Classroom, Choir Stand, and the Cross: The Many Voices of Terrence J. Dooley by Charles Clark

Terrence J. Dooley moves through a school hallway the way he moves a choir stand on Sunday—focused, intentional, and just playful enough to keep everyone on their toes. A celebrated gospel choir master and a full‑time classroom teacher, he has quietly crafted a life where blackboard and B3 organ, lesson plans and lead sheets, all live in the same sacred space.​

A man of many callings

Ask Terrence J. Dooley who he is, and he does not start with accolades or chart positions. He calls himself a man of God, a father, a husband, a teacher, a former athlete and lifelong basketball enthusiast, and, maybe surprisingly, a lover of comedy. Comedy, he explains, fuels his creativity, helping him stay loose enough to write freely and connect to people on and off the stage. That sense of range—sacred and silly, disciplined and improvisational—shows up in everything he touches, from his classroom culture to the way his choir, Terrence J. Dooley & Testimony, sounds on record.​

Teaching was not a fallback but an early dream. He remembers flipping through an old middle‑school yearbook and seeing that he had already written “teacher” as his future occupation. He loved to help people, to share what he had, and to lead, even as a kid, and though the road to the classroom was “scenic,” landing there feels like a promise kept.​

In the classroom, presence and representation

This school year, Dooley admits, has been draining. “Everybody’s been in their rooms just with their heads down,” he says, describing colleagues returning from break and diving straight back into the grind. Yet he remains deeply committed to the work, insisting that the key is ruthless prioritizing—protecting rest, planning ahead, and honoring downtime as much as rehearsal time. On Saturdays and Sundays, he pours himself into music and ministry, but by Monday he knows teenagers are coming “with full energy” and expects himself to be ready to receive them.​

As a black man in the classroom, he sees his presence as non‑negotiable. From kindergarten through his master’s degree, Dooley never had a single Black male teacher, a void he still feels when he looks back. He does not claim that representation alone would have changed his grades, but he understands the power of walking into a room and seeing someone who looks like you in charge, making the classroom feel like an “all‑around safe space.” His own management style is direct and relational—“we can laugh, we can joke… but y’all gonna act like you have some sense in this class, and you’re gonna do your work”—and it has translated into strong rapport, solid grades, no write‑ups, and a room where students know they are heard.​

A versatile sound, on purpose

If the classroom is where Dooley shapes lives, the choir stand is where he narrates his own. His catalog—songs like “Lift Him Higher,” “Mystery,” “Turning Point,” “Trust in the Lord,” “I Owe God Praise,” “Testimony,” and “Where Would I Be”—has earned him a reputation as one of the finest choir masters of his generation. One hallmark of Terrence J. Dooley & Testimony is that no two songs sound alike. Listeners will not find the same groove recycled at three different tempos; instead, each album plays like a journey rather than a loop.​

That variety is not accidental. Dooley loves big choir music, but his tastes stretch into worship, jazz, and beyond. He played in jazz band in high school, a New Orleans‑flavored influence that surfaces on the song “Mystery,” and he carries that eclecticism into his arrangements. He often returns to something he heard from Prince: albums matter. To him, a project should move through keys, textures, and moods, resisting the temptation to chase one proven sound just because it once “popped” in a certain season.​

Making albums in a singles world

In an era dominated by streaming and singles, Dooley still believes in the full album, even as he acknowledges the economics have shifted. When he released his first project around 2010–2011, the CD release concert served as both ministry event and business strategy, with physical sales helping recoup thousands of dollars in costs in a single night. Today, supporters “go to Spotify” instead—and their version of support, he notes with some honesty, is his too—yet that support pays only pennies, sometimes barely a penny for an entire album stream.​

Still, he keeps creating. A new album, recorded several years ago but delayed by life—a master’s degree, two children with his wife, and buying a house—is finally ready, with a release planned for the first half of this year. The project, featuring powerhouse evangelist Lillian Lloyd in a marathon, 20‑minute performance the team is still “trying to chop… to make it palatable,” promises the same breadth his listeners have come to expect. There will be church choir anthems, songs that put “a little boom in your subwoofers,” and, above all, lyrics anchored in Scripture.​

Keeping Jesus at the center

If versatility is one pillar of Dooley’s work, theological clarity is the other. The new material, he stresses, is intentionally Christ‑centered, a response to a landscape where some music labeled “gospel” feels more vaguely inspirational than explicitly rooted in Christian confession. He does not deny the need for clean, uplifting songs of all kinds, but he draws a clear line: if it is called gospel music—which he defines broadly as Black Christian music—it should stay close to the vine. On this upcoming album, that conviction shows up even in the titles: “Tell Somebody About Jesus,” “Follow Jesus,” “I Love the Lord,” “Praise the Name of Jesus.”​

Dooley is a student of those who kept that center of gravity before him. As a lyricist and arranger, he has studied James Hall, Donald Lawrence, the late Richard Smallwood, Kurt Carr, Fred Hammond, and John P. Kee, artists who, in his view, write the majority of what they record and marry strong theology with sophisticated musicality. He also carries lessons from mentors closer to home—Bishop Roger Harrison, local ministers of music like James Watley and Gary Lewis, and Elder Walter Roberts in Columbus, Ohio, whose hymn traditions continue to shape Dooley’s own writing.​

Between the classroom and the choir loft, Terrence J. Dooley is building something that looks less like a career and more like a calling lived out in harmony—rigorous, joyful, biblically grounded, and unmistakably his. For those who want to follow that journey, he keeps it simple: search his full name—on any streaming platform, on social media, or at his website—and the music and ministry of Terrence J. Dooley & Testimony are right there, ready for the next lesson, the next service, the next song.​

Where Are You, Brother: Reclaiming Identity Through Faith & Black History by Granvel Johnson

Personal identity matters because it influences how we see ourselves, make decisions, and interact with others. Identity shapes how we think, feel, choose, love, and hope—from what we eat to where we live to how we dream. Strong identity ties us to community, family, culture, and faith. A clear and healthy identity strengthens self-esteem, confidence, and our sense of God-given purpose.

This article encourages African American Christian men to recognize that a positive racial identity as an essential part of a whole and grounded Christian identity. To understand where we are, we must begin where Scripture begins—with God’s questions.

 God’s Questions About Identity

After Adam and Eve sinned, God asked Adam, “Where are you?” God was not confused about Adam’s physical location; He was calling Adam to recognize his changed moral and spiritual condition. God’s question invited Adam into self-reflection: Where am I in relationship to God, my community, and to myself? Who have I become? Why?

Later, God asked Jacob, “What is your name?” Again, the question was not for God’s information but for Jacob’s transformation. Before Jacob could become Israel—a man with a new identity and purpose—he had to confront the distorted identity he had lived into. My brothers, God requires no less of us?

As sin distorted Adam’s identity, America’s sin has marred ours. Racism has left deep spiritual, emotional, and psychological wounds across our communities.  As Jacob wrestled, so must we. We must grapple with the long history of lies, miseducation, and terror that still impacts us. Only then can we fully become the men God envisioned when He meticulously and lovingly made us.

 The Assault on Black Identity

For more than 400 years, our ancestors have survived brutal slavery, lynchings, degrading racial segregation, fire-bombings, the theft of labor, land, and life. We’ve lived with public humiliation and private trauma. Countless times we’ve been reclassified, redefined, and renamed: slave, negro, colored, mulatto, quadroon, griffe, octoroon, Negroid, etc.   

Even our attempts at self-definition—Afro-American, Black American—reflect a long wrestling with God’s perennial question: What is your name? We cannot answer truthfully without confronting the forces that tried to name us something less than human.

How Identity Gets Distorted

At first glance, identity appears simple. But in a society where schools, media, politics, and culture bombard us with negative images of Black life, it is easy to lose a healthy sense of self. 

In the Garden of Eden, the serpent sought to rob Adam and Eve of their position in God’s family. In the United States, enslavers sought to rob us of our place in humanity. White supremacist culture relentlessly distorts Black personhood at its core—spiritually, morally, psychologically, and physically—it then manipulates the world into believing it is innocent.

Racism destroys self-esteem, self-respect, and hope. Its goal is dependency and division, so victims unknowingly rely on racist ideologies for direction, validation, and identity. Dr. Carter G. Woodson wrote: “If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to concern yourself with his actions.” Claude Steele confirms that repeated exposure to negative portrayals of Black people produces low self-esteem, expectations, motivation, and self-doubt. Du Bois called this psychic fracture double consciousness:

“One feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts… two warring ideals in one dark body.”

White people are simply “Americans.”  We, on the other hand, are “the other” —American enough to pay taxes and fight wars, but denied equal citizenship. Black soldiers were expected to stand and fight for our nation’s freedom, but were beaten for sitting at a lunch counter.  They recited “with liberty and justice for all,” then were lynched in their uniforms. More recently, Colin Kaepernick was labeled a traitor for kneeling against injustice, but Robert E. Lee—who fought to enslave our ancestors—was honored at the Pentagon.

Racism gaslights its victims. It turns communities against themselves and then feigns innocence.  Donna Bivens explains:

“As people of color are victimized by racism, we internalize it… we develop ideas, beliefs, actions, and behaviors that support or collude with racism.”

How often do we hear this among ourselves:

 

• “I used a Black mechanic once. Never again.”

 

• “Black banks? Girl, the ATM wasn’t even working.”

 

• “I only date light-skinned people. I want kids with good hair.”

 

• “We’re just not gifted in those areas.”

Meanwhile, similar mistakes by white professionals are dismissed as human error—not evidence that all white people are incapable. Fractured identities persist because racism distorts the mirror we look into. Dr. Franz Fanon notes that personal identity is shaped by broader cultural narratives—by the stories a society tells. As a result, the oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.

Uncritically embracing the stories of our oppressors is an act of spiritual suicide. Embracing our full identity as children of God requires a fearless examination of the narratives handed down to us as “history.” Healing begins with reclaiming the truth: we are capable, beautiful, relevant, powerful, and made in God’s image. This is not pride. It is not opposition. It is healing. It is truth-telling. It is the recovery of what was stolen.

Who are you? What’s your name? These questions are not rhetorical—they are answered in the lives of those who came before us. Each of these men and women demonstrates the truth of who we have always been: capable, inventive, courageous, and divinely created for purpose.

 

• Onesimus, an enslaved African, introduced smallpox inoculation to the colonies, saving Boston from the 1721 epidemic. It later helped Washington’s army defeat the British.

 

• Dr. Halle T. D. Johnson was the first licensed female doctor in Alabama—of any race.

 

• Dr. William J. Knox, Jr. supervised an all-white team at Columbia University working on the atomic bomb.

 

• C. R. Patterson and Sons, a Black-owned auto manufacturer, began production in 1915.  The company manufactured cars, trucks, and buses. Unfortunately, it did not survive the Great Depression.

 

• Dr. Solomon Fuller’s research undergirds our modern understanding of Alzheimer’s.

 

• Dr. Matilda A. Evans was the first Black female doctor in South Carolina. Her public-health model for Black children was adopted statewide.

 

• James Armistead, under the guise of a British spy, passed intelligence to George Washington which led to the defeat of the British at Yorktown in 1781, and our national independence.

 

• Julian Abele designed Duke University’s entire main campus, including Duke Chapel and the historic Cameron Indoor Stadium. He designed or contributed to the design of over 400 buildings, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Harvard's Widener Memorial Library.

 

• Dr. Charles Henry Turner proved that insects can hear, learn by trial and error, and that bees see in color and recognize patterns. The French naturalist Victor Cornetz later named the circling movements of ants returning to their nest tournoiement de Turner (“Turner circling”), a phenomenon based on one of Turner’s discoveries.

 

• Dr. Marie Maynard Daily disclosed the relationship between high cholesterol and clogged arteries and increased our understanding of how foods and diet affect the health of the heart and the circulatory system.

From the ironing board, to the designs for the original Ford Mustang, to life-support systems for the Apollo 13–era space suits: God continues to ask, “Who are you?”

The Power of Knowing Who You Are

Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman wrote about a powerful experience he had in Daytona Beach with his young daughters. They saw swings on a school’s playground but were not allowed to use them. The girls asked him why.

Thurman explained:

“I said, ‘It is against the law for us to use those swings, even though it is a public school. At present, only white children can play there. But it takes the state legislature, the courts, the sheriffs and policemen, the white churches, the mayors, the banks and businesses, and the majority of white people in the state of Florida – it takes all these to keep two little black girls from swinging on those swings.

“That is how important you are! Never forget, the estimate of your own importance and self-worth can be judged by how many weapons and how much power people are willing to use to control you and keep you in the place they have assigned to you. You are two very important little girls. Your presence can threaten the entire state of Florida.”

Knowing who you are—and knowing who your people have always been—is a form of liberation. It threatens white supremacy.

God’s questions echo across generations:

“Where are you?”

“What is your name?” 

We cannot answer these questions truthfully without understanding the story we come from—its pain, its glory, its struggle, and its divine resilience. A positive, truthful racial identity is not separate from our Christian identity; it strengthens it. God has always been in the business of restoring names, healing wounds, and calling people into wholeness.

To know our history is to reclaim our identity.
To reclaim our identity is to heal.
And to heal is to walk fully into the men God created us to be.

 

 

 

 

Reconnected on Purpose: How Rufus Johnson Keeps Christ at the Center of a Modern Sound by Charles Clark

 

Rufus Johnson likes to keep things simple, but there is nothing simple about the world he has built between the classroom, the studio, and the scholarship office. A gospel artist whose songs glide across genres without ever losing the message of Christ, Johnson is also a music teacher and co‑founder of a nonprofit dedicated to ushering Black students into the life‑changing experience of HBCUs.​

A “simple man” with a clear assignment

Ask who he is, and Johnson does not start with awards or streams. “I just like to get the best out of life every day,” he says. “I love music. I love God, I love my family. And I just want to…do right.” His goal is not celebrity, but consistency—pushing, growing, and “keep making this music that’s…going to bless people.”​

That commitment shapes the way he writes. Johnson leans on a Mary Poppins metaphor: his songs are the “spoonful of sugar” that helps life’s medicine go down. He wants listeners to enjoy what they hear in the car or on their commute, but also to walk away with something that heals, comforts, or corrects. Inspired by Sam Cooke’s conviction that a hit comes when you put truth “in terms that your audience can understand,” Johnson avoids unnecessary complexity and aims his lyrics straight at everyday people.​

A catalog that refuses to repeat itself

Spin through his singles—“Reconnected,” “Wait for You,” “So Good,” “Different,” “Love Me Like You Do,” “Be All Right”—and one thing is obvious: nothing sounds recycled. Tempos shift, grooves mutate, and influences range from R&B textures to hints of quartet and contemporary pop, all while staying rooted in gospel. That variety is both a creative choice and a strategic experiment. As an independent artist, Johnson is “still searching” for the signature sound that will become his calling card, and he is determined to find it honestly rather than by copying someone else’s formula.​

Independence gives him the freedom to explore. He sources loops and sounds from different producers and online libraries, humming melodies until something feels right enough to build into a fully realized track. If a song wants to lean R&B, he lets it. If it pulls toward quartet elements, he follows. There is no rigid blueprint; there is only the question, “Does this feel good, and does it say what people like me are trying to say?”

​Keeping Christ in contemporary sound

For all that sonic experimentation, Johnson is careful about one non‑negotiable: the message. In an era where some “gospel” songs can sound spiritually ambiguous, he never wants listeners to wonder whether he is talking about Jesus or a romantic “boo.” He credits that conviction in part to the generation of elders—like the clip he references of Shirley Caesar urging artists not to “take the message of Christ out of the music”—who challenged younger creatives to stay biblically grounded.​

Johnson’s response is not to retreat from modern sounds, but to inhabit them with theological clarity. He refuses to “get so far out there that the music takes a turn” into lyrics that are unbiblical or merely his own version of truth. The assignment, as he sees it, is to stay true to Scripture while making the sound “palatable for today’s listener,” whether that’s through a smooth mid‑tempo groove like “Reconnected” or a future single like “Jesus Over Everything,” which he recently recorded on the road with a simple laptop, mic, and headphones.​

“Reconnected”: DIY, deeply personal

“Reconnected,” his current single, may be Johnson’s most personal milestone so far. For the first time, he handled almost everything himself: finding an atmospheric guitar‑driven beat online from an overseas producer, reshaping it, adding drums, writing the melody and lyrics, recording all the vocals in his home studio, and even mixing the record on his own. For a veteran who had always relied on producers, releasing a fully self‑made track marked a new level of artistic confidence.​

Lyrically, “Reconnected” is a confession and a charge. Johnson wrote it out of his own tendency to get spiritually “comfortable,” losing the urgency to seek God’s face when life is running smoothly. He did not want to wait for disaster before turning back to prayer and presence, and he suspected others felt the same drift. The song, warmly received by listeners, invites believers to reconnect before crisis hits, to choose closeness with God as a lifestyle rather than a last resort.​

Building bridges beyond the mic

Music is only part of the story. Johnson is also a classroom music teacher, and like many educators, he has discovered that the job is as much about emotional intelligence as it is about content. Teaching has exposed his limits and his resilience; there are days when he can’t wait to go home, days when he has to admit a “bomb” lesson did not work, and days when he must remind himself that the most challenging students are often “screaming for help” or simply bored. Kids, he notes, will always be honest: if you’re whack, they will say so; if they love you, they will hug you and call you their favorite.​

For his students, his presence as a Black male educator carries its own quiet power. Growing up, Johnson rarely saw Black men at the front of a classroom except in PE or driver’s ed, and he remembers their names precisely because there were so few. At his current elementary school in Richmond, Virginia, he spent his first two years as the only Black male teacher in the building, and even now, with one more Black man on staff, there are only two. He treats that as a sacred responsibility, striving to be the kind of teacher students remember as kind, well‑put‑together, and consistently respectful—someone whose very existence disrupts negative stereotypes.​

KR Scholars and the HBCU pipeline

Alongside his wife, Kristen, Johnson channels that same commitment into KR Scholars, the nonprofit they co‑founded in 2020 to promote and support historically Black colleges and universities. Both are HBCU graduates, and their shared stories of campus life—community, cultural affirmation, and academic rigor—sparked a desire to make sure more students not only know about HBCUs but can afford to attend.

What began with three $500 scholarships has grown into a fully recognized nonprofit that has raised over $100,000 and awarded more than $60,000 in scholarships in just five years. KR Scholars now partners with Richmond‑area high schools on programs like HBCU Bridge, which offers college‑readiness support and brings recent HBCU freshmen back to talk candidly with current seniors about campus life, pitfalls, and possibilities. At events like their “holiday homecoming,” students share stories over food, games, and stipends, creating a feedback loop of representation and encouragement that mirrors Johnson’s impact in his own classroom.​

Between late‑night vocal sessions, weekday lesson plans, and weekend scholarship events, Rufas Johnson is quietly crafting a vocation that refuses to separate art, faith, and service. The songs may be the first thing listeners notice. But beneath the hooks and harmonies is a through line: a desire to make life’s medicine go down a little easier—and to make sure the next generation has every chance to live that life to the fullest.​