- A new initiative led by Christ church Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills is gonna lift up compelling stories of faith lived up by people all across our region.

This four-year project is titled Faith in Detroit.

It's supported by Lily Endowment, and Detroit PBS is the lead storytelling media partner.

I got all the details from Reverend Dr.

William Danaher of Christ church Cranbrook, and Reverend Dr.

Theodore Turman from the Ecumenical Theological Seminary, which is one of the project's partners.

Father Danaher, Reverend Turman, welcome to "American Black Journal."

- Thank you.

- Good to be here.

- So, I wanna start with the title of this project.

It's not Church in Detroit, it's not Belief in Detroit, it's not Religion in Detroit, it's Faith in Detroit.

And I love that phrase, it's a wonderful sort of welcoming phrase, I think.

But I want to start with each of you talking about why that name matters, and what it means in the context of this project.

Father Danaher?

- Well, when we were deciding about this, we decided to think about Faith in Detroit meaning two things.

First of all, it's the way we experience faith in Detroit.

The incredible diversity, and the incredible power, and the incredible history of faith in Detroit through its many houses of worship, but also through its many leaders and through the people who do the work that they do.

But we also wanted to talk about people who had faith in the city that in Detroit when Detroit didn't have a lot of believers.

And those are the people that are the most interesting, to me and to us, I believe.

Because so often, the master narrative about Detroit is one of rise and ruin.

- Mm-hmm.

- And when I got to know the faith communities of Detroit, and I'm so grateful for the Black churches of Detroit that I've had the ability to build relationship with, I began to see that Detroit is made up of people who believe in the city, and these are people who are resilient and who are focused on resurrection.

- Hmm.

- So, we wanna challenge, a little bit, the dominant narrative about Detroit.

We want to actually reflect the real narrative about Detroit as told by Detroiters.

And we want to equip storytellers, and we wanna help them share their stories across mediums in different ways.

And we do that by capturing both of those things, the faith we find in Detroit and the people who believe in Detroit is a place of faith.

- Mm-hmm, yeah.

Reverend Turman?

- One of the things that I learned early on was how to define faith.

And we, you know, we do a lot of equations in church.

And so, we decided that faith was belief plus action.

And so, kind of piggybacking off of those who believed in Detroit, it was also then, what did that look like?

What did that belief, how did that manifest?

And how does it continue to manifest?

So, the notion that we are exploring what belief plus action has looked like, but also continues to look like, and even to some degree, beginning to project what it might look like in the future.

And then I think the second part of it which is worth exploring, is just the name Detroit.

- Yeah.

(chuckles) - It means so many different things.

And there's, both fortunately and unfortunately, there's no one who has total control over what that word means, right?

Because we have all experienced conversations where people say, "I'm from Detroit."

Where?

- Yeah, right, right.

- Well, what does that mean?

What are- - It's not always a question, sometimes it's a little bit of an accusation, right?

- Absolutely, absolutely.

- Yes, yes, 100%.

- Stepping into that conversation of what it has meant and this journey of defining both faith and defining Detroit was something we really wanted to not shy away from, but really intentionally engage.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

Reverend Turman, in the Black-church, in particular, story, I think, carries this across history in super important ways.

Talk about how in this project, that through line of narrative and story will- - Mm-hmm.

Well, if you think about it, oftentimes, we identified leaders by their ability to tell stories.

If you could command a crowd, they'd put you in the pulpit.

- [Stephen] Right, right.

(chuckling) - If you could capture people- - It's still kind of a test.

Right?

- Yeah.

If you could capture people's imagination with your words, they almost immediately began to see some spiritual gifts in you.

And so, there are things that we have done very naturally that we didn't necessarily believe was, we usually believe it was more art than science.

And now we're trying to sort of reverse that and think about the sort of the science of it, along with the artistic expression.

- Mm-hmm.

Let's talk about how this project reaches individuals.

- [Theodore] Sure.

- People living here in metro Detroit, and I guess what you hope they'll draw out of it.

- So, the way we conceived of this, is we wanted to create a kind of ecosystem of storytelling.

But there's, in all reality, an incredible ecosystem already.

And one person I've been watching for a long time is Satori Shakur and her incredible work with the Secret Society of Twisted Storytellers.

- Twist storytellers, right?

- And I'm a huge fan of hers and a huge fan of that work.

And I see so many layers.

Every time I go, it's an amazing experience.

And so, that's one form of storytelling, right?

That's the person on the stage in a audience who's actually invited to be empathic at the very beginning.

She has an incredibly wonderful approach.

But the more and more I spent with people through different projects that I did with a collaborator in Detroit on art, with Billy Mark, who is a interdisciplinary artist and remarkable performance artist, poet, IB, and also seeing the stories that are not rehearsed, that don't appear on stage.

- [Stephen] Mm-hmm.

- And also, I see the artistic community as looking to find ways to improve their skill as storytellers, not just for the stage, but maybe in written print.

- [Stephen] Hmm.

- So, we wanted to find partners who could help us, at the most basic level, meet the storytellers and have the trust to tell us their stories.

And Detroit PBS is an amazing partner because the model of Detroit PBS is you lead, we follow, it's a community-based organization in terms of the way it invests in the communities.

Because of the work I do through my church, we actually know a lot of the same people.

And that allowed us to think about Detroit PBS being a key partner because of their understanding of how we have to be in the midst of the community.

So, we have Detroit PBS, which is gonna be doing opportunities for people to tell their stories at the communities that they do.

We also have an artist collective led by Billy Mark, and that's actually gonna do something as exciting and unproven and experimental.

But he's gonna build an app that's gonna try to map stories.

- Yeah, wow.

- And he's gonna, because of his, he's got a playfulness in his artistic practice, he's going to create pews where we're gonna place them in either public places or in places of worship where someone could sit and either hear a story or tell a story.

And we just want to catch, at that basic level, people who are willing to do storytelling.

And then from there, we have our relationships with Ecumenical Theological Seminary, which is gonna help people tell a story in a deeper way with scripture and tradition and history to really equip mostly pastors, but also people who are Christian leaders.

And of course, we know there's a lot of that shared work in our community, but also with Detroit Opera to actually see if we can pull some leading stories to tell the story of faith in Detroit differently.

And then I'm really excited to be working with Oakland University and the Center for Public Humanities, because there are people who want to tell their story, they may not be drawn to Satori Shakur's approach, and she's a consultant for us, and we're working with them, but they may want to tell their story in written form.

And so, we have a online journal that we're gonna be doing, and as well as intensives.

And all of this, and then there's another layer even, but I won't go too much into that.

But what we're hoping to do, is get that ecosystem built by many ways of telling a story rather than just the person on the stage or the person on the pulpit.

- Sure, sure.

And by reaching really deeply into different parts of the community.

- And so, we are looking for stakeholders because there are, the informal networks of faith are the really profound way to get into any community.

And so, you know, if anybody knows a story, we will be sending along information.

It's, we got an intake.

- Come and tell it, right?

- Yeah, come and tell it, and then we'll find the venue.

So, I'm very excited that our first storytelling opportunity will be at Fellowship Chapel.

And I'm really grateful for Dr.

Constance Simon for organizing that.

And she is a brilliant leader, and a wonderful person, and- - [Stephen] Frequent guest on this show.

(Stephen chuckles) - [William] Nobody better.

- Yeah.

- And to have her ability to be a stakeholder and to help us draw in the storytellers is gonna be critical.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- No one does this alone.

- Right, right, right.

- If I can be ever so critical of the church, I think historically, the church has had a difficult time holding stories that did not fit neatly into the church.

And so, one of the things that made this project attractive, was Father Bill's intention on creating spaces outside the church to still tell stories of faith, right?

I think that one of the things that we're seeing, particularly in these days, that people are coming to, and expressing their faith, in numerous ways outside of the church.

Now, that makes church people anxious.

- A little bit nervous, right?

- Oh, but I still think that it's valuable.

And I think the church has an opportunity to reflect on why we haven't been able to make room for some of those stories.

- Yeah.

- And so, there are going to be people who look at our project and say, "Well, what's the opera here for?"

Or, "What are the schools here for?"

And the point is that we're trying to create as many avenues, as many pews, as many doors, and put up as many microphones as we can to capture compelling stories.

And so, that's what I'm excited about.