Online Archives

By Melissa Lauber
UMConnection Staff

magine if the church listened to its poets. Imagine if we lived in the modernized music and message of the Psalms, moved to the cadence of our hymnody and let ourselves be challenged by the interior rhymes of sacred spoken words.

It’s easy to imagine, but there’s a risk to letting the subversive rhythms of a Gospel slam enter the sanctuary. There’s a tangy difference between a standard sermon and a moment of spoken word poetry. It’s like taking a deep drink from a Communion chalice – your taste buds set on traditional Welchs’ grape juice, and instead, discovering wine – deep purple, the pungent, poignant remembered blood of a savior.

Last month, on a bitter cold January morning, the Rev. Wanda Duckett of Mt. Zion UMC in Baltimore stood at her pulpit and opened her heart – sharing the sentiments that both brought her sorrow and made her soul sing. As part of a doctoral project, Duckett introduced people to spoken word poetry in a Sacred Slam: a Wordshop for Worshippers.

Spoken word, she explained, using a definition from the Online Urban Dictionary, is poetry intended for onstage performance rather than being exclusively designed for the page. While it’s often associated with hip-hop culture, it also has strong ties to story-telling as well as jazz and the blues.

In fact, said Duckett, “spoken word is like the jazz of poetry.” And like jazz, it’s often left outside the sanctuary door, deemed too secular for sacred purposes. But for Duckett, who wants to fling wide the church doors to all the world, relegating spoken word and the themes it addresses to hip cafes and other cultural locales misses out on a powerful opportunity for discipleship and transformation. “We need to bring it into the holy space and let God deal with it,” she said.

Duckett grounds her belief deep in the theology of creation, believing that the poetic voice is the voice of God. “God is the original poetic preacher who, in divine meter, proclaimed creation into existence. … God said, ‘be’ and stuff was.”

Made in God’s image, we too have the power to speak with authority and call things into being. Spoken word, she said, is “a gift from God to name and frame creation.”

Today, Duckett is anxious to ensure that the gift is used in the contexts in which people live. Sacred is not to be enshrined, it’s the holy and hallowed voice of our everyday experiences. It is what, Duckett has learned, gives us each our “bop.”

“We need to shed new light on what sacred is,” said Duckett, who calls on people of faith to begin speaking “a word of life – real life.”

What is holy about our speaking, she challenged those present at her workshop. How do we translate human lives in light of the Gospel in ways that feel genuine and have meaning? “Proclamation without spirit and life are incapable of really bringing about resurrection and hope.”

She proclaims: “The word of God is alive and active.” Is it being spoken in the church in ways that are immediately relevant and make people sit up to listen? In ways that transform people themselves into the poetry God writes? If not, the church needs to take up its pen, put its finger to the keyboard, raise its voice – and speak, listening always to the poet.”

I Decided to Be Myself – By Wanda Bynum Duckett
I tried it this way, that way, his way, her way, their way
But the stairway to heaven opened up when I decided that
My way was the high way so I’m just gonna be myself.
Hip hop vibe on an old school track
A poet and I know it so the good news got flow, it
Rhymes with the reason and a beat after God’s own heart
Since I decided to be myself.
This lyric is tight and I’ll fight for the right
To dance at the drop because God has been good
And my joy is worth that.
So don’t be mad at my gladness
Though it messes with your madness
I can no longer feign sadness or stoic face…
Here’s my smile but you can’t have this
There is a peace in being yourself.
So give me a kiss like Ju-diss
And count the sheckles of your own shackles
But forward I must, in God only – I trust
That He made me fearful, a wonder,
Peep the resurrected thunder
From now on and on and on
You won’t steal my song
God made me this self for Himself.
This story must be told;
Y’all done let it get old,
We gotta blow off the dust
Open graves, release slaves,
Captives save, Jesus gave me a purpose and
I can’t fill it unless I’m empty
Of every expectation except His
So I’ve decided that it is what it is
I’m just gonna be myself!
So I wanna
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)