Por Ossie McKinney
I went to Oakland thinking about the work I was building. I came home thinking about the people who were building me.
We often use the word “formation” in church. Spiritual formation. Faith formation. Christian formation. We build Sunday school classes, Bible studies, small groups and ministries designed to form people into faithful disciples. But during a recent retreat in Oakland, California, another question began following me around: “Who formed you?”
Not just who taught you. Not whose books you read or whose sermons you remember.
“Who has been allowed to change you?”
I traveled to Oakland carrying much of the work I have been doing with the Dr. Emmanuel McCall Racial Justice and Leadership Initiative. Over the past year, I have researched stories, developed resources and worked with colleagues to think about how racial justice becomes something people can actually practice. I have been doing a lot of creating. Oakland made me think more deeply about who was shaping the creator.
As my team reflected on our work through the lenses of radical imagination, transformative solidarity and leadership for the whole, I began recognizing places where other people’s experiences had changed not simply what I thought, but what I did. One of those places was language.
We are producing a bilingual Lenten racial justice devotional and Small Group Resource Guide in English and Spanish. Initially, I thought about translation much the way many organizations probably do. Create the resource and make sure other communities can access it. But relationships began changing the question. Instead of asking, “How do we make what we created available to Spanish-speaking communities?” I began asking, “How can Spanish-speaking voices and experiences help shape what we create in the first place?”
That difference may sound small. It isn’t. One approach asks people to receive what we have already decided they need. The other makes room at the table while decisions are still being made. My work with my colleague Rubén and others helped move Spanish-language inclusion from the end of the process toward the beginning. They were forming me.
Then it happened again. As contributors reviewed edits to their Lenten devotionals, some told me that changes intended to improve their writing had also taken something from it. Their voices had become less recognizable. Something of the heart and soul they had put into their words had been lost. I could have explained the editing process. I could have defended the need for consistency, word counts and readability. Instead, I had to listen. And listening required more than saying, “I hear you.”
We changed the process.
Contributors were given the opportunity to review and approve substantive edits so that editing could strengthen their writing without taking ownership of their voices. That experience taught me something I am still carrying: Formation leaves evidence.
If I say I have listened to you, but nothing about the way I lead changes, I have to ask how deeply I listened. If I encounter your story but remain completely untouched by it, have I really allowed myself to be formed? That question matters for racial justice.
It is possible to read books about people who are different from us, attend workshops, commemorate historical events and listen to powerful testimonies without allowing any of it to change the way we use power, build programs, spend resources or make decisions.
We can become very informed without becoming very formed. Justice asks more of us.
My first article in this series wrestled with the discovery that our histories are more connected than we sometimes want to acknowledge. My second reflected on Harriet Tubman’s home and the realization that freedom does not sustain itself. Freedom has to be tended by people willing to open doors, share resources and create places where dignity can live. Oakland added another layer. Our formation is connected too.
I am not formed only by the people who raised me, educated me or taught me to worship. I am also being formed by people whose experiences challenge mine. By people who tell me when something I created does not work for them. By people who invite me to see what I missed. By people whose lives make me reconsider what I thought I understood about justice, leadership and faithfulness. That kind of formation requires humility because sometimes the evidence that I have learned something is that I have to change something.
This season, formation feels especially close to me. I recently finished teaching a summer course in worship leadership, spending weeks thinking with students about what it means to lead people in worship. At the same time, four of my grandchildren are beginning a new school year. One is entering second grade, another kindergarten and two are entering classrooms for some of their very first experiences of school. I find myself thinking about all the people who will help form them. Teachers whose names they may remember for the rest of their lives. Classmates who will introduce them to experiences different from their own. People who will encourage them, challenge them and perhaps see something in them that they have not yet learned to see in themselves.
Then I think about my students. I entered the classroom as their professor, responsible for teaching them something about worship leadership. But good teaching does not move in only one direction. Their questions, experiences and perspectives also caused me to think again about some of my own assumptions. Maybe that is what I am learning about formation.
We are always both forming and being formed.
That matters far beyond a classroom. In our churches and in justice work, we can become so accustomed to asking what we need to teach, offer or build for other people that we forget to ask what they might be teaching us.
Who gets close enough to challenge what we thought we knew?
Whose experience is allowed to change our practices?
Whose voice can make us revise the lesson, change the process or admit that what worked for us did not work for everyone?
Because formation leaves evidence.
If I have truly listened to you, something in me should be different. I went to Oakland thinking about the work I was building. I came home remembering that God is still building me.
Justice work is not only about what I create for others. It is also about who I am becoming as we create something together. So, who formed you?
And perhaps the harder question is this: Who are you still willing to let change you?
Rev. Dr. Ossie McKinney serves as Director of Research and Administration for Outreach and Growth with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and provides research leadership for the Dr. Emmanuel McCall Racial Justice and Leadership Initiative. A worship leader, scholar, and storyteller, she explores the intersection of faith, justice, history and formation.