christian worship
FOR A FEW months last winter, I did something that still feels too rare in my Christian life: I attended a local Bible study group in American Sign Language.
Every month or so, a half-dozen of us gathered in someone’s apartment, caught up over dinner, and then hashed out theology together. We often stayed late into the night.
Unlike other Bible studies, no one spoke. Half of the people there were deaf, the other half were hearing — but everyone knew how to sign. This Bible study in Boston was highly informal. It wasn’t attached to any particular ministry — especially since none of the deaf people there, including me, attended a local church regularly. Sitting together, far removed from any institutional church, we planted the seeds of community.
Each time I drove home, I felt vital glimmers of encouragement. I’d lived in Boston for more than three years and still hadn’t found a church of my own. I only attended Sunday services sporadically. None of this was by choice. Though my faith is important to me, most churches are not accessible to deaf worshippers.
During my time in Boston, I wound up “church-hopping,” attending one service here, another there, depending on when ASL interpreting was available. Denominational preference is a luxury deaf churchgoers don’t have: Over the years, I’ve visited everything from evangelical and nondenominational to Presbyterian, Anglican, Episcopal, and Catholic churches. My years in Boston felt similarly fragmented, even though I learned a lot about how different Christian traditions approach worship.
Even when I found Sunday services to attend, deeper church participation felt impossible for me. Church events are rarely ASL-interpreted, and I’d given up on trying to show up at speaking-and-hearing Bible studies, potlucks, and weekend retreats. (I occasionally went to local church gatherings when my signing hearing friend Tim Loh could “friendterpret.”) I’d grown up in the church, watching my hearing parents attend weeknight church events, then later watching many hearing Christian friends share about their “church families” in adulthood. But I couldn’t figure out how to grasp such a life for myself.
ON A TUESDAY EVENING in February, the band called Urban Doxology rehearses for an upcoming performance in Richmond, Va. They jump from song to song without sheet music or a printed set list.
“We who believe in freedom cannot rest,” they sing. “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.”
The group’s founder, David Bailey, watches. Dressed in a pink button-down shirt and a brown fedora, Bailey moves about the rehearsal space adjusting sound levels and giving occasional feedback.
Ten years ago, Bailey was leading music at a church in the suburbs when he and his wife felt called to join a budding multiethnic, economically diverse worshiping community in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond’s East End, where Patrick Henry gave his famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech in 1775.
Over time, the community grew into a church, East End Fellowship. It found a home in the Robinson Theater, a brightly colored community arts center named after Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, a Richmond native and tap dancer.
Committed to the work of reconciliation, Bailey began leading cultural competency trainings less than four miles from Monument Avenue, a divided street peppered with statues of confederate leaders, including Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis. Grounded in theology and history, the training provided members with a shared knowledge and language to talk about race. However, Bailey sensed it wasn’t enough.
He noticed the lack of leadership development for people of color going into vocational ministry. He had also grown wary of the available worship music repertoire. “It was like you either had old-school gospel or we had retuned hymns,” he said. East End Fellowship needed more leaders and new songs, ones that better reflected its growing multicultural congregation.
Bailey devised a single solution for the two challenges: a summer internship program dubbed the Urban Doxology Songwriting Internship. “We started the internship so we could develop the kind of leaders we wanted to see as people of color,” Bailey said. “But also so we could create the kind of culture and language for worship that shapes the imagination and deals with the pastoral concerns of the people in the community.”
In 2011, East End Fellowship welcomed its first class of diverse young musicians to Church Hill.
Americans voted largely along the lines of race, education, and party identification. Nonwhites strongly preferred Clinton, while whites decisively chose Trump. Compared with past Republicans, the businessman received a stunning surge of votes from non-college-educated white voters.
None of this is surprising.
And yet the result upends so much conventional wisdom.
The other day I read some interesting statistics about how social media is shaping our lives . It is interesting to see the response to this and recognize the different ways in which we grapple with deluge of social media in relation to our faith. There are lots of resources emerging to help us maintain a strong and vibrant faith in the midst of this. I wanted to highlight a couple that I have found very useful