Photograph: Rich Fury/Getty Images for Coachella Kanye West performs Sunday Service during the 2019 Coachella festival. Parishioners don’t just want a silver tongue, holy hands and a whiff of fire and brimstone. Todd’s Sunday sermons, which have seen him set against an Imax-quality display, sometimes while standing on a stage pooled with water or in a driving artificial rain – are as ambitious as anything you’d see on a Vegas proscenium. Increasingly, they’re finding themselves pitted against the mainstream likes of Kanye West, whose viral Sunday Service productions have only further blurred the line between spiritual and secular. Well before the pandemic, Black churches were scrambling to capture these short attention spans with flashy PowerPoints, studio-grade musicianship, concert-quality light displays and similarly high production values. And even though African Americans remain the most church-going demographic – with a 40% attendance rate that’s almost 10 points higher than the national average, according to a Barna survey – young Black people lag well behind older generations in their weekly church engagement. It’s a style that Black politicians – not least Barack Obama – often drop into when preaching to the choir on the campaign trail. With his father as a pulpit mentor, Martin Luther King Jr elevated this elocution style into an historic second act as a civil rights icon and touring public speaker. It used to be that the Baptist preacher didn’t need much in the way of frills he (usually a he) was the show – needing only a bit of gospel organ, a catchy refrain and a dash of the holy spirit to move the crowd. The principle of what he’s doing is very, very difficult Cean James, Philadelphia Salt & Light ministries “The principle of what he’s doing is very, very difficult,” says Cean James, the 47-year-old leader of Philadelphia Salt & Light ministries. And it was only a matter of time before Todd reached them. How social media became a new stageįor more than a decade, these preacher-influencers have been spreading the gospel to reach souls spending more of their lives in front of screens. It’s definitely not the kind of thing you can imagine hearing from Jesse Jackson. When memes like the Silhouette Challenge go viral, Todd isn’t just aware he has a whole tangent in a sermon about “men anchoring their families” in which he discourages young ladies from “being impressive” with their bodies – an aside met with considerable pushback from secular feminists who’d long written off the Black church as overly paternalistic. He promotes family on TikTok and parades fashion on Instagram. In Georgia there’s Jamal Bryant, a preacher’s kid turned megachurch leader who sometimes appears alongside his ex-wife on The Real Housewives of Potomac.īut none is as of-the-moment as Todd – whose second book, Crazy Faith: It’s Only Crazy Until It Happens, could just as easily describe his viral clip. In South Carolina, there’s the Oprah-approved John Gray. In this Covid-addled chapter of the internet age, the 35-year-old Todd epitomizes a new brand of holy man – the preacher-influencer.
“It’s never my intention to distract others from God’s Word and the message of Jesus … even with illustrations!” Within days, Todd predictably reappeared on camera to apologize for his “too extreme and too disgusting” example. “If your pastor rubs spit on your face”, quipped the Rev Dr Chuck Currie, a United Church of Christ minister, “find a new pastor.” Still, a fair few came to Todd’s defense, some making a case for saliva’s medicinal properties and others making a broader case for nastier offenses other shepherds have committed against their flocks. “God wasn’t nowhere near that,” snarked the Root’s Shanelle Genai. The internet broke into fits at first sight of this clip. Gizelle Bryant and Jamal Bryant attend the Atlanta UNCF Mayor’s Masked Ball in 2019.
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