What does it mean to be white women who are informed by Black and Indigenous faith practices? It means you tread carefully and lightly and with great respect. In this episode, Kerry speaks with a creative, influencer, and all-around amazing person, Melissa Greene about expanding our faith without being appropriative assholes.
Melissa Green is a leader, a creative, a wedding officiant, and a communicator. She spent the first 10 years of professional ministry traveling as an artist seven of which were with the contemporary Christian music group. Avalon Avalon was an American music award original artist of the year in 2003 and Grammy-nominated in 2005.
In 2009, Melissa resigned from touring and was immediately hired at grace point church in Franklin, Tennessee.
Grace point is a progressive Christian community where Melissa was the associate pastor and worked for eight years, curating all of the services, leading the music, nurturing the community, and preaching once a month from 2012 to 2017, she was the hope curator for Timothy's gifts, which was the prison outreach, where she produced 127 concerts on 11 different week-long tours with incredible artists in order to entertain and uplift those in maximum security prisons.
She is now the co-founder and leader of Imaginarium, a nonreligious, nonprofit that focuses on creating space to imagine a better world and intentionally making it. So. In May of 2020, she completed her master's of divinity from the Christian theological seminary. She has now also had the privilege of curating and officiating 26 weddings, including interfaith, religious, and non-religious ceremonies.
Now in her early forties, after her world travels continually. Habitual learning and her life experiences. She has leaned into a deeper and broader worldview that holds at its core that all of life is spiritual. It's a view that holds that every living thing is inherently worthy, needed, and capable of a view of the interconnectedness of humanity as well as to the world in which we live.
Melissa's life mission is to stay learning, stay curious, stay grounded and stay open to change.
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