Our ministry gathers in non-traditional times and spaces, in community centers, borrowed sanctuaries, porches, and even living rooms. These gatherings are intimate, sacred, and deeply experiential. We engage liturgy and liberation in the same breath, merging scripture, spoken word, ancestral invocation, testimony, music, and healing rituals that address the whole person - body, mind, and spirit. We are building a community that restores, affirms, and equips its participants to pour their healing back into the world. These are spirit-led gatherings structured to blend the sacred flow of West African oral traditions with the freedom theology of the hush harbors. We do not simply hold worship; we hold space!
What makes Brewster Place unique is our dual purpose: we are both a worshiping community and a training ground. Our gatherings are both altar and classroom, pulpit and porch. Women and girls are encouraged to identify their “spiritual medicine” - the gifts, callings, and lived experiences that uniquely position them to serve and heal others. Whether one’s ministry is through preaching, organizing, feeding, teaching, or creating, Brewster Place creates space for that ministry to emerge, be nurtured, and be shared. In this way, we are not just forming disciples, we are developing liberators and community builders.
We take the call to equip rural Black women for leadership seriously, not only within Brewster Place but also across their communities. Our planned leadership cohorts, healing retreats, and intergenerational workshops will center womanist theology, ancestral practices, and sustainable care. Through storytelling, communal rituals, and land-based learning, we are cultivating a spiritual ecosystem that nourishes both the soul and the soil.
As founder and visionary of Brewster Place Ministries, my leadership extends beyond that of curator and organizer. I serve as a prophetic midwife, helping to birth callings and nurture the spiritual vocations of those entrusted to this community. I serve as a cultural memory keeper, drawing on my upbringing in Rockingham, NC, at Mt. Zion UCC to bring forth the deep wells of ancestral wisdom that sustain Black rural communities. And I serve as a spiritual architect, constructing a liturgical and theological framework that allows Black women to see themselves as sacred text, living witness, and carriers of God’s truth.
My leadership is deeply informed by my background in ministry, public policy, advocacy, and theological training, as well as by my own story of return. Returning to a rural North Carolina church after years of education, urban ministry, and organizing is not just personal for me; it is prophetic. Brewster Place embodies that homecoming, a home for others who long for a spiritual community that sees them, hears them, and believes in their healing.
Brewster Place Ministries is not a replication of the past; it is a reclamation of the sacred. It is born from the belief that healing is possible, leadership is transferable, and the Spirit still moves among the least likely and most overlooked. As Brewster Place grows, I continue to serve as preacher, teacher, healer, and strategist. Above all, as a listener. I listen to the Spirit. I listen to the people. And I listen to the land, trusting that what we are building is not just for now, but for generations yet to come.