Mide Kolawole

By Blake Thomsen

Lights flashed and the music pumped out of the speakers as thousands of college students sang in unison with lifted hands. Grand Canyon University’s basketball arena had been transformed into a massive space of worship. Mide Kolawole and her twin sister Lade were part of the worship team leading the students in song. Tis was their destiny. Growing up, they had always been told they were called to lead worship, “to change the world for God” in the process, Mide says. The bigger the platform, the better.

Tere was only one problem: Mide felt like she had to hide key aspects of herself in order to ft the mold of an evangelical worship leader.

Growing up with a Black father and white mother, she had always wrestled with aspects of her identity. “Navigating my identity as a Black woman and someone who is biracial – and the way that intersects with my faith – is a journey I’ve been on since I was born,” Mide explains.

Mide primarily grew up around her mother’s side of the family. Although they did their best, there were still aspects of Mide’s experience that they couldn’t share. Mide explains:

Worse still, she felt like her Blackness was often downplayed and de-emphasized in church spaces, including her worship team in college. Auditioning for the team in the frst place felt like a leap of faith, given the paucity of Black students at the predominantly white school. “When my sister and I both made the team as instrumentalists, we couldn’t help but notice that no people of color were given roles as leaders,” Mide says.

Despite her obvious vocal talent, she was never given the opportunity to be the worship leader throughout her time at GCU. “I still feel that because I wasn’t white, wasn’t thin, didn’t play guitar well enough, or maybe didn’t exhort the students or congregation with a certain tone of voice, I was passed over for most of the leadership roles in worship that I was so desperate for during my time in college,” Mide says. “It felt like my image was important when someone wanted to diversify a stage – to be in a choir for MLK day, or a special dance number for a conference – but my actual voice was never heard. It wasn’t needed and wasn’t asked for.”

Mide’s identity as a queer person complicated things even further. She struggled to fit all of the pieces together. “I think there was a point in high school,” she recalls, “where I was like, ‘Tis Christianity thing doesn’t really work for someone like me, but I really like this Jesus guy.’”

It left her searching for a religious home. “I was thinking about converting to another religion, but I was so entrenched in an evangelical space that it was not something I could share with anyone,” Mide explains. “I was so terrifed.”

Mide ultimately decided to stick with Christianity, but her unease and isolation remained. “Te process I’ve been on with my identity has been very lonely at times and very difcult.” she says.

After graduating college, Mide moved to California to attend Fuller Teological Seminary, deter mined to gain a better understanding of what her queerness meant for her faith. “I thought if I just study enough and get the tools where I can fgure this out for myself, then I can feel comfortable with the outcome,” she says. “Whatever way it falls, I just need to be able to live in my own knowledge and capability to determine how I feel about this and what I believe.”

At Fuller, Mide found professors and fellow students who exposed her to new ways of looking at the intersection of queerness and Christianity. “What they shared with me started to transform my spirit and how I felt about this issue,” she says. She soon felt comfortable coming out to those in her inner circle. “Tat winter was when I frst felt comfortable sharing with my sister and my closest friends that I was queer,” Mide recalls. “I think I needed to take a step out of the community I was in before to feel comfortable sharing that. Ten that started this whole process where the foodgates were open.”

January Lim, worship arts pastor at Evergreen and a Fuller classmate at the time, was one of the frst people Mide came out to. A few weeks after Mide came out, January invited her to Evergreen. After spending her whole life in non-afrming church spaces, it was an eye-opening experience. “Evergreen was the frst time I was going to church with people who were openly queer and serving,” Mide says.

Soon Mide was joining January to help lead worship for Evergreen’s online services during the stay-at-home orders. As she became more immersed in the Evergreen community, she fnally escaped the isolation she had experienced while processing her identity throughout her teenage years and early twenties.

“Randi and Kennah Brydon were the frst queer couple I actually got to become friends with and share with,” Mide says.

Becoming more involved in the Evergreen community has been a genuinely transformative experience. “Te biggest thing is, fve years ago I would’ve never imagined that I could be in a community like this and be open about who I am,” Mide says. “It was an impossibility. And now a lot of the time I take it for granted. Tere’s no way I could’ve gotten to this point in my life where I feel so integrated and so honest about myself without being a part of this community.”

Still, her coming out has not come without challenges. “I think the biggest hurdle for me in the coming out process was not really what God thought about me, it was the idea I was going to lose everything I had built up and worked for, the community I had in church and in my life up until that point,” Mide says. “Once they knew this about me, I worried I was going to be disqualifed or cast out.”

Coming out has indeed brought consequences for Mide. Tere are relationships still being rebuilt, and others that have fundamentally changed. Not all relational change has been bad, though. “Something that is so important to me is redefning my relationship and partnership with my sister outside of the more toxic spaces we were a part of growing up,” Mide says.

“My sister and I have both been on our own individual journeys with faith and identity since we parted for grad school,” Mide explains. Tis marked the frst time the sisters had ever spent any extended time apart. Te space between them, coupled with Mide’s coming out, allowed them to release the call of leading worship together with a massive platform in the evangelical world, an ambition that had shaped much of their early lives.

Te process has also given Mide’s relationship with worship a fresh start. Te release of the call to lead worship in an evangelical space with Lade – one Mide felt she could never fully embrace as her own – has brought something so much better. Now the worship arts coordinator at Evergreen, Mide has found a stage that is perfect for her, even if it looks vastly diferent from the ones where she previously sang.

“When you look at worship at Evergreen, the platform is a lot smaller, it’s not a GCU arena or a Hillsong church,” Mide says. “But I feel like the defnition of worship is so much more expansive. I get to go into this space with my church family every week, and I can dream up anything. And I can trust that people are gonna come on the journey and are gonna be willing, and it’s really exciting.”

Mide is a long way from the bright lights, big stages, and booming speakers of her evangelical worship past. But it seems this is where she was called all along, even if it required a long, challenging journey to fnd it. “When I think about my ‘call,’ I feel so much more comfortable and excited about inviting people into the worship space at Evergreen, whether they’re Christian or not, wherever they’re at. It’s something I want people to be a part of.”

“When I think about my ‘call,’ I feel so much more comfortable and excited about inviting people into the worship space at Evergreen whether they’re Christian or not, wherever they’re at. It’s something I want people to be a part of.”