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The models of church we’ve been using aren’t working. Churches are shrinking, people are disconnecting, our membership is aging, and there are serious questions about our relevance in the world. It’s time for us to rethink how we do everything. By stripping us down to our mission, to the WHY rather than the HOW, can we rebuild our churches into vibrant, covenanted communities that can think outside our traditional boxes? Join Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister, and Jil Novenski, Director of Religious Education for Children and Youth at the Community Church of New York for informal, unstructured, joyful, and radically honest conversations about what's working, what's not, and how we can embrace change in times of uncertainty.
0:01:00 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): So we've been just talking. Jill and I started talking, like, a year ago, although I had been writing about this even before that, around kind of the question, what are we doing? And then who are we serving? Which is a question you keep asking, where are the people who really need us, and what are we doing with our money? What are we doing with this staff? What is our mission? How is our mission really alive, and is it really alive? And are we serving old models instead of a mission that we find worthy of our time and energy and… I mean, we're pouring ourselves out into something.
0:01:40 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Is what we're pouring ourselves out into worth it? And I think we all agree, my sense is that we all agree that the mission is worth it. But the ways we do it? Sometimes less interesting. So that's why you and I have now recreated worship. But it was more than that. I mean, even just, like, bringing you on was part of when I showed up here, I kind of had this, like, what happens if we just do everything differently? And then have been just doing all kinds of things right? I'm bringing in brother Zach and kind of everything…
0:02:11 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Everything just keeps….
0:02:12 - (Jil Novenski): The liturgical dancers was something we never had.
0:02:15 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): The dancers, right. Just kind of like, if we could, I mean, my sense was like, I'm sort of set up to do things. Like, I've got money, I've got staff, I've got this great board, I've got a congregation that's kind of like, we trust you. You tell us where to go, we're right behind you. So I kind of showed up with this sense of, like, well, if you have all that. then what do you do? And then called you.
0:02:40 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Found you out of nowhere. I mean, I put something on Facebook. Do you know I found him?
0:02:43 - (Jil Novenski): I heard the story once and forgot.
0:02:46 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): James Russian, but I didn't know him either. I put something on Facebook and was like, I have not even a fully completed idea. I sort of have a thought, and I kind of am wondering if there's anyone in the city of New York who could have this thought with me. And a few people were like, there's this guy James. He knows everybody.
0:03:05 - (Darnell White): Yes.
0:03:06 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): And I talked to him, and he was like, yeah, you want Darnell White. I'm like, okay. I don't know James, let alone you. That's how I found you.
0:03:15 - (Darnell White): All this time, I thought, like, you and James were, like, old buddies.
0:03:18 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Oh, my God.
0:03:18 - (Darnell White): Maybe they went to college together…
0:03:20 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): No, no. Never met James. No idea. If I tripped over him, I wouldn't…
0:03:23 - (Darnell White): Know who he is.
0:03:24 - (Jil Novenski): Truly serendipitous.
0:03:26 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): But he knew. I mean, I talked to him for a while, and I said, I don't even know what I want. I've got money. Maybe I want, like, a choir director. Maybe I want a choir. And his thing was, well, you know what? Darnell is incredibly talented and really creative and would be the thought partner that you need to figure out what's next. And then I talked to you. I don't know if you remember this. Our first conversation was on Zoom, and you were at a show somewhere, but you had a keyboard in front of you…
0:03:51 - (Darnell White): I was doing the show that I'm literally doing now.
0:03:54 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Oh, you're kidding.
0:03:54 - (Darnell White): That I'm in tech for right now, which is Lady Day at Emerson's.
0:03:58 - (Jil Novenski): Oh, it's finally coming to the… yeah
0:04:00 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Well, you were sitting in a room, like a hotel room or something, but you had a keyboard, and you kept playing. Like we're talking, but you were, like, putting music to the conversation. I don't know if you know you do this, but you were like, channeling, like "Oh, I don't know what that means… bum bum bumm." You were just living through this keyboard, and I was like, oh, I have to be in a room with this guy.
0:04:28 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): How do I get you to where.
0:04:34 - (Jil Novenski): You bring up a point, before we even hear more from your side of things from the beginning, how it's all sort of unfolded. But it's interesting to hear you, Peggy, talk about what this person that sort of presented him your way said, which is that he'd be a great thought partner, because as I was looking for an assistant it was the same kind of thing, we are kind of this 200 year old startup in that way. And I experienced the same thing looking for somebody that was excited about coming in at the beginning. It's a very special thing, somebody to be excited about that, because it takes a lot of work, a lot of flexibility, a lot of patience, and stick-to-itiveness, you know what I mean?
0:05:13 - (Jil Novenski): Which I think really does bring us back to what is it that we are about and what is it that we do. So as soon as somebody gets on board with that, that's a great anchor. If they have the character to get into starting something and being a part of all the messiness that that looks like and sort of making magic of it. And I just think that you've totally, absolutely done that. So great.
0:05:36 - (Darnell White): We're working on it.
0:05:38 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Right.
0:05:38 - (Jil Novenski): Right. It's totally a project still unfolding, that's for sure.
0:05:43 - (Darnell White): I love all that.
0:05:44 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): So when you came here, you were coming from, is it a baptist background?
0:05:47 - (Darnell White): I was. And I was coming from a pretty oppressive one.
0:05:51 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Well, that's why you came here.
0:05:52 - (Darnell White): That's why I came, yeah. And it's funny because that's what I was thinking when you're saying that James and I had just recently had that conversation about that.
0:06:03 - (Jil Novenski): Oh, that really is serendipitous.
0:06:05 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Do you know what was going on in his church?
0:06:07 - (Jil Novenski): No, not exactly.
0:06:09 - (Darnell White): They had these new bylaws that were really very exclusionary.
0:06:11 - (Jil Novenski): Right. There had been something new written in that really took it back.
0:06:16 - (Darnell White): I was like, oh, my gosh. It's funny because that is ultimately the point for me. I think that worship, belief in a higher power, God, the universe, whatever we call it in our respective denominations, I think all people want that. I think all people want to worship and want to pray and want to be in religious ceremony and want to engage in ritual and community and all those things. Clearly, the church, and the Baptist is not the only denomination, but it has not been a safe space to be able to worship and pray and do all the things that we want to do in terms of belief in a higher power while you're sort of being oppressed. And I think that a lot of people in my community seek that, but they don't know where it is.
0:07:09 - (Darnell White): You know what I mean?
0:07:10 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): That's what you keep telling you, keep saying that what you're doing here, what we're doing here is what everyone wants. Yeah, but they don't know. They don't know where we are.
0:07:18 - (Darnell White): And so they separate themselves from any sort of attachment to any sort of ritual or anything like that. They just forget about it. I did for a number of years. Because you're living life. And so I think that's just like, I see that so much working in theater as much as I do, and cabaret is the world I also exist in a lot. And so coming here and again, I'm very much like, you and I, that's like the start, because I'm like, okay, there it is. Because nothing's better than having a leader that you're like… that's the best thing ever.
0:07:56 - (Darnell White): It really is. And so I think the idea for me was like, wow. When I came here, I didn't know anything about Unitarian.
0:08:03 - (Jil Novenski): When she contacted you, what was the first thing you did? Did you do some, you know, did you go to the website?
0:08:10 - (Darnell White): I didn't really, because I trust James. That should give you an indication of who James is. Like, he said it, and I was, you know, James is.
0:08:20 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Well, I think his thing was, you're going to be safe.
0:08:24 - (Darnell White): You know, it was almost him doing it for me.
0:08:26 - (Jil Novenski): That's such a huge…
0:08:26 - (Darnell White): Not for him.
0:08:28 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): And for him that was just about Unitarian Universalism, because James and I don't know each other, but he understood it as, like, liberal religion and welcoming. So he knew you'd be safe. And I guess you had told him that they were writing into the bylaws…
0:08:41 - (Darnell White): Yeah, we'd had that… I think I made a post about it.
0:08:44 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): And when you came here, though, it's like two years ago now, the music here was pretty traditional. It was kind of organ…
0:08:51 - (Darnell White): It was very…
0:08:54 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Classically trained choir. It was very traditional. It's interesting, actually, if I think about it right now, how different the music is now than just two years ago.
0:09:05 - (Darnell White): Yeah, it was gothic. That's the first thing I thought actually was gothic. That's the word that came to me, was just gothic.
0:09:13 - (Jil Novenski): Kind of heavier and more formal.
0:09:15 - (Darnell White): Yeah, I just think that that's kind of the point, I think I was saying, I think when you come into a religious experience, it's about being moved in some way. You know what I mean? That's what people still want to feel. People say, oh, why do gay people go to these churches where they're treated a certain way? It's because that music and the ritual of it still moves them and they want that.
0:09:38 - (Darnell White): But there's obviously that part that's like…
0:09:41 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): So how did you move us from that to where we are? Because our music now feels much more alive. It feels exciting. People want more and more music. I mean, now we've changed the liturgy. There isn't necessarily more music, but there are fewer words. So it feels like the time is spent more with music than with words. And the singing isn't performative in the same way. It's inclusive.
0:10:11 - (Jil Novenski): It feels like such an invitation.
0:10:16 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): How did you get us there?
0:10:17 - (Darnell White): It's you. It's about allowance. That's what it's about. It's about allowance, about understanding. In most churches around the world, well, around the country, but in most church, particularly in the protestant denominations, in the more contemporary protestant denominations, a lot of times, some of the pastors of these churches are sort of… The ego is like, big to the point of megalomania in some cases, and so a lot of them don't want to accept, because the main thing about any religious experience is the message.
0:11:00 - (Darnell White): We're trying to reach you with this message, but how do we get you in here? How do we draw you in to get this message to you? And so in a lot of those denominations, you'll find sometimes the pastors can tend to be, and they want to sort of suppress what the music is and not truly acknowledge, well, this is what's going to get the people to hear the message. This is about the community of the singing and all of that sort of spectacle so that we can reach them with this message of welcome, of love, of whatever it is.
0:11:25 - (Darnell White): And so you have to be allowed to do that. You have to have someone in front of you that recognizes that, sees you and says "oh."
0:11:34 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): So part of what builds this really effective experience is collaboration. And one of the things I would say about this place is I feel like people really know where their lane is, and they do a really good job of saying, that's not mine. I'll help you if you want, but I'm not overstepping here. So we have kind of built that. So part of what I'm hearing you say is that collaborative spirit. Like, we're going to work together, we're a team, we're a community, and no one person can want to be at the top of it, because it's just not about that.
0:12:13 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): It's not about you, it's not about me. It's not about you. It's really about what all of us in the room are creating.
0:12:20 - (Jil Novenski): It's a very big deal to have somebody at the helm, if I can concur with what I believe you're saying, saying that they are ready to make major changes. They're willing to accept that. They don't exactly know what that looks like. And they are totally open to stepping out of the way and trusting the expertise of the people they've chosen to lead in their lane. That's huge.
0:12:45 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Well, and the other side is true, which is you have to have people who are worthy of the trust.
0:12:51 - (Jil Novenski): Well, right.
0:12:52 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): But there's something bigger here for me, which is that your place here… I'm thinking about other people who are listening to the podcast, and I'm thinking, okay, so they don't have Darnell White, but they have people who like to sing. Right? I think if we, how do I say this? If we break it down, if we get rid of all the things we think we're supposed to do in that hour of worship, and we just talk about what moves us, what do we love?
0:13:23 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Where do we really find the spirit? Where is spirit most alive for us? And then we sink into it or expand it. It feels like one of the things we've done because you were so willing to do it, is to just stretch it out, expand it to say, like, you invited these new people into the choir and people who didn't know Unitarian Universalism, who may or may not be classically trained, but who are phenomenally talented, but more than that, who have spirit. That kind of… It feels like it's real. It's real. It's so real. All the people that you've brought in, it's not a job.
0:14:01 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): This is like they understand themselves to be embodying church. And then we use the music and just stretch it out. We stretch out the things that really work. We don't fill the space just to fill it. We're not performing anything. We're living something. I guess that's what it is. This choir feels like it's living something.
0:14:21 - (Darnell White): They do. And I think ultimately, my goal as we go forward is to pull that in. That's the ultimate. You know what I mean? Because that's exactly like. I'll be honest with you. I love… This is the space I know I'll be in the longest. But, yeah, I think that, for me, like you said, I started in classical music. The first thing I played was Bach.
0:14:45 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): And you went to Juilliard, right?
0:14:46 - (Darnell White): I did. I was a vocal student at Juilliard.
0:14:49 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): You did vocals in Juilliard?
0:14:51 - (Darnell White): Yeah, I was training to be an opera singer.
0:14:51 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Aopera singer? Well, you could. I could see that.
0:15:00 - (Darnell White): Yes. I knew many scores by the time I was 16.
0:15:03 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): But you're a brilliant pianist. Where did you learn that?
0:15:06 - (Darnell White): Well, I studied that. I got lucky, really. Like all kids that play, you sort of have a sense of it, and you plunk out melodies and play and things like that. But it was just the gift of the universe that at my church, our musician, who played for St. Paul on 60th and played for a Jewish synagogue that was in Harlem at the time, was our musician and saw or recognized… And when I was about six, he started giving me lessons, and he was a Columbia professor.
0:15:43 - (Darnell White): And so that's why the first thing I started with was classical music. But the Baptist church is very different and it was more about the hymns and sort of what they would call traditional music now. So even stylistically, I remember yearning for the first time, like, you go and see a Pentecostal church and hear the music, like, oh, the drums. That's what it is. But he was my teacher, and so I studied with him for years, and then when I got to junior high school, that's when I started studying other things, because I had a teacher there, his name was Phil Bingham, who was a huge jazz person, and he was part of jazz mobile and all that, went all over the country.
0:16:22 - (Darnell White): And he finally acquiesced and started, because he wouldn't before that, because I was studying classical music, and he finally was like, okay. And then he taught me, and that's what really opened me up to all of the music. And then my generation was just, it was music. I don't know what I would do now because we had vinyl and records, and my first album that I bought was Thriller, Michael Jackson. And then I bought everything before and after.
0:16:55 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Well, because the breadth of your… You seem to know everything. It feels like you're doing the classical and you're doing the church thing, and then you're doing the jazz thing, but then I throw something random at you, just some contemporary or some folk thing, and you're like, sure, bang, bang, bang. And then it's like you just have it.
0:17:21 - (Darnell White): Well, that really is about… It's so funny because the musicians, we all joke around in terms of the mind of a musician or someone that plays, it's like, oh, I could do that. And there's different skill sets, and everybody can't do everything. But I will say I am grateful that I studied and that I love and have always loved a wide breadth of music. I remember hearing Radiohead for the first time, hearing the song Creep, which is my favorite song of all time.
0:17:52 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Is it really?
0:17:53 - (Darnell White): Yeah, that's my favorite song. And I was like, what is that? My friend's like, oh, it's Radiohead. And I was like, oh, that's a great song. So I went back that song, then I started listening to Depeche mode, and then it was Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and all of those groups and the lyrical content and the analogies and all that. So that was like, there's just portals. And I'm glad I have never been, like, the best jazz person, but I understand all of the languages to some degree in the way that we do understand languages, and that's been a help and a gift and a blessing for me, and it helps me here to take some of the traditional, even some of the traditional music that we do here and arrange it in such a way that gives it more life.
0:18:44 - (Darnell White): And everything doesn't have to be just, like, melodic lines, because, again, I think any sort of ritual experience, wherever it is in the world, I mean, when the Hutus, they're dancing in Africa or in India, when you hear them playing the tabla and they're doing, like, it's all about some sort know, engagement and spiritual, like, you know, some sort of heart movement, and that's what I seek whenever I'm playing music, that's what I seek.
0:19:13 - (Darnell White): I seek that, you know? And so that's what I want to like, and I feel like I'm beginning to sort of bring that into our space.
0:19:19 - (Jil Novenski): You are.
0:19:20 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): I feel like Unitarian Universalism can be deadly boring. Our worship services can really be awful. When I was new as a UU, I was so moved by the theology of it, and we had this unison affirmation that was like, love is the doctrine of this fellowship. The quest for truth is its something, right? And service is its prayer. And I'm like, yes, me too. Service is my prayer, right? The quest for truth is our sacrament. Like, yes, that's where we find God.
0:19:53 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): We search, we serve. But as much as I would, like, literally sob at the unison affirmation in that church, the reality of most UU services is just not that emotional. It's not that moving. Whereas when you can move out of the way of it and let move into. For me, the music moves us out of our brains and into our hearts, and we just start moving with it. And that, for me, is the dancers, too. Is this, like, this is about our whole body.
0:20:29 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): This is about who we are and how we live and how we breathe, and we don't have to formulate anything. We don't have to think it through or explain it. We just can feel it.
0:20:44 - (Darnell White): Music. They use it in therapy. We use it in so many aspects of life. I use it to get through the day when I'm walking up these streets to go from one studio to the next. And I think it's so ironic that you're saying, like, sometimes the service, the Unitarian service, could be boring. The irony of that is the Unitarian church is the church where you have the most potential for it to not be boring.
0:21:07 - (Jil Novenski): Amen. I agree so much with that, and I can't tell you how shocked I was coming to Unitarian Universalism unchurched, but my very first church experience was in an AmE church in Seattle, so it was a starkly different experience here. But when I came into this role as Director was the first time I was actively having to look for or wanting to look for music and hymns. We're in a pandemic now. We're online. So I'm trying to look for all kinds of content.
0:21:37 - (Jil Novenski): Oh, my God. Till today. It's shocking to me. Every time I crack open a YouTube hymn, it feels like I've entered a funeral service. I'm sorry to everyone putting content out there, but I'm telling you, it's dead. It feels to me, I mean, like having a great physical experience and no kind of splash at the end.
0:22:01 - (Jil Novenski): Come on.
0:22:02 - (Jil Novenski): What? There's just a few really major culture shifters that exist. Music, how the education happens, those components. I mean, what you described about your early life foray into music had everything to do with a couple of educators seeing that even though all kids kind of may gravitate toward a keyboard, there are some kids that you can see something, but you grab it and you nurture it and you crack that window open.
0:22:31 - (Jil Novenski): And when you describe playing different genres of music in new ways, I feel like to be able to hear a piece of music you're familiar with in a different way feels like you also are getting an opportunity to have a fresh perspective. And I feel like at our church, we also celebrate these… Some others might call it, well, it's just an individual story, but that's church, though. If we allow ourselves to be energized by what magic even happened, for one congregant, then that fuels us forward to say, this is engaging, it's transformative, and it's for everyone.
0:23:08 - (Jil Novenski): So I totally agree with you. I think the tenets of Unitarian Universalism allow for the maximum potential in a transformative experience.
0:23:17 - (Darnell White): Yeah, definitely. I think what you're allowed to bring into the space musically can be so much. The denomination has that potential, but it's really based on what?
0:23:28 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Who's in the room?
0:23:29 - (Jil Novenski): Yeah, I think that's for sure true. And the congregation didn't know to let something happen until we put it forward and tried it out. So there's boldness there to say, I know this is completely different. This is completely something new.
0:23:47 - (Darnell White): I think people go with you, and I'm going to be as humble as I can when I say this, but I think that people go with you when they are truly able to see your heart and your intentions in life. We all make mistakes in life, just in general. We do things wrong, we hurt people. Sometimes you don't mean to, and all of those sorts of things. But I think when we try to live a life where the intention is love, the intention is good.
0:24:20 - (Darnell White): Lead with love. Put love at the front of everything. One of your best sermons ever, the one that sticks, I think. And I think people see that when I'm doing the music. I think people see that no matter what they may… I think there's an expression of love and care. I care about the people in the space in a real way.
0:24:46 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Well, there's an honesty. When you can be completely honest, when you're completely yourself, when you can expose yourself, then other people feel like they can meet you there.
0:24:57 - (Darnell White): Absolutely.
0:24:58 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): When somebody is a little shut down or formal or just distant, then everyone else stays distant, and we end up in these really sort of hyper individualized spaces, when we can just expose ourselves. This is really who I am. Then we can meet each other in community in a much more real way. That's probably the foundation of transformation. When you can really bring yourself and someone else can bring themselves, and when you have a whole congregation of people who are bringing themselves into the space, then everything is possible.
0:25:39 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): Then you can really put love at the center of everything. In fact, you already have.
0:25:43 - (Jil Novenski): Yeah. I think you and I have talked, Darnell, so many times about celebrating what can unfold in a moment that you would never expect, and being able to sort of lean in to the not knowing and trust and have faith in what you're bringing, to allow that to unfold, and then to celebrate it, which is huge.
0:26:06 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): What do we need? Who are we? Who are we becoming? What do people in the room need right now? And then how do we move toward that? For me, if we're talking about really recreating religious community, that's the question. What do we need? What do I want there's a way in which we can live into a vision of community where we're not hyper individual and we can really be concerned about the people next to us and what they need and how we together create a shared vision for the world.
0:26:38 - (Rev. Peggy Clarke): I think that's really the key for what we're talking about. So I'm aware of the time we're going to have to wrap up our really little session here.
0:26:46 - (Darnell White): We're not even… what's going on?
0:26:53 - (Jil Novenski): We need two sessions with you, that's for sure.
0:26:56 - (Darnell White): I'll do another session.