Writing a Soundtrack of Reconciliation

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.

In an intensive eight-week program, interns don’t just write songs. They study biblical theology and multicultural worship, discuss race, class, and culture, complete reading assignments, and attend rehearsals. No “Jesus is my boyfriend” songs, as Bailey calls them, are written here. The small cohorts don’t just learn about reconciliation, they practice it.

Makeda McCreary, the band’s newest vocalist, was working at the Bank of America in 2016 when Bailey called her about the internship program. “We’d been talking about the internship, and I was avoiding it, and he was like, ‘So, are you going to be a banker for the rest of your life?’”

McCreary applied, not knowing that in July of that year Philando Castile would be shot and killed in his car by a Minnesota police officer while McCreary was sharing a room for the internship with the white sister of a cop.

Growing up black in a majority white neighborhood, McCreary went to college vowing to only know people of color. However, the internship changed things. “It just kind of bridged the gap again and was able to shepherd me into being in Urban Doxology, where our mission is reconciliation and bridge-building and connecting with the people of God,” she said. “We’re all one people under God and our differences connect us, they don’t separate us.”

Erin Rose, also a vocalist, had a similar experience. “There was no felt need on my part for racial reconciliation in the church or otherwise,” she said. “But the internship flipped my whole world upside down and I saw the church in a completely different light. What it meant to be Christian was completely changed.”

By 2013 many of the former interns had made homes in Richmond; they decided to make the project more permanent. “I was really inspired by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and how they went around to share about negro spirituals,” Bailey said. “And I felt like we could do the same thing and share the songs we wrote in our community.”

The annual summer internship program continues, but Urban Doxology became a band of its own, recording albums and performing across the country.

IMBUED WITH HUES of pop, gospel, and R&B, Urban Doxology’s two albums, written by band members and interns, reflect its own reconciliation journey. “Reconciliation is hard,” said vocalist Toya Obasi. “Even the interns are trying to reconcile themselves to one another to be able to share a song.”

From the rapped “Shalom” to the multilingual “Que Seas el Autor,” the intention of reconciliation is what ultimately holds the seemingly unrelated songs together. “The sound of Urban Doxology is a really multifaceted answer because we are considering hospitality in worship,” Bailey said. “We need to be able to go in and out of these different sounds to be able to understand who God is fully and be able to speak in ways that are pastoral to different folks.”

The sentiment resonates with vocalist Kimberly Williams, who also serves as a worship leader at an integrated church in Washington, D.C. “I always feel like music, especially worship music, is like a balm, like an ointment,” she said. “When there are rough things that are happening, there’s something about theological lyrics set to music that creates a soothing presence among people who are different in the same space.”

In many spaces across the country, Urban Doxology’s presence alone has caused needed change. “Most evangelical Christian spaces are dominated by white men,” said Stephen Roach, keys player and the band’s sole white member. “Having a group that’s 100 percent led by black women [vocalists] and is showing that you can be that, even in white spaces—that’s valuable and that’s powerful.”

“We perform in front of [predominantly] white audiences a lot, and there’s always a few brown girls who come up to us afterward,” vocalist Rose added. “It’s representation; they see black girls who have a platform ... and it gives them life to see that.”

While many churches continue to view the sermon as the focus of a Sunday service, Urban Doxology recognizes that it’s the songs that people remember come Wednesday. “If I’m a surgeon, I’m going to want the finest tools available, which is why we work hard on the songs,” Rose said. “We’re the worship leaders; we’re the surgeons; so it’s important for each of us to be handling the moment and to be sensitive to the spirit of God.”

URBAN DOXOLOGY members are rarely still when they rehearse. Hands lifted high, the women dance across the stage. Breaks between songs swell with laughter, making the rehearsal feel like one continuous prayer. For them, it is. “If you’re trying to write the soundtrack of reconciliation, you’ve got a heavy load on you,” Rose said.

Striving to be bridge-builders within the congregations they visit, the members of Urban Doxology often find themselves suffering from identity crisis. “When you’re being all things to all people so they’ll know Christ, it can be challenging, isolating, and lonely [work] because you’re always bending in order to be that bridge,” said Williams.

In addition to being bridge-builders, they also serve as safe spaces. “When we do conferences or workshops or worship, we’re that safe space ... and that sometimes gets tiring,” McCreary said. “Because it’s not like you have a community and they have a community—we’re safe spaces for all of these people.”

Since Urban Doxology’s formation, the country has experienced the Ferguson uprising, the Charleston church shooting, and the Unite the Right rally in the neighboring city of Charlottesville. Rehearsals—the intentional time spent together—gives them the opportunity to reflect and recharge. In that space, members refer to themselves as a community and a family, rather than a band.

THE BAND IS currently working on its third full-length album, and is featured in a documentary released in April called 11 am: Hope for America’s Most Segregated Hour.

Ultimately, members want a studio of their own, so they can both produce year-round and contribute to the multicultural community growing in Church Hill.

“So much of what we’re doing is responding to the needs of [East End Fellowship] and where that church is as a multicultural church in a neighborhood that’s gentrifying in a country with broken systems and a lot of division,” Roach said.

And for those not in Church Hill? Bailey hopes Urban Doxology’s songs will be a blessing to them. He also hopes they’ll be moved to write their own soundtracks. “I hope that what we inspire people to do is to think about their context,” he said. “To write worship for their context and to remember people on the margins as they engage in their worship experiences.”

In a time of national upheaval, Bailey is mindful that racial reconciliation in the church doesn’t happen in the abstract. It happens through relationships and systemic change. In that, music serves as a uniquely powerful tool.

“Motown integrated America before legislation integrated America,” Bailey said. “White people and black people were singing [The Temptations] before the civil rights laws had passed. I think that can be true in the church.”