Keri L. Day sees a unique space in theological education for Black students and professors, and it contributed to the title of her new book.
The associate professor at Princeton Theological Seminary wrote “Notes of a Native Daughter: Testifying in Theological Education” as part of the Theological Education Between the Times series. One of the things she explores is the presence of both harm and hope in the academy.
“[There are] both the deep experiences of structural racism and a number of Black students as well as faculty members knowing that they have contributed and they have shaped theological education in profoundly important ways,” Day said.
“It seemed to me that either privileging one or the other side is sort of helpless and hopeless, because structural racism does not allow, or will not allow, African Americans to lean into their call and into their own talents and gifts.”
Day offers a third perspective — which she believes most Black faculty and students feel — that they are both insiders and outsiders, “kin and yet strangers,” in the theological academy.
She compares it to the experiences James Baldwin wrote about in “Notes of a Native Son.”
“He knew, as an African American, we’ve contributed in making America what it is. But at the same time, we still felt excluded. We still felt outside of what America offered,” she said. “I felt like this ‘Notes of a Native Daughter,’ particularly focusing on Black women’s experiences and Black queer people, that it captured this contradictory, liminal space that African Americans find themselves in.”
She spoke with Faith & Leadership’s Aleta Payne about her book. The following is an edited transcript.
Faith & Leadership: You write about how the theological academy is “a site of both harm and hope,” a site of both repression and affirmation, for racially marginalized groups. That is such a powerful image. Can you talk about it a bit more?
Keri Day: I’m thinking, for example, of how African American students come to the theological academy, say to Princeton Theological Seminary. On the one hand, they feel at times not heard, not seen, because the theologians that they’re studying are white, with particular kinds of experiences that are not their own cultural experiences. Or particular points that they make on a theological level do not resonate with those in the primarily dominant white class.
They feel themselves as needing to not just be understood but to prove themselves, that they too can participate in the intellectual “world building,” as we would call it in the context of theological education. That’s harm, a site of harm. It’s a site or a context where African American students and faculty begin to question themselves, their abilities to move through the context — what can they actually contribute to the context — because they feel so inadequate.
On the other hand, it’s also been a site of hope. The same students that come from the Princeton Theological Seminary will find themselves deeply tooled by classes that they’ve taken. Maybe they’ve come out of a church that is deeply conservative and doesn’t support Black women in ministry, does not support Black queer people. When they come to the seminary, they’re able to find and discover intellectual and theological tools that will allow them to make a case, to speak and affirm their own perspectives, and maybe those perspectives are not embraced within the context of the Black church or within the context of Black community.
In that way, it’s a site of hope, because here they do feel confirmed in their perspective. They do feel affirmed that they’re wanting to think more progressively about the world around them and about different experiences along lines of gender and sexuality. Here you have, again, this double consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois speaks about — that they experience theological education on the one hand as still repressive in these kinds of ways that I mentioned but on the other hand as a site of profound possibility.
F&L: You have described parts of your book as a testimony. For those who do not know what it is to testify or understand what a rich and powerful part that is of some people’s theological experience, can you explain it?
KD: In this tradition that I grew up in, what made testifying so powerful was that it certainly is an individual act, in the sense that the individual is standing and declaring one’s own truth. In the moment of testifying, you are speaking your truth, your experience of God and the divine, your experience of the world, who you are.
There might be some people in the room who may not like what you’re declaring about what God has done for you or what you’ve experienced by way of struggles and victories through the week as you stand up in church and you basically speak what your experience has been with God and with the world and with yourself. But here you are. It’s a profoundly individual act.
But here is the key to the power of testifying and testimony: it is not only an individual speaking one’s truth; testifying is also a collective act. Part of what grants testifying or testimony its power is that presumably there is an audience or community on the other end that is waiting to hear and move into the experience with you.
When one got up in my tradition and testified to what God had done, one also knew that what made it a powerful moment is the community affirming by way of oohs and aahs, by way of saying “Amen,” by way of saying, “You better tell it!”
This call-and-response format is a way of the community affirming for individuals that they are heard, that their experience is valid, that basically the individual is right in speaking the truth that he or she knows to be true.
For me, the power at a metaphorical level, in my book of testimony and talking about theological education, is that part of what the theological academy has to do is be that community who is willing to participate in this powerful ethical moment. Not just a theological moment. It’s an ethical moment of affirming that what the individual — in this case, the native daughter, the native son, the African American student or faculty — that what they speak is important, that it needs to be heard, that it needs to be affirmed.
When it is heard, when it is affirmed in a collective manner, then that testimony becomes a form of knowledge about who we are as a community literally — not just about who I am as an individual speaker but about who we are. It becomes the truth of the collective, something that needs to be lived into by the community.
F&L: You end this book where you could not possibly have known you would when you began — in the pandemic. How do you think that made it different?
KD: I started this book a year and something before the pandemic hit, and in some ways I did have to go back and I had to reframe the book based on the pandemic. Because to me, it was in the pandemic that I was able to see in some ways the unrelenting nature of structural oppression. The pandemic more deeply exposed the unrelenting burden of structural racism on Black community, on Black students within theological education, on Black faculty.
I want to be clear: it doesn’t mean that other faculty who are not Black didn’t have issues. But what I am saying, as an example, is that I had a number of my students that come from communities that were hard hit by the pandemic because their communities have few resources, so they were more vulnerable. They were more susceptible to COVID. Many of them, Black students, had family members who lived in more economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and had COVID and were in serious condition, and [I saw] the burden that placed on these students, in the middle of online education, to perform.
They would come to me about their white professors, some of the very problematic responses in pedagogies that were operating, and in some ways a lack of desire by some professors to really understand the community that these students come out of and how their academic performance is actually affected by being Black in America, basically. It actually did call upon me to go back and to reshape some of what I wrote.
The postscript that I wrote to the book, the last few pages, I went back around to put the question mark back in the air. You get the sense that in the fourth chapter it is a prayer that I have of community, of theological education listening to native daughters and sons, of a kind of great gathering, of a beloved community.
But as a postscript, when I started writing about the pandemic, the question mark reemerges. Is it possible? It’s this sort of tension that I do want the reader to live inside of, where I talk about having students that felt like they were the problem. They were treated as if they were a problem because of all they were going through, given the community that they are a part of and how disproportionately these communities were affected, and them needing to balance what they do academically with this reality of their community and their family.
All of that brings back, Is it possible for theological education to truly listen? The question mark, again, reemerges. It’s this tension of what I was hoping to accomplish in the text. This tension reemerging by the time the reader ends the book, the postscript, that the theological academy is a site of both harm and hope.
F&L: What else would you like people to know about this book, about the process, or about what you hope they will take away from it?
KD: To the president and the dean of a theological institution, you must no longer take on a managerial position when it comes to the institution, just managing the institution according to what has happened in the past, just trying to preserve what the institution has been. To the president and the dean, after reading this book, I hope you take away that you must have bold, risk-taking vision in helping to release theological education into a more liberative future as it relates to race and gender.
To the faculty, to the faculty of color, to the Black faculty, testify. That in and of itself is often very hard and can be a dangerous thing if you’re on tenure track. But find ways to testify. Sometimes it’s therapeutic to ourselves to be able to just testify in safe spaces.
To the white faculty member, truly become an ally, as I talk about in this book, by attending to the policies and the structures of the institutions. It’s not enough to speak that I’m an ally or I have a good Black girlfriend or he is a good colleague of mine at my institution. Really stand up in the policy decision making of the institution and promote equity for Black students and Black faculty.
To the prospective student that wants to enroll in theological education, the groundwork has been laid down. We’re standing on the shoulders of others who in some way — and I don’t know if you can see this in my text, but I really try to give honor to those who have come before. I’m not just talking about what it means to be Black in theological education or a Black woman, but I’m also telling a story about how Black women have actually shaped theological education. I want the prospective student — white, Black, it doesn’t matter what ethnicity or race — I want them to be able to see that, to acknowledge that and to celebrate that.
“We’ve always done it this way!”
For decades, church leaders and committee members have sat in fellowship halls and church classrooms and around conference tables discussing future plans for their congregations.
Inevitably, someone utters those familiar six words: “We’ve always done it this way.”
At first, it can feel like an uninspired attachment to the past. But with deeper listening, you will recognize that it can be more about pride in the track record of the congregation. It’s more “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and less “Over my dead body!”
“We’ve always done it this way” can be an important tether to church culture and long-standing tradition — but it can also be the chief barrier to innovation.
What if the pastors in the room saw themselves as innovation instigators?
When I was growing up, one of our favorite sayings was, “Why are you instigating?” It was a question that would come up whenever two or more folks were in the early stages of an argument or disagreement.
Inevitably, someone would come around to some version of, “I heard you said this …; I heard you said that …,” which would lead someone else in the conversation to ask, “Why are you instigating?” The rhetorical question in childhood settings was meant to draw out the reality that the instigator was bringing information to the forefront to fuel the fire and keep the intensity high.
I am by no means advocating for pastors to spark disagreements in committee meetings, but what would it look like to see ourselves as innovation instigators within our congregations? When a committee member gazes through rose-colored glasses at a church event from the past, how might pastors bring to the forefront the full picture rather than limiting the view to the committee’s highlight reel?
What would it look like to raise the internal challenges that accompanied an external win? Yes, the event was sold out, but was the church equipped to handle the crowd? Yes, the choir did a phenomenal job, but did they sing too long? Yes, elected officials showed up, but when their team misrepresented our event on their social media accounts, did we correct them?
Seeing ourselves as innovation instigators means being willing to hold the mirror up to ourselves and our team so that we can honestly examine the moments where things are working effectively and where they are not. The purpose of this work is not to deflate the pride that congregations have about who they are and what they’ve done but to work out the kinks so that every experience offered becomes better than the last. A culture of questions and critique helps churches both celebrate their wins and respond to their losses.
Innovation instigators don’t allow the team to let themselves off the hook when it comes to event evaluations. They stand in the tension to hold space for new normals to emerge when the old ways of doing things are no longer cutting it.
Rarely is the work of innovation done completely from scratch. We must look for innovative moments within ongoing practices. In other words, we may not be able to change the whole thing at once, but we can make significant changes along the way.
My dissertation adviser, L. Gregory Jones, now the president of Belmont University, calls this practice traditioned innovation. As he wrote with Andrew P. Hogue in “Navigating the Future: Traditioned Innovation for Wilder Seas,” traditioned innovation is “a way of thinking and living that holds the past and future together in creative tension.” Jones and Hogue went on to write: “We believe that the innovation that matters is innovation that draws on the best of the past, carrying forward its wisdom through ‘traditioned innovation.’” This framework has animated much of Jones’ work and even launched the Traditioned Innovation Project at Duke Divinity School.
With this context in mind, I’m calling for more of us to see ourselves as innovation instigators. We have the capacity to hold the past in one hand and the potential future in the other. I am more persuaded than ever in this post-2020 world that congregations have the capacity to innovate. We’ve proved it. The COVID-19 crisis forced churches across the nation to find ways to do church differently. Our “why” remained the same, but our “how” had to change. On that journey, we learned that we, the church universal, are capable of discovering new ways of solving problems.
While you cannot force innovation, you can create a culture that fosters innovative solutions to ongoing issues. Innovation instigators are those brave enough to ask the questions that unmask the real underlying challenges congregations face. Innovation instigators are those willing to disrupt the comfort of a church meeting to open the space up for honest reflection. While pastors cannot force members to think differently, pastors can raise the kinds of questions that draw out new answers. In this season, I implore you to instigate some change. Instigate some new ideas. Instigate toward innovation.
The years 2020-2022 taught us just how resilient we can be. Countless congregations learned new technologies under pressure. Innovation was at an all-time high. I believe that we still have within us that capacity to innovate. We did it under duress; now let’s attempt it in more neutral conditions. Let’s be innovation instigators.
What would it look like to raise the internal challenges that accompanied an external win?
We have always shared our neighborhood with squirrels. But over the past few months, the squirrels seem to have forgotten our unspoken agreement to coexist peacefully.
They are chewing through play structures and windowsills, digging up plants, nesting in cars and moving into attics. Our neighborhood listserv is replete with DIY suggestions for waging battle against the invaders — everything from spraying hot sauce or rubbing habaneros on a swingset to scattering a bunch of fake snakes around the yard.
Mark Rober faced a similar problem: squirrels were devouring his birdseed. He had taken up bird watching at the beginning of the pandemic, only to bear witness as squirrels took down not one but three “squirrel-proof” bird feeders.
Rober could have taken the same approach as my neighbors, arming himself with squirrel repellent and giving up on a new hobby he found “so lovely.” But the NASA engineer-turned-popular YouTuber had an entirely different reaction.
He got curious.
And then he channeled his indignation into a good-humored appreciation for the squirrels’ ingenuity and persistence, meeting their creative problem solving with his own.
Over a few weeks in spring 2020, he built an eight-part Ninja Warrior-style course for squirrels. If they wanted to get to the birdseed, they would have to successfully navigate such obstacles as a swinging bridge, a maze, slanted steps and a catapult (“squirrelapult”). And the prize was not just birdseed but a treasure trove of walnuts (the treat Rober found they liked best after observing which nuts or seeds they ate first in a buffet he set up).
More than 95 million people have watched the utterly delightful 20-minute video that follows Rober’s adventures with the squirrel contestants he named Rick, Marty, Frank and Phantastic Gus. (Spoiler alert: All four made quick work of solving the puzzles laid out for them.)
What makes the video especially charming is Rober’s growing appreciation of the creatures he initially describes as “adversaries.” You hear him cheering on the squirrels, marveling as they experiment, fail and hop right back up to try again.
“They’re kind of adorable,” he says at the end. “Incredibly crafty, curious by nature, athletic and persistent.”
I was reminded of Rober when I heard a Christian leader wonder recently, in this challenging moment, how to cultivate creativity among clergy and lay leaders. “How,” he asked his colleagues, “are you successfully helping church leaders expand their imaginations?”
Behind his question, and the nods of solidarity from other leaders who work closely with congregations, was a recognition that many church leaders are tapped out. And the burnout extends beyond clergy. How can you guide a congregation through a pandemic when many of the lay leaders you count on for volunteering, fundraising and leadership are currently minimally engaged?
It’s far too simple to blame COVID-19. Matt Richtel, in an essay adapted from “Inspired: Understanding Creativity. A Journey Through Art, Science and the Soul,” writes that while we may say we want to be creative in navigating a puzzle, we are actually averse to innovation: “Subconsciously, we see creativity as noxious and disruptive.” (This may be especially true in religious settings, as researchers have found that thinking about God can stifle creativity.)
The issue? We don’t naturally like uncertainty.
“The reasons for this implicit bias against creativity can be traced to the fundamentally disruptive nature of novel and original creations,” Richtel writes. “Creativity means change, without the certainty of desirable results.”
And haven’t we had it up to here lately with uncertainty? Well, yes.
But if we change our relationship with uncertainty — from exasperated and impatient about those darn squirrels to curious and openhearted — we might just push through the weariness of leading in a pandemic to notice glimpses of possibility and playfulness.
Sarah Stein Greenberg, the executive director of the Stanford d.school, writes that the key is to develop a design mindset — one in which we know that the world is not as it should be yet also know that we have the capacity to meet the challenges as they come.
“In an era like this one, we all need the ability to adapt, to be resilient, and to be creative and generative even when we are uncertain,” she writes in “Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create and Lead in Unconventional Ways.”
“It’s not enough to know how things have worked in the past; we must be open to creating a dynamic future.”
So how do we do that — become builders rather than maintainers or controllers? How do we become more like Rober and, well, less like ourselves? Rober describes in a TEDx video the three steps he follows to generate ideas:
Be curious. Develop a childlike wonder about the world. Ask yourself: Why is this thing this way? What old ideas can we let go to make space for something new? If we sit long enough to observe something difficult, what insights surprise us?
Work hard. Experiment, fail and learn. Over and over again. What could you try without being overly invested in the outcome? Whom might you empower to join you in trying something new?
Get lucky. Some parts of the creative process are outside your control. That is uncertain, yes — but it also means the world is awash in possibility, waiting to be discovered.
“As you are creative and you observe and question your world, as you work hard [and] build early and often, you increase your chances of getting lucky,” he says. “We are all way more creative than we give ourselves credit for.”
Truth be told, I still find the overbearing squirrels in my yard somewhat irritating. But now I carry Rober’s spirit with me through the challenges of church life — the youth who don’t show up anymore, the languishing ministries, the empty pews — and wonder, not how to fix them, but what they are trying to teach me.
But if we change our relationship with uncertainty…we might just push through the weariness of leading in a pandemic to notice glimpses of possibility and playfulness.
As a sociologist, Michael Plekon has to face the facts: the situation for the church looks grim. But as a priest, he doesn’t despair.
“In the core of the Christian faith, we have the reality of Christ dying and then being raised. So if the church is the body of Christ, is the people of God, then that wonderful passage from death to life will continue,” he said.
In his book “Community as Church, Church as Community,” he lays out the challenges for the church in America. But his focus is on telling stories of resurrection — snapshots in time of congregations forging new paths and creating new ways to be the church.
From a donate-what-you-can restaurant to UMC house churches to a historic sacred space converted into a gathering place to a 24-hour coworking project, the congregations he highlights have re-imagined how they can serve God and be in community.
He did his own research and shared stories from a variety of publications to support his core point: that the church is being reinvented in communities — local parishes and congregations.
Plekon is a professor emeritus of sociology at the City University of New York-Baruch College and served as an attached priest for more than 25 years at St. Gregory Orthodox Church in Wappingers Falls, New York.
He spoke to Faith & Leadership’s Sally Hicks about the trends he sees in American society and in congregational life — and where he sees reason for hope. The following is an edited transcript.
Faith & Leadership: You share stories in the book, including some from Faith & Leadership, for which we thank you. Why is telling the stories of these congregations important?
Michael Plekon: The stories are essential. They’re not just dressing. They’re not just to make things more lively. They’re the very core of it, and that’s how God works. If we believe that God became part of creation, took on time and space and the body, well, that’s what God continues to do in congregations. They are the body of Christ.
It’s the central argument of the book that while you could describe church as many different things, the ones that are the most solid in the Scriptures are the body of the Christ and the koinonia, the community, the fellowship. And that means that there are all kinds of connections, relationships, women and men praying together, eating together and enjoying each other’s company.
I had one critic who said, “Oh, you’re just talking about happy times,” and I said, “Well, if you’ve ever lived in a community, you will know that it isn’t always happy times.”
The stories are so crucial because they tell you something about the struggle that takes place to keep being church in a particular place. Really, that’s what a congregation or a parish is.
F&L: You’re both a sociologist and a priest. From that dual vantage point, as you look at the state of congregations today, what are the big takeaways?
MP: Well, you can’t deny or try to overlook or evade the reality that congregations are declining and shrinking. There is no church body, there is no denomination that is not experiencing that. If I look at this from both perspectives, as a pastor and a sociologist, the facts are grim.
It doesn’t mean that the church is going to go away. That’s not going to happen.
[But] how long will it be possible for the model of the congregation or the parish that we’ve had for over a thousand years to keep going? Well, it will keep going in some places, but it’s already gone in other places.
What I try to do by putting in front of readers some of these cases of congregations in transition is to show that the church might get smaller but that’s not a bad thing.
Dave Barnhart down in Birmingham has a network of house churches called Saint Junia. There are all kinds of other variations on these themes that I tried to give examples of. They’re out there, and they’re changing as time goes on.
F&L: Talk a little bit about your sources of hope and the overarching theme of resurrection.
MP: I have one in mind, because I have a personal connection to it and it was just in an article that the Christian Century published. It has to do with an Orthodox parish on Troost [Avenue] in Kansas City. It was started by a priest maybe 30 or more years ago who first rented and then bought a kind of run-down commercial building. They put the church, if you will, upstairs and then put the “other church” — that is to say, space for outreach services and eventually a pay-as-you-can cafe — downstairs.
This group of clergy and laity who continue to run what is called Reconciliation Services are a huge sign of hope. If this isn’t a version of the empty tomb on Troost [Avenue] in Kansas City, then I don’t know what it is.
There are reports and there is a budget, but what you have there is a director who happens to be a priest and a board connecting continuously with the state government, with private foundations, with the federal government to keep this form of the works of love or the works of mercy going. That’s another form the church can take.
It’s kind of a best-kept secret — the church being out there in the world, being the body of Christ, feeding people, giving people a place where they can be safe, where they can interact with one another.
F&L: In your book, you say, “Pastors are often failures. … And if they cannot admit this, clergy are liars.” I know that’s a rhetorical flourish, but it does make a point.
MP: You almost cannot undertake the proclaiming of what God has to say to the rest of the world without in a certain sense becoming a failure.
It’s kind of a best-kept secret — the church being out there in the world, being the body of Christ, feeding people, giving people a place where they can be safe, where they can interact with one another.
We, because of our culture, always reward people for filling the pews or having thousands and thousands of members. But that’s really an anomaly when it comes to the average woman or man who serves in the ministry. Most of the time, they’re struggling to survive themselves.
Cathie Caimano, who is featured in my book, calls herself a free range priest and says that this is the way it was in the beginning and it’s coming back to this now.
Andy Doyle, who is an Episcopal bishop down in Texas, has written a wonderful little book called “Vocātiō: Imaging a Visible Church.” He says much the same thing: that going forward, we have to really reconsider what is the formation going to be for pastors and deacons and also how are we going to employ them or deploy them.
I think that going forward, clergy are always going to be in some ways failures, to the extent that they’re seriously ministers of the word of God and ministers to the world, ministers to the whole people of God.
So yeah, I meant to be provocative when I said that. I think that anybody who has been ordained more than a year or two would probably agree with me that if you’re going to do what’s right, you will probably provoke some kind of criticism or opposition.
F&L: Describe the experiment that you yourself tried that didn’t work out. You tried greeting parents as they dropped children off at the church. What did you learn from that?
MP: The first parish I served was a fairly large ELCA parish not too far from where I live here, maybe 400 people or more when I was there in the ’80s.
We had built a new church, but one of the things that my rector saw was that increasingly, people were dropping their kids off for Sunday school and for confirmation class, not attending themselves — even when, for example, in confirmation it was a requirement that you come to services, participating in the service, receiving communion, singing, some experience of church.
Well, what was most alarming about this is that we thought that what we were seeing was the beginning of families just deciding to opt out of church.
We tried to go out and greet between the services, not to make them feel guilty but simply to welcome them, see how things were going, because this was our only contact with them.
In some cases, people got angry with us. Why were we harassing them?
All we were doing was saying, “Hi, I hope everything is fine at home, hope the kids are having a good experience in Sunday church school.”
Now, not everybody who engaged in this kind of drop-off behavior just dropped church; some people continued to be faithful members. But in many cases, as soon as the youngest in the family was confirmed, it was goodbye church except for Christmas and Easter and, of course, weddings and funerals and baptisms and so forth.
I think one of the largest demographic factors behind this is mobility. Most of us now don’t stay where we grew up; children go away to college and university. They stay away to work, to marry, to have families, and therefore the idea of multigenerational families in a congregation, which used to be the backbone of the congregation, has simply disappeared.
Those are the kinds of things that you can’t blame on somebody’s preaching. You can’t blame things that the church, meaning the clergy and the institutional church, has done to turn people off. These are things that happen in people’s lives, and nobody can stop it.
F&L: I think you also make the point that some pastors are in impossible situations.
MP: Very much so. The very nice, neat life the congregations were able to provide for their clergy is disappearing even more quickly than the church buildings.
And for all the best reasons, sometimes people will not go along with what’s necessary to experience resurrection.
There was one congregation in Austin, Texas, where they were about ready to turn the keys in — Asbury United Methodist Church — and a new group of younger people came in, [forming] Servant Church.
They welcomed these folks who were left, who were kind of like the grandparents. Most of them stayed and took on that kind of honored role as the legacy, the history, and if you will, the grandmas and grandpas of the congregation.
The music was different from what they were used to. They turned the church on its axis and used the horizontal rather than the nave, but they still kept being church. That story has played out so many times.
So there’s hope here. It’s a very sobering picture, because for some people, this is news that somehow they’ve been able to overlook or evade — but it’s not hopeless. It’s not a matter of despair whatsoever.