On Standing in the Gap: An Orientation to This Space

This is not a deconstruction blog.

It is not an ex-vangelical space, not a testimony of departure, not a guide to leaving well. Those spaces exist and they serve people. This is not that.

This is something older, and harder, and more honest than either of those — a space for people who cannot simply leave and who refuse to pretend that staying is the same as compliance.

Where I Am Writing From

I am a queer womanist scholar of Black religious lives, subcultures, and institutional formation. I am also a former youth pastor who experienced spiritual harm and institutional expulsion. I hold a conjure-adjacent agnostic position with deep cultural formation in the tradition. I was raised Bapti-costal — which is to say, I know the tradition from inside its most intimate registers.

I examine the Black Church not as a faith tradition to be defended or dismantled, but as a technology — a system through which Black people have made meaning of Black life and possibility, navigated institutional power, and negotiated healing and harm simultaneously. At its deepest root, the Black church is conjure. That is not a provocation. That is an observation.

I write from that location. Not above it, not outside it, not recovered from it.

What the Maroon Is

The maroon communities of the Black diaspora did not disappear into the wilderness to escape Blackness or to escape the plantation's spiritual inheritance. They went to become sovereign — to construct life outside the permission structure of the master's house while remaining, always, in relationship with those still inside it.

That is the epistemological location of this blog. The Maroon is not departure. It is a sovereign space — a place of fugitivity, ancestral reconnection, and the kind of clarity that does not require institutional permission to be real.

The Church Gworl part is equally intentional. I am writing for and from a particular kind of formation — one that knows the liturgy, loves the tradition, has been harmed by its institutions, and still cannot locate itself fully outside the sacred architecture the tradition built. The gworl did not leave. The gworl built a maroon.

Who This Is For

This space is for practitioners — clinicians, ministers, spiritual directors, educators, organizers — who are navigating institutional spaces they cannot or will not simply exit. People who need diagnostic language, not exit narratives. People who understand that institutions shape the very frameworks through which we navigate them, and who are trying to think clearly from inside that bind.

It is also for those who study these spaces — scholars of Black religion, womanist thinkers, trauma practitioners — who want public scholarship that does not flatten the complexity of what it means to remain.

If you are looking for someone to tell you whether to stay or go — that is not my work here. What I can offer is a sharper set of tools for seeing what is actually happening in the spaces you inhabit, and for understanding why the decision is never as simple as it looks from the outside.

What You Will Find Here

Musings from the Church Gworl Maroon is public scholarship. That means rigorous, grounded, and written for the person in the pew and the person in the academy simultaneously. It means I will cite my sources and also tell you what I actually think. It means I will engage theory and also name what I have lived.

The posts that follow this one begin with a piece I first published in 2016 — a piece on church hurt that I am republishing here with new framing, because the conversation it started has not ended and because the political moment we are in demands that we return to it with sharper tools.

Welcome to the Maroon.