This story was originally published online with Word In Black, a collaboration of the nation’s leading Black news publishers (of which The Informer is a member) and slightly edited for clarity.
With graduate degrees from St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore and Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., the Rev. Dr. Wanda Bynum Duckett has traditional faith leadership credentials.
Her career path affirmed it: she rose from itinerant ministry to serve as superintendent of the United Methodist Church’s former Baltimore Metropolitan District for eight years.
Then, she retired and rewired.
After years of preaching in a more traditional mode, Bynum Duckett now spits the gospel with the power and energy of a hip-hop artist or slam poet. That’s with good reason: Bynum Duckett, 64, is melding art forms found in nightclubs and coffee houses with Scripture — a unique spiritual blend she calls “Sacred Slam”:
“We are the ones…what are we waiting for?
We are the ones…open wide every door!
We are the ones
We can’t hear them from our shrines
Can’t see them through closed blinds
Can’t love them with closed minds.
Eternal life? Let’s get this right.
The world is waiting and
We are the ones.”
The combination is drawing them into the pews whenever Bynum Duckett preaches, and not just young people craving a spiritual message in a language they can relate to.
Sacred Slam, she says, attracts the young and the young at heart. Her style has been so successful that she facilitates workshops and coaches others to find themselves in the art of poetry under the banner of Spoken by Bynum Duckett.
“I celebrate that God is the first spoken word artist,” Bynum Duckett told Word In Black in a recent interview. “In the beginning was the word. That’s a spoken word poem. And if you go back and listen to Rev. Jesse Jackson and some of the popular preachers we have, it’s poetry; the way they use imagery and repetition and alliteration.”
Extending her soul art, she says, has been a real blessing as well as a model for others to be authentically themselves. People began to ask her to perform in unusual places, including a wedding: “One bride walked down the aisle to a poem,” she says.
Bynum Duckett wants to introduce younger poets to the faith community, thereby encouraging them to embrace all the arts for worship. Her next plan also includes community gatherings, even in homes, much like the poetry salons of the Harlem Renaissance.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Word in Black (WIB): When did you first fall in love with hip-hop and poetry?
Wanda Bynum Duckett: Oh, my goodness. It was in the late 70s, and I heard [rap artists] the Sugarhill Gang; I was kind of in love then, but then when I heard, “Don’t Push Me, I’m Close to the Edge,” I was like, O.K. — I’m in.
I grew up the youngest of five. I had a brother who was rock and roll, Led Zeppelin, Rare Earth guy. He was a hippie. I had another brother who was Temptations, Four Tops. And my sister: she’s Pointer Sisters, and she’s listening to Malcolm X on wax— on album.
My mother’s James Cleveland, Mahalia Jackson. So I think in song and rhyme anyway.
Of course, we’ve got poetic preachers and in the tradition of even someone reading the scripture and the preacher preaching a while and then he’s rhyming and he’s riffing and he’s unpacking it. It’s poetry to me. It’s, like, the way the images and the words and the attitude of it all come together. All this stuff is in my head.
WIB: When did you first experience rhythm in scripture and prayer responses?
Bynum Duckett: I really don’t know if I was aware until other people noticed it in my preaching. I think it was so much a part of the way I think, hear, and speak that I didn’t realize. I would preach at Mount Calvary AME Church, and when the young adult choir was singing, they would snap their fingers when I made a point. I said, “What are they doing?” I said to myself, “I’m not doing poetry,” but that’s the way they heard it.
WIB: Did you need to summon courage to be non-traditional?
Bynum Duckett: One of the first times I performed, I stood in the background with my hair tied up, like I was Maya Angelou or somebody. I thought I had to be Afrocentric. While I read from the background, out of sight, the Rev. Stephanie Graham Atkins, one of my colleagues, did liturgical dance to the rhythm of my words and I got to hide.
It was another kind of gradual coming out.
WIB: Did you experience pushback? Did anyone say, “That’s not preaching. What’s she doing up there?”
Bynum Duckett: It was actually the opposite. I found my tribe in the young adults. And people love when young people show up, right?
I give credit to a young lady named LaShonda. When I was in southwest Baltimore, my first church, I was doing a lot of real, gritty urban ministry. And then when I moved uptown to Ashburton, I sat in the office and saw people and visited.
She came into the office one day and said the young people had Googled me. They said, “Where is she? We haven’t seen her show up here.” She called me out. She said they were excited for me to bring my bop” as she called it.
Out of that conversation came the poem, “I Decided to Be Myself.”
WIB: What did “being yourself” look like, initially?
Bynum Duckett: We started the “Seven Last Words of Poetry ” nights on Good Friday. We didn’t start until 10 p.m. People had been in church all day. We set the place up like a cafe. We had live music one year. We had a DJ the next year. And the seven last words were all offered poetically.
People came from all over: D.C., Silver Spring, you know, elsewhere in Baltimore.
It was beautiful. They were able to get a taste of what it was before they could argue against it.
So then, when I did [my] dissertation work, I really pushed the envelope and took the United Methodist hymnal and wrote a poetic reaffirmation of baptism, a poetic communion service.
WIB: Can you say more about the baptism poem?
Bynum Duckett: It is dedicated to Trayvon Martin. He had “a right to live.” Remember that mantra? And it’s talking about how Jesus had the right to live, but he gave himself up for us. It’s a communion service.
In the dissertation, it was the first time I had a chance to experiment with that to see what people said. And then I took a survey as part of the dissertation work. And the survey was, like, “it’s cool.” They said they liked it but weren’t sure about it being part of worship.
Some said they certainly didn’t know how they felt about it being used in the sacraments. And some people said stuff like, “Well, it’s kind of like hip hop. I don’t understand it because they talk too fast.” So writing it down is helpful so people can read it at their own pace in their own way.
But this one woman, who had been kind of on the edge, cried as I did a reaffirmation of baptism. She said it took her back to when she was confirmed, and she wasn’t one of those weepy people.