New Orleans blues-and-funk bandleader Adrian Duke is known around town for groove-worthy vocals and soulful love songs.
Adrian’s wife, Holly Duke, grew up singing soul music, too. But for her, a Baptist-raised Alabama native, that soul came in the form of gospel—and it brought with it a faith that nearly prevented their marriage.
“I met my husband in grad school. He was a Unitarian, so I thought I could not be with him because I was still in the fundamentalist faith,” Holly Duke says. “I went to speak to a youth minister who tried to get me to pray his Unitarianism away, which is a common prescription for a lot of problems.”
As an undergrad, she “met new people, had new experiences and decided that different people in different religions and people who felt and looked differently than I did were not wrong or scary or to be judged.” But it was only later, when she realized that “I could not pray [Adrian’s Unitarianism] away,” that she also discovered she could explore other kinds of Christianity.
“I went to a United Church of Christ in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where they had different interpretations of the Bible,” Duke says. “It was not a literal but more living and inclusive interpretation of the faith, and it was exactly what I needed to hear.”
Spreading this message of inclusion and acceptance has become a passion for Duke, who says her experience—one she describes as growing “into the world [and] away from the fundamentalist faith”—is familiar to many of her peers at her current church, Sojourners United Church of Christ in Charlottesville, where “LGBTQ members are welcome all the way up to ministry.”
Inspired by a recent article in Rolling Stone about LGBT youth who were getting pushed out of church because of faith-based biases, she hatched a plan.
She approached Melanie Miller, the pastor of Sojourners, with the idea for an “old-style, faith-based tent revival” designed to reclaim gospel in the name of open acceptance.
“When Holly came to me, I was thrilled,” Miller says. “We’re part of a larger denomination, which was the first to ordain an African-American, the first to ordain a woman, the first to ordain a gay person. If you’re a person of faith you are welcome here.”
Miller is equally anxious to share her message that God loves everyone. “Often those very narrow voices, those that preach hate not love, get media attention and counter it,” she says.
Duke and Miller developed All Soul’s Tent Revival, a gospel concert/music festival featuring Adrian Duke and former touring gospel singer Theresa Richmond to spread their message of welcome as widely as possible, reaching out especially to those pushed from their church because of their sexuality or gender identity.
“The music is going to be legitimately awesome,” Duke says. “It’s going to be amazing gospel music and very close to the authentic stuff people remember. If you come from this background you will certainly be able to sing along.”
She says her husband plans to draw from African-American spirituals, country and an Appalachian style of gospel music. Many of the songs will be those sung by Richmond during her years touring with gospel icon Margaret Allison and the Angelic Gospel Singers. (According to the show’s press release, Charlottesville’s own Mike Clem, Lucy Fitzpatrick and Stuart Gunter will also appear on the bill.)
In addition to music, beer, wine and food trucks, All Souls Tent Revival includes a few comments from Miller who, like Duke, found her current faith family in young adulthood.
Growing up in the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, Miller says she stood front and center at the missionary conferences her family attended every two weeks. She considered becoming a missionary because women could not be ordained. “As a child, I couldn’t even imagine being a pastor,” she says.
But when her parents got divorced, she began to struggle with the directives of her faith, “asking those hard questions like ‘Why is this okay? Why did this happen?’”
In college, she started attending a United Church of Christ and found that “no one was watching me to make sure I was being good and avoiding that list of don’ts: Don’t watch movies, don’t play cards, don’t dance. I got the message for the first time that God loves me,” she says.
Eventually, a UCC conference ministry member suggested Miller go to seminary. “Suddenly, it all came rushing back,” she says. “I remembered how I used to preach to my dad’s cows.”
Now, after nearly 20 years spent serving the church, Miller sees first-hand the power of acceptance for others.
“At Sojourners, we get a lot of visitors on Sunday morning. They sit at the back near the door, so they can flee if they need to,” she says. “For so many, it’s scary just to walk [through] a church door because they’ve been so hurt in the past. It’s excruciating to see, but as they relax into the message of radical welcome, they begin to weep.”
Visit the free All Souls Tent Revival at Ix Art Park from 7-9pm on September 26, immediately following the Tom Tom Fall Block Party.