Why I Can’t Go to Your Church Anymore

I still remember the tightness in my chest as I read the email. It was from a friend. Someone I had gone to Bible study with. Someone that had cried next to me in her car and with whom I had explored everything from the shallows of first dates to the depths of theology. We bonded over being nerdy, record stores and actually believing in God.

I opened the email and was caught off guard at how many emotions I could feel in succession. Surprise. Confusion. Sadness. Anger. Regret. Shame. I do think shame is what I landed on for the longest time and it was all for something that can easily seem trivial.

She asked me to sing more quietly in church.

She labored long and hard to craft a lengthy email asking that when I am at church, worshipping God, that I monitor how loudly I sing.

I grew up with a pretty diverse church background. One important experience I had in all of this was singing in my Baptist church back in Virginia — a more than predominantly Black congregation. I grew up harmonizing with other choir members and learning to project to the back of the room with the fervency and vigor befitting of a scene in The Sister Act 2. My grandmother still likes to say, “I don’t sing. I make a joyful noise unto the Lord.” When my mother was battling cancer, the one request she would make of my sisters and I on the really bad days, was that we would sing to her. One of her favorites was Mary Mary’s “I Just Can’t Give Up Now.” Through lifting our voices up higher than the pain, we somehow provided moments of relief and hope for our mother.

And when she died, my song was among the first things to go. My spiritual experience after that was colored with something darker than sadness and hearing people sing in church was enough to make me weep and hide in the bathroom. For nearly two years I couldn’t sing. At least not to God. But somehow, call it the Divine, I got to a place where I could sing again. More than that, I got to a place where I could mean it.

In the years that followed I went to college, found a church and at times even sang with the worship team. Before my Sunday contributions began, I regularly received encouragement from fellow congregants telling me that they loved how I worshipped so freely and it freed them to do the same. Every time I sang in church it felt like an active step of faith, proclaiming that I was bent on having joy even in the midst of grief and suffering.

Then, one warm summer day, I received an email stating, among many things, that the way I worshipped in church was distracting and I should question if I was using my voice to draw attention to myself rather than God. Moreover, that I should monitor how I sing and choose to sing more quietly.

The email hurt. Especially coming from a friend that I cherished. In the weeks that passed, I just chose not to sing at all. At times even sitting in silence. I don’t even recall if I ever shared with my friend the affect that her words had on me. With time I did sing again, here and there, but it was not the same and never without the concern and thought of her and others. Eventually I left my college town and the church along with it. Mixed emotions were tied into those goodbyes.

Years passed, with the memory of that occurrence coming up as infrequently as the visits I make to Gainesville. In all of this, I did what I could to believe the best in her and in that congregation and chalked it up to the preference of a few folks and some poorly chosen words. But in the years hence, I’ve come to terms with the reality that this was a racialized experience.

You can claim race-baiting as much as your heart desires, but show me a Black church where someone gets condemned for singing loud.

Unbeknownst to this young woman, and at the time, unbeknownst to myself, we were participating in conflicting cultural notions of what comprises worship. As someone that had experienced fairly monochromatic modes of musical faith expression, my friend had no point of reference for what I was doing. From her framework, singing loudly was something performative and done for attention and theatrics. From mine, singing loudly is, as my grandmother would say, “telling the truth and shaming the devil.” Singing loudly (and even dancing) in my culture, hearkens to images of David dancing unabashedly and claiming that he would “become even more undignified than this” for his God (2 Sam 6:22).

We call it miscommunication when the same words are interpreted differently by the speaker and the hearer. At best it results in a joke, at worst, in a fight. Usually, it can be redeemed by fleshing out the conversation. I wonder, what we should call this.

That wasn’t the first time I felt uncomfortable in a white church and it wasn’t the last. However, I think the last has come. For years after that, I pressed on. I often lived in predominantly white areas and for a long time didn’t have a car so Sundays were spent where I could get a ride. I tried to tell myself that the cultural things didn’t matter since we’re all children of God and trying to get to know Him and to love Him, but I often didn’t feel the love of God there. Moreover, my blackness didn’t feel loved there at all.

Instead, I felt the pressure to bend and conform into whiteness. Even in churches where well meaning white people claimed to be accepting and progressive, the sermon style, dress code, order of service, music — the whole liturgy seemed a mantra in affirming Western normatives more than a pursuit of a Near Eastern Jew who was hung on a tree.

Mr. Murthi once said, “When you come to us with the Gospel, don’t bring it to us as a potted plant. Bring us the seeds and let it grow in our soil.” I pine for a place where I can learn of Jesus without the mantel of Whiteness surrounding him.

Maybe I can’t go to white churches anymore because I’m tired of sermons that will touch on the tragedy of abortion but will say nothing of the violence inflicted against bodies that look like mine.

Maybe I can’t go because 80% of the congregation voted for someone that views my female form as an object and my skin color a crime.

Maybe I can’t go to white church because as much as they might claim to love diversity, I know they would never submit to the leadership of a black pastor.

Or maybe I can’t go, because I see church as a place of refuge and rest where I can approach my God without fear or shame, and welcoming as these spaces claim to be, I’m not allowed to sing there.