Jennifer Lauren

Last year, I shared a vision to build a multi-generational community of women helping girls achieve their potentials, using dance to develop faith and pathways to economic opportunity. Well, it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, and I feel it’s time to be bold about how God inspires my vision for a dance social enterprise.

I recently read Sho Baraka’s He Saw that it was Good, a book that explores the intersection of faith, creativity, and social justice. Baraka, a Christian hip-hop artist, encourages readers to embrace light and shadows from their identities and experiences to turn honest self-examination into works that restore the world with God’s vision of goodness.

The key questions: Why are you making, and what is your definition of good? For Christians, I think the implicit challenge is to consider if/how one’s definition of good aligns with God’s.

As a dancer, I’ve struggled to reconcile light and shadow to perform, choreograph, and teach from a place of authenticity, toward a God-inspired good.

When I was eight years old, my dance teacher recommended I perform a solo. But it was too expensive, so I was crushed, letting go of my dreams to be an “Olympic tap dance champion.”

I felt short-changed that I couldn’t challenge my limits and discover my aptitude, but more importantly, this first-world deprivation made me empathize with those who have less as I became aware of how poverty can choke potential. I also realized the magnitude of my parents’ generosity – they spent nothing on themselves so that I could become my best through a world-class education. Understanding sacrifice and the value of knowledge to achieve one’s potential moved me to start teaching and leading youth, especially through dance, which planted a vision for how to invest in under-privileged communities.

What started as a dream — light — got corrupted by a desire for validation, which I tried to correct. Over the years, I’ve had to learn and unlearn the value of competition; detach my worth from my craft; and find opportunities to imbue dance with Biblical values and practice, like generosity.

Walking with Jesus has helped me define a vision for “good” that inspires me to make with integrity, aligning my heart and hands to my faith. Now, I can answer why I create and what I think is “good” with Scriptural rigor:

I create to love and serve my neighbor in ways that will help humans flourish and experience God’s presence in a more just, united, and peaceful world.

Mark 12:30-31 | Micah 6:8 | Jeremiah 29:7 | Ephesians 4:11-13 | Philippians 4:8-9

This year, I’ve explored how to share this moral imagination through dance. 

I originally choreographed a routine to Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” to disciple students at Because Justice Matters, a Christian non-profit that builds pathways to brighter futures for girls in under-resourced communities. It was normal and safe to integrate God and dance explicitly, grounding movement in Scripture to teach girls about God’s love for them. 

When I started partnering with people with different world views, my aim shifted from evangelism to creating a dance community imbued with Christian values and practice. Love your neighbor and build a better world, with excellence — I hope my actions speak for themselves.

I’ve always debated how explicitly to express my faith, as part of my identity and a driving force for my work. I think the answer is to be like water, an element that changes shape but retains its atomic properties. Not everyone will agree or buy into the dance community I’m hoping to build, but the least I can do is to align my dream with God’s vision for “good”, bringing my whole self to serve the people around me.