Starlette Thomas
Dr. Tamice Spencer-Helms (they/she), driver of innovative Afro-futurist technologies, has visions of a better faith and its afterlife after “hospicing whiteness.” Their expressions are many: nonprofit leader, public theologian, cultural critic, theoactivist, a DJ, remixing cultural texts, lived experiences, and sacred traditions, and the Creative Director of Black Modern Mystic. A word worker, Spencer-Helms is also the author of Faith Unleavened: The Wilderness Between Trayvon Martin & George Floyd. Between its pages, Spencer-Helms “extracts the leaven” of white supremacy and offers fresh manna and unleavened faith to her readers. Their work and witness are a love offering as they collect like-minded disciples who walk outside the lines of church parking lots, who would likely be found with the have-nots or on the sidelines with the marginalized, with “Jesus and the disinherited.”
Not to be viewed as a line leader, Spencer-Helms is a womanist in ministry, collaborating with like-minded scholar-practitioners, challenging social hierarchies, false binaries, and resultant dueling realities in classroom, conference, and church settings. Because our deliverance is a group project. “Christianity, at least in how it has functioned in the West—imperial, hierarchical, exclusionary—is unraveling, and not just in the institutional sense but at the level of meaning, imagination, and legitimacy. The inherited frameworks no longer hold, but not for the reasons many assume,” Spencer-Helms concludes. Because new life not defined by whiteness requires a theological push, we have the gift of this midwife.
Starlette Thomas is Associate Editor and director of the Raceless Gospel Initiative at Good Faith Media.
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Reflection and resources at the intersection of faith and culture through an inclusive Christian lens.