Brooklyn, NY — St. Paul Community Baptist Church (SPCBC) has been awarded a prestigious $1.25 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. This grant will be used to launch Restorying Our Worship – Centering Joy, a five-year initiative that aims to reimagine worship through an African-centered, child-focused lens.
The program is funded through Lilly Endowment’s Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative. The aim of the national initiative is to support faith-based organizations as they help children grow in faith and deepen their relationships with God.
SPCBC will serve as a congregational incubator that cultivates a new worship paradigm that affirms joy, cultural identity and spiritual formation in children by aligning developmental milestones with spiritually grounded, and culturally meaningful worship practices. Moreover, this project will highlight the creation and implementation of a new curriculum titled Wonder and Worship for Africana Youth. An education and liturgical curriculum that centers majesty, meaning, memory and mastery as an approach to touching the spirit (Nsaka Sunsum).
This curriculum will be developed using the collective creativity and brainpower of a project design team comprised of early childhood and religious educators, media specialists, content creators and spiritual guides. SPCBC’s template for restorying children and youth worship will then be used as a model for other congregations. These secondary project sites include:
● Second Baptist Church of Aiken, Aiken, SC
(Rev. Ray Speller, Senior Pastor)
● Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, Washington DC
(Rev. Dr. William Lamar IV, Pastor)
● Mt. Aery Baptist Church, Bridgeport, CT
(Rev. Dr. Anthony Bennett, Pastor)
● New Calvary Baptist Church, Norfolk, VA
(Rev. Dr. William Marcus Small, Senior Pastor)
● New Life Presbyterian, Atlanta, GA
(Rev. Hodari S. Williams, Pastor)
At the heart of this project is the Nsaka Sunsum framework—an African-centered approach to spiritual formation, rooted in the concept of “Touching the Spirit” at the “crossroads,” where children develop character while they problem solve using culturally and spiritually responsive tools. “When we center the aspect of wonder children experience as they figure out the world, we can enliven their understanding of the unseen and awesomeness of our Creator as an experience of joy,” says Dr. Itihari Toure, one of the design team members and Fundi (teacher) for SPCBC. “This project is not just about worship,” said leaders at SPCBC. “It’s about restoring the joy and purpose of our youth in ways that speak to their identities, experiences, and futures.
As part of its community engagement strategy, SPCBC will host Days of Discovery, Embodied Joy Sessions and Challenge Conversation Tables—dynamic gatherings that invite congregations to reimagine prayer, storytelling, and spiritual expression through the lens of critical inquiries like:
How are the children?
What tells us how they see and hear God? What do they dream about?
Ultimately, the Restorying Our Worship – Centering Joy project represents a bold step forward in reclaiming the spiritual imagination of Black youth through culturally responsive, joy-centered worship.
SPCBC is one of 170 organizations nationwide that are being funded through three rounds of the Lilly Endowment Nurturing Children initiative.
Media Contact Information:
Trina Scotland, Executive Assistant to the Lead Pastor tscotland@spcbc.com, 718.257.1300 ext. 127