Rev. Brad Davis is reimagining the rural Appalachian church. This entails imagining a new gospel – a gospel rooted in the reality before him.
Take a ride with Davis along the two-lanes that thread these Southern West Virginia coal camps – once vibrant; now vigilant – through the hollers and up the switchbacks, some so abrupt, Davis affirms, you’ll pass yourself round the bend.
Take a ride and absorb the context, here in McDowell County.
Davis has imagined, and now practices, what he calls the “holler gospel.” A holler, he explains for the uninitiated, is, in the vernacular of Central Appalachia, the hollowed-out, low-lying depression between two hills that forms a very narrow valley.
“Many of us live in these hollers,” he’s written, “which is an appropriate metaphor, I think, considering our people have been hollowed out and laid low for generations by outside exploitative forces.”
Holler gospel is “the work of transformation in communities ravaged by scarcity.”
Davis is a child of these mountains and their hollers, born and hewn in nearby Mingo County, coal mining families on both sides. He’s an ordained elder in the West Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church and ministers to the congregations of six churches here in McDowell County, a place his friend Jeff Allen, who once served here and is now executive director of the West Virginia Council of Churches, calls “a landscape of grief.”
In 1950, the population of McDowell County was right at 100,000; it’s now around 17,000.
“We are on the clock,” Davis avowed. “We are on life support.” Emergency measures are in order.
Reimagining the rural Appalachian church, Davis urges, entails “rediscovering and reinterpreting the good news on our own terms and in our own specific context” – spreading a gospel that replenishes dignity and humanity.
The words of this gospel are most fluently expressed through deed.
Recapturing Radicalism
Davis, 52, was called into the ministry relatively late in life, on Easter Sunday of 2005. The catalyst was a sermon proclaiming “there is always a new life, a resurrected life available, through Christ,” he recalled. “That resonated.” He’d worked as a journalist and, for a time, been “mixed up in the drug culture.”
“Easter Sunday was the day that my own personal resurrection began to take shape.”
He’d been raised in the Methodist church, and it remained his home. The Wesleyan tradition of the faith, he said, “is embedded in my DNA.” What spoke to him was a focus on the disenfranchised and on lifting folks out of poverty. “I refer to John Wesley as the first liberation theologian.”He received his master of divinity degree from Methodist Theological School in Ohio, where he read the works of the Latin American liberation theologians and the philosopher and theologian Howard Thurman, author of the book Jesus and the Disinherited, he which he asks, “What does Jesus have to say to those with their backs against the wall?”
Old King Coal what are we gonna do?
The mountains are gone, and so are you!
But even so, rejoice dear ones!
Let not your hearts be troubled, my people.
Do not despair.
Do not buy into the lie that there is nothing,
that we are nothing, without our king.
He is not the sum total of us and our identity.A Eulogy for King Coal by the Rev. Brad Davis
On the surface, Davis’s relatively radical reading of the scriptures seems an odd fit for rural Southern West Virginia. “We’re rooted in radicalism down here,” is his understanding.
“We’re known as the ‘Free State of McDowell,’” both for the fact that a great many Blacks were elected to public office in the early 1900s and for the independent spirit of its people, which he believes can be traced to the labor struggles of the same era.
Davis said when he first arrived, in 2022, his predecessor informed him that a prerequisite of being a true resident of McDowell County is “a middle finger in the air to everybody.”
Folks here, he noted, have been lied to. They’ve been told the coal industry will be revitalized. McDowell County went for Obama in 2008 (one of only seven of the state’s 55 counties to do so). In the past couple of general elections, it’s gone overwhelmingly Republican. But “voter turnout has been paltry, to put it mildly. People have lost faith in either party to help them.”
That spirit of independence, that radicalism, has been in decline, Davis says, “and it’s something that needs to be recaptured. And I think if we do recapture it, everything has the potential to change.”
‘A Force to Be Reckoned With’
Davis is a founder of The New Society,…
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