We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ben White a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ben, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

My whole life has been full of risks, so they’re familiar to me! When I was a teenager, I was a pretty reckless addict. I got sober at age 19, and underwent some radical changes in my life. But the wildness in me never really tamed down.

When I first started to work in the Church scene at age 24, I tried to work in suburban settings. I tried a rural setting also. Those were some really good experiences for me, but it felt too sheltered, and too easy.

By the age of 26, I began to dip my toes into some urban ministry settings- doing non-profit and Church-related work in tougher areas. Something in me came alive in that work. Despite having grown up in a suburban setting, and being more familiar with the suburbs, a passion for tougher parts of the city began to take shape in me.

And now, at the age of 42, I’ve now been leading in an urban Church called Streetlight Community Church for the past seven years. It’s been tough. It’s been rewarding. It’s been risky. There have been plenty of moments where I have feared for my own safety and even my own life. But I have also seen people who were crazily addicted to drugs get sober. I’ve seen marriages turned around. I’ve had the opportunity to baptize homeless people and do Church gatherings out in the open on the street. I wouldn’t trade the risks I’ve taken to get to do what I do for anything!

Ben, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a kid that was raised in the suburbs by a Dad who played guitar, banjo, and bass, and who also sang, wrote, and recorded his own original music and raised me to do the same from the age of 10 on.

I got into doing a combination of non-profit work, Church ministry and music because of my background, upbringing, and passions. From 2019 until now, I’ve been more involved in creating hip hop beats, lyrics and recordings. I write and produce original music for our Church- Streetlight Community Church (go to streetlight.life to learn more), in an effort to infuse more hip hop into our worship culture. But I also work with youth in the city of Akron, Ohio to help them to write, create, produce, record, and put out their own hip hop music. We work with kids of all backgrounds whether they’re into Church or not. We give them opportunities to perform live, have rap battles, and freestyle sessions.

Streetlight Community Church is certainly a Church, but it’s not a typical, siloed sort of Church. We have a strong desire to bless the city, connect to the needs of the city, and particularly to help out those on the periphery and underground of the city.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I have been greatly impacted by the early methodologies of Jack White.

You may or may not know Jack White- but many of you do. He was the red pant wearing guitarist and singer for the band “The White Stripes”.

Jack White’s methodologies, particularly in the band “The White Stripes” intrigued me from day one. He decided, in a music industry full of people trying to over produce, over glamorize, and over sell themselves, to utilize minimalism in his craft. He used a cheap, plastic kids guitar that often went out of tune. The band only had him playing guitar and singing, and Meg White playing drums. Meg White’s drumming was basic and minimal, and he built the songs around her simplicity.

They managed to impact the world with their music, while using so little. I really feel there’s an echo of John the Baptist’s ways in it. I look at a lot of what I do this way because I serve and dwell in a community that has much fewer resources than anyone else. We don’t have the money that most Churches and ministries have, but we utilize what we do have to impact lives.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

During 2020, I felt like everything was falling apart! Many of us can probably relate!

In 2020, not only did the COVID pandemic rush into our existence like a freight train, but racial, political, emotional, mental, and psychological unrest came right along with it.

And there I found myself, a white pastor of an urban Church, who had been doing hip hop music with mostly black teenagers leading up to March of 2020. When George Floyd was killed I spoke out pretty loudly. After all, seeing him killed by a police officer brought to mind all the hip hop students that I was working with, and I saw their faces in his as he breathed his last breath. My speaking out loudly brought me a lot of flack, especially from predominantly white Christian spaces in Akron. For merely speaking against racism and police brutality towards the black community, and nothing else, I was accused of all sorts of things.

We had people in our church leave, and decimate our community during that time.

But new people were raised up and came to join us, help us, and resource us. They believed in what we are doing.

In this season, I learned the meaning of what MLK said, “The time is always right to do what is right.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://streetlight.life/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/streetlightcc
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/streetlightcc
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwVBXqHG0mI9IDm31qSLlrA

Image Credits
Kristi Watson from Power Photography