Before her work at Warner, Michelle lent her ministerial skill & services to various organizations in Seattle, including World Vision, University Presbyterian Church, Emerald City Outreach Ministries (now Urban Impact) and Young Life. Currently, she serves as a worship leader at Imago Dei Community Church.
Originally from Laurel, Mississippi, Michelle has been residing in the Pacific Northwest for more than 20 years. Her passionate pastime is serving as front-woman to her band Michelle Lang & Still Water (MLSW). MLSW is an award-winning contemporary gospel band that travels all over the country performing at camps, conferences, concerts, conventions. They have had songs in regular radio rotation and videos on BET, The Gospel Music Channel and the Word Network.
In Seattle, Michelle has served as the Music Director of Teen Summer Musical. She has provided management and content to local radio & television, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, ACT Theater, along with numerous projects in Seattle Public Schools, and Parks & Recreation.
Her work weaves common threads of urban development, racial reconciliation, art as activism, and youth & family services. She considers all of it ministry. For more than two decades, her guiding passions have been to paint pictures of the Gospel through whatever work or means to help people make connections that lend to a meaningful life and validate the voice of marginalized communities.
In this first of a two-part Q&A series with Colors of Influence, Michelle shares her dedication to nurturing the Warner community through their spiritual journeys.
What is your primary charge in leading at Warner Pacific College?
Warner is a Christ-centered college. While the staff and faculty are Christian and people of faith, not all of our students are. The school is driven by Christian principles, but our students don’t have to be.
I attend to anything related to the spiritual journeys of our faculty, staff and students. This creates a great opportunity for me and my team, because the campus becomes a mission. Not necessarily an Evangelistic mission, but a mission that offers a safe space for people of faith or people who are on a journey of faith. They may be on a journey purposefully, accidentally, or even unknowingly. My role here is to engage with people on their that journey, most typically through our chapel programs, our small groups, or just being a consistent and hopefully life-affirming presence.
What is it about Warner Pacific College’s culture that draws you to its mission?
I had already been managing programs in Seattle, Washington, and I wasn’t looking to move to Portland to just manage another program. What excited me the most was Warner’s mission to be a point of access and a place that intentionally served the wider kingdom & community.
I was contacted by Ben Sand (special adviser to the President at Warner Pacific) a few years ago. At that time, Warner was looking to redefine itself as a school that actively pursued people of color and people from the urban context.
Warner’s leadership was interested in ways to shift the culture, to gain more interest from students from various diverse backgrounds. They also knew that while they can invite students to come here, they first needed to create a space where students can thrive, where they can be authentic to who they are.
What drove me to Warner was the heart they have for serving students. They are true and intentional to the work of making this space welcoming for students of color, first-generation students, immigrant students, and students who are on a journey of faith. Just recently Warner was named the most diverse college in Oregon! Not bad, right!? I’m proud of us for that.
What do you find most edifying about serving the spiritual needs of the Warner Pacific community?
I know this might come across to some people as almost sacrilegious but part of what I like to do is to make God, Jesus, Christianity “small” enough for people to feel like they can access and process it - kind of make sense of it all. Sometimes I think that religion and faith, and even morality and ethics, become too big that they become undoable and unknowable.
Part of my excitement everyday is to present these concepts in a way that makes someone feel that they are accessible and reasonable. But it’s also my passion to show the grandness of faith, in such a way that we don’t put limitations on its potential for humanity. Religion is bigger than ourselves; it’s so big that all our lives are contained in it. But it’s also small enough that it’s accessible to people for whom it’s foreign.
When I’m speaking in chapel, I think about the furthest out and the closest in, as it relates to people’s proximity to the gospel of Christ. There are believers and non-believers. My work is cut out for me, because it’s an opportunity for us to process that journey together. It’s kind of funny because I’ve almost forgotten how to speak to a room that isn’t diverse in background and thought.
What do you find most challenging?
Our students come from all different walks – and in all different thoughts -- of life. Attending to that in our programming could be challenging.
Students have elected to attend this college, but now I have to figure out how they serve them with programs that they like and others that they may not know about. We are providing offerings that are equal parts familiar and unfamiliar in ways that are beneficial and meaningful to their lives.
That could be hard. With anything in life, there will always be some aspect of any experience that you don’t like or particularly agree with. I believe that this is true in creating spaces for people to step into their spiritual path.
How do you incorporate your spiritual background into the work that you do?
I didn’t think this was true of me, but it happened. When I first got here, I was so concerned about fitting in that I lost a part of me. I was coming to shift culture and adding myself to the mix, but as a new person, I wanted to fit in. I didn’t want to shock people so much that they can’t receive what I had to offer.
During my first year at Warner, I was fully here with my culture and my identity. I felt that I was doing a good job, but I don’t think I was as “alive” as I wanted to be.
Ironically, within the first year of being here, Trayvon Martin happened. Mike Brown happened. Sandra Bland happened. The list was so long. I’m here at Warner for a specific reason, but I was having a hard time finding my way in that reason. Throughout the nation, all these murders were happening and they were affecting the parts of me that I most identify with: my African American part and my urban part.
On one hand, I was trying to fit in. But on the other hand, I was being shaken to speak up and speak into these spaces. I started to see that I need be alive to be fully who I am or my time here would be short-lived.
I realized after that first year that I never had a “gut laugh” on this campus. And I’m a gut laugher! I talk loud, I laugh loud, and I talk over people. I can talk about 17 different things in one time. I dance into a room like it’s a stage and Im making yet another entrance. I sing people’s names just because people make me happy. That part of me was dormant.
When all these things in the nation started happening, I felt that I just needed to show up. One day, I was here on campus, and something was so funny that I laughed but it was a deep and big gut laugh. One that I hadn’t heard from myself in a while. And I felt free. That’s when I felt that I finally got here.
I came from a church background. Even though this is a Christ-centered school, higher education is different from working at a church. I don’t mean this in a manipulative way but at a church, the agenda is to get people there and hope that they embrace the gospel and stay. If they stay, the goal is to help them actualize themselves fully and find ways to serve and give. Essentially, we want them live out the rest of their days as a follower of Christ, active in the world and supported by the Church.
From day one, I learned that’s not what higher end is all about ... the come and stay part. We provide the tools for self-actualization, self-fulfillment, and manifestation. But at the end of the day, we need our students to get out of here and do good in the world. So that was another paradigm shift, because higher education is a different sphere.
What do you find most fulfilling about your work with young people?
When I was a youth pastor, I went to all my kids’ graduations. I’d be so proud of them. It was awesome to see them go off to whatever’s next.
In the year or two before I came to Warner, I started wondering who’s on the other side of that equation. Where is next? Where are my kids going?
What’s fulfilling to me about being here is that I know a lot about what it takes to get a student to this place in life. During that last free summer after graduation, I’m the person receiving people’s kids. At the beginning of the year, and as they are working through the college process, I think about how somebody has trusted me with this phase of these students’ lives. I used to be on the other side of the equation, and now I’m here. It feels like a journey that I’m supposed to be on.