Conference Description: Voices at the Walls: Black Worship, Protest, and the Jericho Imagination

What if worship is not an escape from struggle, but the strategy God gives a people living under pressure?

This year’s Black Theology and Leadership InsAtute gathers pastors, theologians, students, and ministry leaders around a daring claim embedded in Joshua 5–6: holy sound can confront hard structures. Jericho falls not by superior force, but through a strange, disciplined liturgy— marching, silence, trumpet-blast, and communal shout. The text refuses to separate devotion from public life. It offers worship as embodied resistance—sacred practice pressed right up against the architecture of oppression.

In our own moment, Black communities continue circling walls that feel immovable: mass
incarceration, racialized policing, voter suppression, economic dispossession, and environmental harm. And through it all, Black worship persists as a living archive of survival and a school for freedom—our preaching and praying, our shouting and singing, our drums, dance, and even our silence. These practices do more than comfort; they form courage. They keep memory alive. They nurture a people who can grieve honestly and organize faithfully.

BTLI 2026 will explore how Black worship trains communities for the long work of justice—how
it births prophetic imagination, sustains public witness, and teaches the patient circling that often precedes transformation. We will wrestle honestly with Joshua’s troubling conquest imagery, refusing easy answers while reclaiming the narrative as a witness to God’s judgment on death-dealing orders—not a mandate against peoples.

Through plenary sessions, workshops, worship, and small-group formation, participants will gain
theological depth and practical tools to lead congregations whose worship does not retreat
from the streets—but walks with them, sings through them, and labors toward the collapse of
what destroys life.

Come ready to listen for the voices at the walls—and to lead communities who know that worship can be a shout, a strategy, and a sanctified way of making the world new.

Applications open January 1, 2026 and close April 15, 2026