instead of just becoming educated, quote unquote, formally, and then – then trying to do something with it.

Brandi: Yeah, as though hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of education makes you a better neighbor. It – it just doesn’t play out that way, but I think a lot of people who follow Jesus have been – I think because of some of the ways that white supremacy plays out in hierarchy that we believe that hierarchy is attached to education, and so the more education you have, the more hierarchy you have, therefore the more authority you have. And I hear your story breaking the mold that’s put out by white supremacist culture in that in that way.

Sandra: Yeah, and I think it’s actually caused a lot of problems for me, even in communities of color, to be frank with you, because, I find that—[Sandra laughs]—in the spaces I’m in, the folks of color are like me, you know. They’re people who have probably gone in that route, have become educated; many have multiple degrees, have spo – and so I’m saying things like, “We’re not the people to be speaking on this issue; we need to be able to share our platforms.”

So it’s the same thing that white people – that we would tell white people about people of color. People of color who kind of buy into that really, like you said, it’s a system of white supremacy that says, “The expert is the one who’s educated. The expert is the one with the credential. The expert is the one with the degree.” Then we expert-ize, you know, certain people and we marginalize other people, and we end up doing that same thing. I mean, I know I have. I’m just confessing.

Brandi: Oh, same.

Sandra: I know I have. It’s a journey for me, so I have to constantly be like, “Yeah, you’re right. What does it look like to do this in a way that really reclaims the values of my community?” Because the Latina community doesn’t – doesn’t do it this way. We value first and foremost the voice of the abuela, the matriarch of the family, and from there, everything else organizes itself. Those who have experience are those who know; those with gray hair are those who know. You know, that has its downfalls, too, if you’re young and you’re trying to do something and they keep telling you to be quiet. [Brandi laughs]

But I think that, in some senses, it’s trying to reclaim and deconstruct the things that we learned as folks who are – who have been formally trained in western institutions, which, I mean, it’s very hard to find a place where that’s not true. [Brandi and Sandra laugh]

So, yeah. And it’s – it’s interesting because—[Sandra laughs]—the other day I was – we were with our small group. And two of the young girls that were there were the daughters of the mothers that were in our small group. Like, it was like small group family time. And they’re like 19, 20. They’re like, “Yeah, you know, every time I go to small group with a certain group of people – every time I go to small group, all they do is like pick apart the scriptures. They’re like, ‘I don’t agree with you,’ and they argue, and they argue, and they argue.” And I know they’re InterVarsity trained. I trained them, okay? I think I personally trained all of them.

Brandi: [Brandi laughs] Yeah.

Sandra: “And it’s, like, they hold the scriptures far away, and they observe the passage, and they observe the thing, but they don’t let the Holy Spirit actually penetrate their heart, or they’re not looking for transformation. That’s not what they – ” This is what they observed, you know. “It’s like they just want to criticize and critique and analyze and deconstruct and all this kind of stuff.” And I just, like, looked at them, and I started laughing. And I – I  mean, I was laughing, like not even – like, I was hysterically laughing, and I looked at them and I said, “Um, you two will be like this after you get educated.” Like, this is – [Brandi and Sandra laugh]

Brandi: Yeah.

Sandra: Like, and I just – this is what college teaches us to do. Like, it teaches us to hold things at a distance to become objective, quote unquote, observers, as if we could be objective, and to look at things from afar and away to criticize, to analyze—which I think, you know, in some respects it’s important to have. I just – my first thought was, “Yeah, that’s what school does to you.”

Brandi: Yes! It tells us that our brains alone can free us or that our brains alone can help us make sense of what’s happening in our bodies, when our bodies and our experiences and our families and our legacies are trying to tell us like, “Words alone can never save or free”—which I think Jesus would agree with.

And so, even as I think about – even as I think about that, I realize that we are consistently being, in the spirit of the podcast and trying to reclaim our theology from white supremacy, we’re consistently, especially as we’re educated, being further indoctrinated into white supremacy.

And I’m excited to have you on, because I think, as we’ve been breaking down individual values and expressions, I think it’s pretty easy to fall into that category of just using our brains to try to save us from the other construct that our brains got us into to begin with. But I know that you have thought a lot about worship, and you and I are in some projects together around worship, and – and things like that.

But what I think is interesting, and what I’ve been considering lately, is that worship in white space, in some ways, is a thing that, like, penetrates through that, like, brain space a little bit to try to – I don’t even think we’re trying to give people an embodied experience, but it’s what ends up happening. But what has happened is, because we’ve intersected white supremacy values in worship, it seems like we’ve just created a pathway to indoctrinate whiteness further through the practice of worship.

And so I would love for you to help us to understand a little bit about what white supremacy looks like in worship and how you see that playing out, because I do think that there’s a strong connection between what we’re talking about and this education, life-of-the-mind, continued kind of indoctrination to that way and the worship that we say we embody or want to – how we would say give to God, express, embody.

Sandra: Yeah, I mean, you know, my – my life’s – my life’s passion is to help people to imagine what worship, what an expression to God and about God and in the presence of God would look like for each community had we not been colonized in our forms of worship. Like, I don’t know what that is; I don’t know that I could tell other people what that is. But I think my – my, like, life’s passion is to say, if God would have shown up in every space in a way that we didn’t need someone to come and interpret God for us, if it hadn’t been missionaries, if it hadn’t been—which, I’m not saying I’m totally against people sharing Jesus and going places, and I’m – I’m not saying that. I’m just – if it hadn’t come the way it did. If it hadn’t come with white supremacy, and with colonization, and with capitalism, and with genocide, and with rape, and with all of the things that it came with. If it hadn’t come that way, what would people’s expression to God have looked like? What beauty could they have brought? What gift could they have offered to us? What gift could we have offered to one another, if we had not been oppressed, you know, in that way, and if we had not been caged in our understanding of who God is and even who Jesus is and who Jesus was?

One really vivid example that kind of gets at, like, why I do what I do is I was visiting a mentor in Uganda, in Kampala, and I was visiting – I mean, I had no – I wasn’t on a project, I was just visiting. And we went – he took me to this artists’ collective, like collaborative, that they have there, where they go around the country of Uganda, and they find from every province the most gifted artists, dancers, and spoken word artists, and, you know, musicians. And they bring them to – to Kampala, to this art institute, to create art together and to teach one another the songs, the dances, and the stories of their people, of all the tribes and the people groups of Uganda.

Really well done, fantastic art, and then they put on these dinner theatre things for guests that come, as a way of – I think that’s how they get their revenue. They have, like, you know, they put on the – and they tell their stories. It’s like three hours long. And you have dinner and you watch – they take you through all their folklore, you know, folkdances and folk stories and – and each one of the tribes and people groups gives you their courting rituals, you know, does a section that’s their courting rituals.

And it was the most amazing, beautiful, spiritual experience I ever had. And I was there with my husband, my mentors, his wife, and my son, who at the time was – was three, and he loved it so much. I mean, he clapped and he danced, and I just thought, Even for him to be taking in all of these colors and sounds and instruments and the way the body moves—you know, all those things.

And around that experience, I had – I’d gone to all these church services, and in every single case, aside from one, it looked, sounded, and was presented to me exactly like you would find in – in a western country, in one of the three large mega-church worship movements. I mean, it – the women sounded the same, the men sounded – it was like – and I just kept thinking, like, Why in the world would an African woman, with her voice, you know, ever want to squeeze her voice into a tiny little CCM, you know, kind of white little – why would they want to do that, what would compel someone to do that?

And I mean obviously I know the answers to that. But I was so sad. I was so sad. And then – and I was angry. And I couldn’t be like, “Well you guys are colonized. You need to…” That’s not my job.

Brandi: Sure. Yeah.

Sandra: So I just kind of was in my sadness and processing with my mentor, and then we went to this event. I just – I lamented and I grieved. I – I – actually, as much as I enjoyed it, for months and months after that, I just couldn’t – I couldn’t take away from my heart really, this feeling of sadness that there could have been so much more understanding for us on this – as non – as non-Africans, for myself, of who God is and what God’s world is about and what it means to worship Jesus, if that had not been taken from them and considered inappropriate to bring into worship.

So, I’m just trying to reclaim – like, I’m just trying to reimagine and reclaim an expression of not just worship as it pertains to music, but how we do our lives in response to who God is in the church so that we can be free, all of us liberated, not just the people who aren’t allowed to do their thing, but all of us to be free. So, that’s – that’s kind of what I’m trying to do. I just think that there’s more. I believe there’s more.

Brandi: Well, I hear some of – in some of what you’re saying that in order to reclaim our theology from, really, white worship—what you call CCM, or Christian contemporary music as a lot of us know it—requires a reclaiming of our whole selves. Like, it sounds like in that event that you went to, you’re seeing this holistic, historic, embodied thing that’s happening that, in the fullness of it, worship is found.

And so, I think for a lot of folks, we may actually not know the ways whiteness has impacted the contemporary worship experience. Because you said, you know, “I know why this African woman could feel like she needs to, kind of, compress her voice into this white style.”

Can you help people understand why might that be? Why might folks lean into the colonizing implications of whiteness and of Christian contemporary music? Why might that happen, or what does that look like?

Sandra: Well, I think fundamentally at the bottom of that is just white supremacy. It’s internalized. It’s racism. It’s like, “Who you are is not good; who I am is good.”

So I think you can do some exploring on some of the topics that Willie Jennings talks about in The Christian Imagination, of looking, like, when we dis – when Europeans made Jesus a disembodied figure, when Christianity became disembodied from place, like an actual, physical place, we don’t realize that the stories of the characters that we’re listening to, the history and the foundation and legacy of our faith, is rooted and grounded in a brown people, period. Not just a brown people, but a marginalized people. Not just a marginalized people, but in a specific space with a specific culture. So it would’ve been near-Eastern, indirect, communal, hierarchical—I mean, like, on the cultural values scales, every single one of those ten things would’ve been different than white Americans. Every single one of those.

And so we have to do the work of being able to build a bridge to scripture and to the history of our faith from our culture. But, because we don’t want to do that work, because people didn’t want to do that work, they just took it and put it in their own culture. So, Jesus is now white, Christianity is now capitalism, and all those other things.

So I think, fundamentally, it’s because we believe that in order to be Christian, we must be circumcised. You know, like, we believe that, in order to be Christian, we must practice faith a certain way. And so we were told that our dances were inappropriate, because they were attached to voodoo, or they were attached to different forms of ancestor worship, and drum is inappropriate because a drum is attached to – and so we were told that our instruments were bad, that our dancing was bad, that our – the way – the way that we dress was bad. God forbid that we show our bodies to somebody, you know.

Like, when we were there, at the dancing, for example, in Uganda, there were lots of parts of the body that were seen! And I wasn’t, like, covering up my son’s eyes or my husband’s eyes. I was like, “That – that is beauty. That’s beauty.” Now, if people want to pervert that in some way, that’s something else.

But we are made to feel that who we are is second-class and inappropriate and wrong, and I think if you’re told that long enough, for enough centuries and enough decades and enough generations, you literally internalize it so deeply that you don’t even know you’re doing it. You – you literally don’t know you’re doing it.

And so I think they’re thinking, like, “We want to be cool, like Elevation church,” or, “We want to be cool, like Bethel or Maverick, we want to be cool like” – list them all, whatever. “We want to be cool.” And what they mean is, “We want to be like pop culture, we want to be like European, we want to be like American, we want to be like – and if we do that, then we’re on the right track.”

So I think it has to do with – I don’t think it’s conscious. I think, fundamentally, it’s – it’s subconscious, and it has to do with you feeling like the only way you can be acceptable is to be like everybody else. And I think any of us that are folks of color who’ve grown up in a white suburb or a white space, we know that. We know that very deeply. And those folks that are in between cultures and are biracial or multicultural in their own skin, they know that feeling of, you know, “Who I am is not acceptable to anyone, any one side.”

So, I think that’s fundamentally it. And I think it could be – it happened, like, let’s say, in popular culture, in modern culture. But it has its roots in, for example, the mission movement to Africa, to all the countries of Africa before they were countries. And, actually, how they got to be countries was all through that movement, you know. Like, there is the Christian force, the Christian and business force, that came and told people who – who they were, where they should live, what they should call themselves, how they should wear, how they should dance, how they should worship,  who they should worship, and what they should – so I think that happened and we’re inheritors of that.

I think, fundamentally, that’s what – what it is. People are, like – they’re inheritors of their history. It’s almost like it’s in our bodies, and we don’t know – we don’t know it. It has many, many implications, but I think – I think the bottom line is if we just copy what they’re doing, we will be acceptable.

Like we – we have to have a certain stage. We have to set up on – like, literally, how they set up on the stage was the same, where they put the instruments weas the same, what it sounded like was the same, how the – how the technician was mixing the sound was the same! I was like, “…I don’t understand.” I came here to learn, you know, and now I find that this is the result of what we have done as Americans in the world around us. It’s the McDonald’s effect, you know; it’s the Starbucks effect. Sad. Sad. What makes it hard is that I can’t come in and be like, “You shouldn’t be doing this!” [Sandra laughs] You know, like…

Brandi: Yes. Yeah. [Brandi laughs]  Absolutely not.

Sandra: Nope. Nope.

Brandi: You can’t use colonizing impulses to decolonize a space. Well, and it sounds like one of the things that you’re saying, even in the McDonald’s effect, as you’ve just said, is that a lot of Christian contemporary music, or white music, is so deeply tied with capitalism that it gets exported globally in pretty substantial ways. And I know that we’ve been thinking about this a lot. Seventy percent of the top 200 songs sung in Christianity are written by the same twelve people now, I believe is what it is?

Sandra: Oh, I believe it. I believe it.

Brandi: And they all have – I was doing some research, and I think that those – well, one, those folks bank 70% of the global revenue for Christian music. They take songs – like, even, I think about “Way Maker,” right, written by a beautiful Nigerian woman, and then exported through the lenses of whiteness, like, a million times. She’s not making the primary money off of it. But I think about folks like Matt Redman or Chris Tomlin or Joel Houston or Jasons or Johns, Jonases, or Stephens or Brians or Chrises that are making so much money off of this worship enterprise and are exporting whiteness in so many different ways.

And so I would love it if we could express a little bit: What does white worship look like? Because I think it has a—[Brandi laughs]—I think most of us know it when we see it, but I think naming the thing for what it is is really helpful. So, one of the things I think about a lot is – as I talked with Dr. Randy Woodley last week, we talked about dualism and how the life of the mind gets elevated. And so, so much of white worship, for me, is singing theology that we already believe out into the air somehow and that we just abstract our theology, and then we abstract our worship far away from us. And Tamice Spencer said in a few episodes ago that a lot of it is just I sing about how trifling I am and how bad I am and how much I need the atonement and how much God loves me.

And I’d love if we could work out together a little bit: What does this kind of worship look like? I know you said the setup of it, the sound of it, but if we could fill that out a little bit, I think that would be helpful.

Sandra: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think looking at the themes of how – well I think – okay, so, in the – the studies of worship, for example, typically you learn that there’s, like, the expression of worship, there’s the form of worship, there – like – so expression would be what it feels like or what it looks like. The form is, like, how it’s structured. Then there’s, like, the essence of worship, what it’s for, you know, and I forgot the other one.

But they argue a lot of times that sometimes that, like, when you’re thinking about diverse worship or cultural worship or worship in culture, you’re really talking about expression and form. And I argue that actually you’re talking about essence and theology. Like, fine, we can talk about expression and form, but I’m not talking – I’m really not talking about what it sounds like or what it feels like. What I’m trying to address typically, when I’m working with folks or in my writing, is what is the essence of worship and what is the theology of that worship? What is the story and the narrative that’s being told?

So, for example, I don’t think that people, in congregations in our community, they don’t come to church to be informed. They are informed, but that’s not why they’re dragging themselves there. And – and they – they don’t merely come to church to be inspired. Although they need to be inspired, that’s not why they’re dragging themselves there. They’re dragging themselves there because they believe that when they come together to remind themselves and rehearse and practice discipline, spiritual disciplines together, that they actually encounter God together. There is a spiritual kind of almost sacramental experience that happens when God’s presence actually dwells with them in that space.

So they come to church expecting an encounter, like [Sandra claps lightly] encounter with God. I don’t think that’s why people go to worship. I think they’re going there to feel God, like, remember God, to love Jesus, because every song is like a love song to Jesus, because Jesus is my best friend and we’re so close. And yeah, so, I think the essence is different.

I actually believe people go to church for different reasons. People go to worship, for example, why you turn your, you know, like – you would go into a prayer closet, for example. All the grandmothers in our church have their prayer closet. They go there not because they have things they feel need to be said into the air.

Brandi: Yeah.

Sandra: They go there because they’re taught that that is where they can encounter the living God. And that the Creator God who spoke the universe into being is the same spirit that dwells within them. And so that’s why they do it.

And I think that that is lost when we – when we only follow one form or way of worship. Because even though we’re not in – we could be listening to the song on the radio, or hearing the prayer practice, or reading the liturgy in the book. The place from where it comes actually is very important in shaping and creating the theology that comes out of it.

And I think, theologically speaking, I mean, listen to the – look at all the lyrics of the worship songs. Have you – people are doing studies on this. It’s – like you said, it’s like the songs are – first of all, try to find a song that is collective in nature, that acts as if – as if our spiritual life and the community that surrounds Jesus is supposed to be an actual community and not just a bunch of individuals.

So I think that’s the most striking thing about western worship in its current modern form, is that it’s incredibly individualistic; it’s incredibly transactional. Like, listen – listen to the lyrics. It’s very transactional. It’s, like, you’re getting something or giving something, even – and if you aren’t in the presence of God, if there’s something about the presence of God, then it’s just you. I don’t know why you came! I don’t know why you came to be with a couple thousand people if you just wanted to be with God alone, you know, just stay home! I don’t know what to say to you.

Brandi: [Brandi laughs] Yes! Yes.

Sandra: Other things would be, like, in a – in a communal sense of worship, in communal cultures, when you go to worship, you’re not, like, distracted by the person who’s next to you crying or distracted by the children that are speaking or distracted by the person who wants to dance. It’s actually the reason you – that you gather together. You gather together so that you can acknowledge one another’s presence.

So I think that value of communalism versus individualism is very, very strong in the practice of worship in those spaces. But yeah. I think those – those two to me are, like, the kind of guiding – when I go into a space, I’m like, “Oh, this – this is a bunch of songs about myself. I’m not really here for this.”

Brandi: Yeah, well, I even think about – it makes me laugh every time. Every time I take non-Black students, particularly white students, to Black church, and we sing “I Need You to Survive” and you have to, like, look at your neighbor and sing a song about how, because you are part of the community of the saints, you – I need you, and you need me, and we’re a part of this body, like we need to stand together. And watching the discomfort on their faces of having to acknowledge another human person and sing a song to them, as though that person has dignity and value, it tells me a lot about what they think worship is.

Because, like, we’re really comfortable in western spaces making God big and far away. And then our neighbor becomes small and far away. [Brandi laughs] Like, I – one of the things I’ve been laughing about as I look at worship trends lately is, you know, we had “10,000 Reasons” and Hillsong was like, “You know what, hold my beer”—or black water, as Jerry Falwell would say it—and gave us “100 Billion X.” That God can be so big and so far away that you’re trying to worship a god that’s so far from you that how can your neighbor mean anything in that way? And so I think I’ve been experiencing a lot of that sort of abstraction.

I also see a lot of themes around, like, dealing – because I think that all communities have some kind of theology of sin or some theology of brokenness. But I think in western white spaces, oftentimes that is, again, abstracted to individualistic sin rather than corporate things that are harming the community that we need to be rescued from.

And so instead of being like, “God, rescue us from this evil,” we’re like, “Burn me to a crisp, throw me into your oven, God your burning fire’s going to make all the stuff that’s bad in me good again.” And I just don’t understand – well, I think I do understand, but I don’t see the appeal.

And so I’m just realizing that there are so many ways that whiteness and all of its values just get exported through our theology in ways that, like you said, are creating internalized racial inferiority globally. And that is so upsetting. [Brandi laughs] It’s so – it’s so upsetting.

Sandra: Yeah, and, you know, it’s interesting. I was trying to think, I was like, “Why can’t I think of any songs?” Because what you’re saying – I mean, typically, a lot of songs are on my mind. And I realized I haven’t really been listening to worship songs in the last, well, probably year.

I – it’s just, um, I do listen to songs that are given to me from, like – I have a lot of friends who are, for example, in South Africa or in Kenya, and they send me music like, “Hey, we’re working on this song” or people are working on stuff and they send me. I love that kind of stuff. A friend of mine, Chantel Varnado, she just released a CD, so I was like, “Oh, I’m listening to her stuff.” Some of the stuff that the folks that were doing the InterVarsity lives were doing, they wrote some of their own music. So, anytime someone’s writing their own music, I’m like, “Yes, let me listen to it.”

But I’m not interested in whatever’s popular on the radio, on the Top 100 or the Spotify or Amazon Music, or whatever’s there. Because I just – I just feel like it’s going to be the same, same, same, same, same thing. Same six chords, same woman’s voice, same man’s voice, same crescendo, same ending. Like, I can tell you how all those things are going to end and where there’s going to be, like, a spontaneous solo. [Brandi laughs] I mean, I’m just tired of it, you know? So I – I couldn't think of any music for that reason. But I think part of it is just artistically it’s so boring!

Brandi: [Brandi laughs] Oh my gosh.

Sandra: You know, like, there’s just, um, I think when we – we have music that is so produced—because it really is an industry. Like, it is an industry. So, therefore, there are these twelve writers – or no – let’s say there’s twelve, these twelve writers and these six different churches on these three continents that are writing all the music, exporting it all over the world, and colonizing everyone. And the rest of us are just, like, eating it up, you know, we love it. And it’s because it’s actually designed to do that. In the same way that a McDonald’s fry has, like, I don’t know, in it – I have no idea what they put in those fries, really.

Brandi: Yeah.

Sandra: But they’re addictive. They’re actually made to be addictive. They’re scientifically modified to be not really a fry, in a way that your children will want to keep eating them.

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: And the chicken nugget. I don’t know what is in that!

Brandi: Oh, nobody knows.

Sandra: So, anyway, all that to say they create them so that you want more. They create them in a certain way. So I think that actually the industry is creating music in such a way that you – it’s catchy in a certain way so – it’s a formula. It’s literally a formula, and if you want to write music outside of that formula, well, then, good luck trying to get it published, you know, or trying to get a hearing for it. And then if you’re a person of color who has a theology, for example, of community, or a theology of justice, or a – a theology of – of transforming the world or anything – anything that’s in the Bible [Brandi laughs] that’s not just you and Jesus on a – you know, cuddling somewhere, or God really far away, either one, then good luck.

Brandi: Yeah.

Sandra: So I think it’s – it’s very disturbing, because the breadth of – just, for example, just even in the scriptures, the breadth of emotion and experience and poetry that’s in the Psalms. I mean, it’s amazing. If we have various types of Psalms, and in the Psalms, there’s at least 40, I think 50 – I think 40% of them are lament songs. And we have no songs of lament. And when we do have songs of lament, they’re only individualized, and they’re not communalized.

So we can’t say, you know, “Jesus, like, what the [pause] is happening here?” There’s no song to cry out, you know? And so we end up just wailing at church. That’s all we do; we just wail. We cry out to Jesus, and then we sing our songs in between the wailing, which is another mark of cultural worship. Like, I used to tell people, like, “Yeah, you think you’re doing Black gospel worship, you think you’re doing Latino worship, but you’re not, actually.”

Brandi: [Brandi laughs] No.

Sandra: Because, first of all, that song would have lasted fifteen minutes instead of five.

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: And second of all, the song is really just, like, a diving board for the actual encounter with God.

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: The song is just the spring. And then you utilize the words of the song to spring into songs of deliverance, songs of prophetic words, songs of healing, silence, you know, whatever is coming. But it’s not the actual thing. Whereas in white – in western forms of worship, because form and structure is so important, whether it’s a hymn that has four parts and a key change between three and four—[Brandi laughs]—or a contemporary song that seems like it’s free, but actually we already know the formula, and we can tell you exactly where the worship leader’s going: tag the last one three times and then end really slowly, you know. I think that we don’t have what we need in our Christian experience to interact with God in a way that keeps us connected to God.

Brandi: Mm, mmhmm.

Sandra: We don’t have what we need for our Christian experience to encounter God in a way that connects us to God. For – we just – which is why I think, also, we have a lot of people that are like, “God’s not for me. Jesus is not for me. Spirituality is not for me.” And it’s because the type – they’ve been given, like, I don’t know, like, Cheetos. This is, like, spirituality, it’s Cheetos. It’s packaged, it’s crispy, it stays forever. You can have it on a shelf for 17 years; you always know what you’re gonna get when you get a Cheeto; there you go, there’s your Cheetos. And what they really need is, like, a full meal!

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: You can only live on Cheetos for so long.

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: And then pretty soon you’re like, “You know, this is not really speaking to me and what I’m going through.” This doesn’t address the sadness and the revulsion that I experience when I watch children being caged in our world. This doesn’t express the darkness that I feel when I’m preparing to be a foster parent, I learn how many children in our – in our world are abused, verbally, physically, and sexually. It doesn’t help me encounter that darkness that we have inside of us. It doesn’t help me deal with the anger that I feel when I know that racism is not something of the past, but systemically, intentionally planned to continue a genocide over time. This is not a religion or a faith or an experience of God that helps me understand the world that I live in, so I’m out of here.

And I can totally understand that. And so I think if we had rituals, spaces, practices, creativity, art, sounds, smells from other cultures, we could probably have everything we need. I think God has given us everything we need.

So I don’t think it’s just a matter of, I like, “I feel left out. We’re left out. Can you please let us in?” It’s not like that for me at all. I think it is – it really is we’re not giving people what they need to survive this world that we’re living in. Until all of it is renewed and transformed and whole, we have to live here. [Brandi and Sandra laugh]

Brandi: Yes! And we have to figure out how to do that.

Sandra: We have to live here. So that’s – I think that’s my whole thing, like, can we just have a space where we can come together in community? Can we just give people some practices that can help them deal with the things that come in on a weekly basis? Because I’m barely hanging on here. And I design this stuff, you know? I’m barely hanging on here, and I teach this stuff. And so I think I’m looking just for freedom.

Brandi: And it feels so much like when we make an industry of that practice, it’s so hard to get free. Because I’m even thinking about how I’m seeing that happen right now, as it intersects our – our – this social and political moment that we’re in, where I’m watching the Sean Feuchts of the world erecting stages at George Floyd’s memorial and assuming that that’s going to make people freer, that that’s going to save the world, when the community is right there, doing worship by loving and connecting with each other, by grieving and lamenting.

And so I just think that what you’re saying in this – even in the – I love that you have been using the metaphor of unhealthy food in various capacities, like corporate unhealthy food, to describe what this is like, because I think that’s so true, and we’re seeing that! I think one of the things that’s been – that’s been concerning me is that in the moment, in this moment where it is now popular and cool to be involved in justice-y things, I’m seeing that re – that food repackaged as though it’s just – like, seeing – yeah.

When I watch organizations like Bethel launch something like Maverick, which has some great music and some great stuff, but it might just – in some situations, it might be like putting Black faces on – it’s the same thing. And so I feel concerned that because we’re putting tokenized Black faces on the same old thing, we’re calling it freedom, and then we’re having the same kind of nostalgic experience that a lot of us experienced when we first started following Jesus in western spaces.

And then we’re – when we don’t feel right about that and criticize and go, like, “Actually, I don’t think that thing is it,” we end up being told that we’re against the movement that’s for us, in some way. I been told that as a Black woman, like, that my not being on board with that sort of thing—and it’s not just them, they’re just archetypal of the issue—that I’m like fighting against my own liberation. And I’m like, “No! I just am not trying to eat the same shitty food all the time. I’m just not trying to do that.”

Sandra: Thank you. Yeah, no, nope. Not trying to eat it.

It’s interesting that you said that, because I didn’t know – like I said, I’m so, like, I don’t even connect – I don’t have the stomach for most of that, so a lot of the work that I’m doing now is either trying to learn from Native communities in Canada or here or – or globally. And smaller groups, you know, like, all the folks that we know.

And I told my husband yesterday, I was like – we were looking at worship videos, and I was like, “You know what this – this group, everyone keeps suggesting them to me, it just feels like Bethel with Black – with Black people. Is it?” And I just went to go search it. And I was like, “That’s why it feels like that.”

Because it has – in some senses, you know how you can go to a different country and you can find potato chips? Like ketchup flavored potato chips in some countries and arroz con pollo flavored potato chips, and you’ve got, like, flavored potato chips, but it’s running the structure and the engine is the same thing. The content is the same thing, in the sense that it – it has a way of developing, it has a theology it’s promoting. I just – I don’t see anything different there. And I’m not saying that – it’s not – that Cheetos are bad. Because I’m going to tell you, I love a Cheeto when I’m stressed out. I’m gonna eat them when I’m stressed out. But you can’t live on Cheetos, and so I think that those kinds of things, it has, like, the essence of.

And again, let me make sure I’m very clear, because I don’t think I have been clear. I think that musical worship and singing stuff to God is important. I think that is a practice that we do so we can mobilize ourselves to true worship in the world around us. So if the things that you’re singing about, if the things that you’re praying about, if the things that you’re practicing in your own, you know, time and liturgies that you’re doing at home are not filling your heart with discontent at the injustice and sadness that you see in the world and mobilizing you to make a difference in the world, to give more generously, to love more deeply, to speak up when you see things are wrong—if the things that you’re doing in God’s presence are not fueling that for you, that is not worship. It’s not.

And if that’s simply, like, “I need to get before God to know that, like, I’m a real human being, and I’m not just, like, you know, a housekeeper to my kids, you know, as a mother”—the things that I do before God where God comes to me and says, “You’re my child, and I love you. And even if you did nothing for me, I still love you.” That healing that I get? That mobilizes me and frees me to be more generous, more just, and more engaged in the world around me.

So even the things that are our soul care, which I, you know, like, songs and psalms that help us to connect individually with God, they can do that. But if the worship that you practice, the worship disciplines that you practice – the worship disciplines that you worship do not mobilize you for justice and transforming the world, being more present for your family and your neighbors, all those things, it’s really just not worship. It’s not. It’s just self-soothing, kind of self-indulgent—which is great, you know? Get a massage or sing to yourself. Either way, you’re doing good.

But it’s not actually Christian worship. Because what Christian worship does is it actually equips you and prepares you for the lifestyle of justice and compassion and mercy in the world. It has to do that.

And so I would say if you’re following a worship movement or you have a favorite singer or you have a prayer book that you love, whatever those things are, if what’s contained in it you notice is really just narcissism, then you should just toss it out, burn it, you know, erase it from your library, and find things that actually remind you that God is great and that God has a role for you in the world to make it a place of justice, to make it a place of compassion and flourishing.

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: That – so I – I think that’s what matters to me. It’s like, sometimes people come to me like, “My church doesn’t really care about xyz, and I don’t know how to move them towards that” and, you know, leaders. And I’m like, “What are you singing about? What are you praying about?”

How do you expect people to care about children that are being left in hotel rooms all along our borders by themselves, unaccompanied, God knows what is happening to them – how do you expect them to care and mobilize and raise their voice and do something about that if nothing in their practice is preparing them for that moment? So it’s your fault as a church leader or as a pastor. You’re not help – you want them to make this huge bridge between me and God, me and Jesus, me and Jesus, me and Jesus, me and Jesus, me me me me me me, and the world, but you’re not preparing them.

So I think where we ought to be looking for folks that are writing music, creating spaces, painting pictures, creating graphics that – that lead us to see how dark the world is, how much greater God is, and how we can be and play a role in that. I think that’s what we’re – that’s what I’m looking for.

And I – I think that’s why even a song like “Way Maker” – like, I just know the – the history and the present issues – present experience of the church in Nigeria, I just know that that song does not have the same meaning as people singing it in a space where there isn’t persecution and death and – and a need to know that God is always present, even when your life is at stake. And I think that the migrants who sang that song from Honduras through Mexico to Chicago, who know it in their hearts without any PowerPoint presentations or, you know – I think that they translated it and sung it because it was what they needed to sing to themselves to know that even though the world they live in is very, very dark and overwhelming, God is a way maker. He’s a miracle worker, light in the darkness.

So when you take that song out of – when you Columbus that song out of its context and take it other places, it’s not that it’s not meaningful for everyone. We – we all go through hard things. I go through hard things, even though I have significantly more freedoms and wealth and privilege than the people that I love in my community, but I want to honor the place that that song came from and not just commodify it. And I’m afraid that unintentionally or intentionally, doesn’t matter—the impact is that it’s been commodified.

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: And the impact, just practically, is that the people who actually wrote the song were erased from – from the song altogether. 

Brandi: Yes. Yes. That when songs that have such deep meaning and purpose and value become about one’s addiction to pornography and being free from it, it’s like, “Well, yeah, that’s great. Do that. But can we lean into the broader freeing movement that those songs are supposed to take us through?”

And I just think that in an industry that exploits people’s songs for their meaning and their money, for other people’s money, there’s almost no way to do that. Like, I’m convinced—and we’ll talk about this more on the podcast another time—but, like, that we can’t get free if we’re addicted to capitalistic structures. And what I’m hearing in some of what you’re saying is that we can’t get free if we’re, as you’re saying, Columbus-ing songs and Columbus-ing experiences, and exploiting and colonizing people’s experiences and lives. And so for me I think a lot of what I’ve been doing is rejecting, like, I’m rejecting what I call K-Love worship, and—

Sandra: Positive, encouraging?

Brandi: Positive, encouraging. I’m like – I’m rejecting a lot of that. Because the only – because if the system itself that that is coming out of is exploiting people, then it can’t make us free. If people of color can only make it in that industry by becoming more white, it’s not making us free. If we’re stealing songs, like, literally stealing songs and profiting off them, that’s not making us free.

And so I think as we close out, a lot of folks who listen are probably folks who have either given up on worship entirely, are surprised once in a while when a song hits them. And again I don’t want to talk shit about all western worship music. You know, I’ll listen to a Steffany Gretzinger song every once in a while, and it’ll get me in some tears, you know? [Brandi laughs] Like, it’ll connect. But I think for a lot of us, we have seen the ways that eating Cheetos all the time makes our bodies feel, makes our communities feel, makes us feel about God, makes us think about how God feels about us, and have abandoned the practice of worship entirely.

And so, for folks who have done that, do you have any recommendations or starting points to reclaim our worship from white supremacy?

Sandra: Yeah, I think if you come from – I mean, I don’t know if there’s a perfect way of doing this, I really don’t.

Brandi: Sure.

Sandra: But I think here are some things I try to do.

Brandi: Yeah, that’s not the – definitely not going for perfectionism. That would be ironic. [Brandi laughs]

Sandra: I think – I think I try to think about the – the things in my community that have formed my community, not just me. So I start by taking – I think the first step of deconstructing and reclaiming is actually to decenter yourself. And so I started to ask questions like, “What is important in my space, in my community? What are the songs that have been legacy – what I would call legacy songs?”

So, I think in the Latina community it would be coritos. Like what are those coritos? What do they say, what do they claim about God? What are some of the practices in – whether it’s in the Catholicism within Latin America or the Pentecostalism within Latin America, what are some of the – the – the practices that the people that I come from – what are some of their practices, and why is that important? You know, like, so I start there.

So, I think some of that, for me, in my own personal encounter and worship with God, has been, like, practicing things like silence, because that’s a practice we should all have, you know. I think it means singing the coritos that my grandmother used to sing to me growing up. It actually means singing songs – folk songs that aren’t necessarily faith-based songs, like they’re not about Jesus, but they’re just songs about our community, so I understand how our community orients – orients itself and sees itself.

And then I try to do that as I – as I lean into friendships and love other people. So I have a friend who’s in Cape Town and she sends me all this stuff, like stuff she’s working on, songs she grew up singing. She teaches me, she mentors me in that area, and I’m, like, trying to find out, “Well, where does that come from and why is that sung that way?” And, you know, learning, I think, in a way that I’m decentering the industry, decentering myself. Really, I’m just like, “Who are the people that I love, that I trust, that I value, that I want to influence me in some way?” And – and sometimes that means they’re gonna give me a song that I’m like, “Ughh.”

Brandi: Uh-huh. Absolutely.

Sandra: “I don’t really wanna sing that song, because, you know, Chris Tomlin makes me mad.” But I want to know why they’re leaning into that song.

Brandi: Yeah.

Sandra: Like, why is it that that song is – so I try to also to pay attention to, “Is there a contemporary song that seems to really be, like, being grabbed by people? Like, why is it? What is it in the lyric or the experience of the song?” Because I’m trying to learn about what is the Holy Spirit doing in the moment, in this moment in my community.

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: So I think those are some things I do. I look out for other songwriters, so, I mean, I follow Common Hymnal; I follow Porter’s Gate; I follow kids in my community that are making beats, you know. I try to pay attention to what they’re doing and what they’re posting and why. And, again, even if they’re not songs necessarily that name God—I mean, the whole book of Esther doesn’t name God, and God is very present, so I’m trying to figure out where is God present in this movement. There’s – there are also, like, in South Africa and in Kenya, there are protest songs that they sing. You know, so I try to pay attention to how are those formed, who formed them.

So I think I’m just listening and paying attention and trying to – we have so much access because of YouTube that all your friend would have to do is say, like, “Oh Sandra, listen to this.” And they put the link there for you, and you listen to it. It’s not that hard.

I try to follow certain people on Instagram so I – I follow Lusanda – you can follow my Facebook or my IG, and you’ll see. But I follow other people to see what kind of art they’re posting and why it’s striking to them.

I think this is also true for, like, intergenerational things. Because, you know, I’m old. So I don’t know why people like what they like now. What’s happening in our culture now? How should I be leaning into that?

And then I don’t judge myself when there are songs that are – have been very formative for me in my own journey with Jesus. Like, the hymn “It Is Well” has been so formative for me.

Brandi: Mhmm. Yes.

Sandra: So I’m not gonna be like, “I’m not gonna sing that song because a white person wrote that song.”

Brandi: Sure. Of course.

Sandra: Like, that’s not helpful. But I think I – I need to leave room for there not to be a lot of absolutes in – in the way that I encounter God. And then I look for other ways – I’m just on a journey. I think I’m just on a journey and on a quest of like, “What are the things that most connect me with God?”

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: So, for example, I ride my bike a lot. I’m not, like, much – much of an exerciser, but I really like Zumba, and I really like to ride my bike. And I’m gonna tell you, I think when I was doing Zumba a lot more often, when we could be together in person, it was really about being one with my body. I think Zumba and yoga help you, like, be one with your body, so now I’m doing a lot more yoga.

But it’s, like, being attentive to my physical body, because this body is the one that my – this body is the one that my spirit lives in and my soul lives in. And this is the body I’ll have in the life everlasting. This is my body. So I’m gonna have it and it’s – it’s mine and it was given to me for a reason. So how do I take care of my body and be attentive to my body? And I think Zumba, because it is such a – you know, the way you move, and yoga, it just makes you really centered in your body. And I think when I bike-ride, I actually – I actually, like, watch people and I – or just watch around, and I end up in a very prayerful state, so I do most of my praying, actually, while I’m bike-riding.

So, I think looking for things in your body that help you to acknowledge Christ in you, I think that is what you also want to be doing. And sometimes it doesn’t require music or words; it requires you being attentive to your own body. And I think that’s not taught; that is not western.

Brandi: Nooo.

Sandra: That is not taught to us in our church experiences here in the U.S. through white evangelicalism and other white spaces. We’re very disembodied.

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: So I think part of reclaiming – part of reclaiming that is, like, being present in myself, in my body, and being present in my space in the land.

Brandi: Yeah.

Sandra: So, very physically, like this is my city, what do I know about it, who was there before them, who was there before them, and who was originally here?

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: And even when we travel with our kids—you know, road trip, because no flying now—

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: —we try to teach them along the way, like, “This is where we’re at, these were the people that lived here, and this is what happened, and now here’s who lives here.” And they’re five, they don’t – you know, they’re not paying attention. But we feel like that’s a practice we want to have, so as they get older, they say, “You know, one of the things we did, because we’re Christians, is that every time we went somewhere, we acknowledged who was there and who had come before, as a part of acknowledging that we are human beings who live in a body in a space in a place.”

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: So, anyway, those are things – I don’t know that they’re – they’re not music-related, but I think those are things that I could encourage people to do as they’re on their journey, yeah.

Brandi: And I – I think that’s so great. Because so much of western interpretations of what worship is are only about music and only about song. And then the songs become bankrupt, because they have no implications, like we’ve said before.

And so I think for me to actually enjoy music again – like, I took a long gap before I met Common Hymnal folks and started doing music with them where I wasn’t doing anything around any of it. In this time now, because I’ve been doing protest work and activism work and anti-white supremacy work, I found myself newly connected to old Negro spirituals, where my people sang songs while they were forced to work. They found God in that place of darkness.

And I’m like, “Okay. Well then how are we finding God in the songs, in the chants of protest?” I’ve been listening to, like, Mahalia Jackson stuff. How does her soundtrack to the words of the Civil Rights Movement change me? How does that shape me right now?

And so I think that what you’re talking about is re-embodying in a significant way that I think gives us an on-ramp to enjoy musical worship in a different way again, because it doesn’t become the only way or the one right way to experience, know, or give reverence to who God is or to acknowledge who God is in the world. And so I really appreciate what you’ve brought folks, because I think you’re bringing something that offers an opportunity to more life.

And I know that as we think about reclaiming our theology, it can seem very abstract, like thinking about the study of God or who God is, but I’m like, “Oh, it’s something that’s in our bodies; it’s what we do. It’s not something that we just think.” And so, while we start with words like this in a podcast, the reality is, like, it’s the stuff that you’re talking about. It’s bike rides and parenting and going on walks and marching in a protest and eating a good meal, like a real good meal. It’s all of those things.

Sandra: That’s worship. That’s worship. [Brandi and Sandra laugh] Good meals are worship.

Brandi: Yes.

Sandra: And, you know what, this is the bottom line for me. I have been doing ministry and activism for a long time, in my neighborhood and nationally and connected to the global church for a long time. And I have found that I will not survive, I will not actually – this is not sustainable without having a fierce and a deep connection with God. It’s just not possible. You cannot stand against evil and you cannot push back darkness in your own strength. You can’t. 

Brandi: Yeah.

Sandra: And so everything I can do to remind me that God’s strength is made perfect in my weakness and that it’s the strength of Jesus and the power of Jesus in me, everything I can do to make that reality – like, to acknowledge that reality, I need to do it. Because otherwise, girl, I will do it on my own. You know I will. I’ll do it on my own. And then I’ll be a cranky mom and an awful wife and a terrible neighbor and a mean-ass daughter and, you know, like, no one will want to be around me. And I’ll be tired and exhausted. And I’m already tired and exhausted. So I need to be connected to God. We all do. That’s true for all of us. The work of justice is not sustainable without worship. It’s just not. 

Brandi: Well, Sandra, thank you so much. It’s been such a delight to have this conversation with you, and I think you’re giving people pathways around the toxicity of what we’ve been taught worship is in western spaces, and I think on the other side of what you are offering us there is freedom. So I’m just curious: is there anything you want to plug before we go today, anything that you have coming out or doing right now?

Sandra: Well, we do have – we’re working on some stuff with Chasing Justice, we’re doing some MasterClasses this fall, and one of them that we’re doing in particular is on spirituality and justice. And we’re interviewing some folks and having them share a little bit about their journey in justice and how their spirituality and kind of connection – deep connection with God has helped sustain the work of justice. So I think that would be a great thing for people who’ve listened to this to connect to as well.

Brandi: Awesome. That’s so great. Well, thank you so much for your time today.

Sandra: Thank you!

**

Brandi: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Reclaiming My Theology. Honestly, I said everything I wanted to say on the front end already, so I don’t have much to say to you but what we say every week. Which is that I hope that through this work and through both the reclaiming of our theology and the deconstructing of toxic things in our lives that we would be able to do a little bit better together. Have a good one, y’all.