“We served this morning, we’re going to learn now, and later tonight we’re going to celebrate,” said Dr. Amy Bagby before Pastor Howard Brown’s lecture on MLK Day. The Porter’s Gate concert, featuring Audrey Assad and Urban Doxology, among others, was a celebration, but not a naive celebration that ignores the laments that are still so prevalent in today’s day and age. It was a battle cry, a call to remember who God is and who we are as His children in light of the battles of injustice, abuse, and so many other things that surround us.
The Porter’s Gate is a worship project that was started by Isaac and Megan Wardell in 2017. Isaac Wardell is a Covenant College graduate who also started the Christian band Bifrost Arts. The goal was to gather together people of all different backgrounds and cultures to create songs that better reflected the diversity of the church, character, and glory of God.
The term “porter” is a monastic term, used to describe a role where the bearer specifically stood at the door, or the gate, of the monastery, and watched for strangers and travelers, waiting to invite them in. The stranger and the traveler were held in incredibly high regard because of Matthew 25:40, which says: “‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” The stranger and the traveler were viewed as gifts from the Lord, and physical representations of Jesus himself. This idea is what inspired the name “The Porter’s Gate”: their goal was to write songs that welcomed the stranger and the traveler, and challenged the body of Christ to do the same.
The Porter’s Gate performance and invitation to worship were an incredible way to end MLK Day at Covenant College. Marie Bowen (‘20) described it as “...this electrifying night—this celebration, this lament, this challenge for believers to be loving and welcoming…[T]o celebrate the diversity of every member of the body was such a wonderful way to end MLK Day.”
Bowen went on to explain how the other events organized by Covenant for the day, including a service project that morning and a lecture by Pastor Howard Brown that afternoon, made her thankful for Covenant’s intentional choice to not only address the minds of those in their community, but their bodies and spirits as well. The concert was a powerful way to culminate a day of engaging all three: “We didn’t just focus on the mind, we didn’t just focus on the hands, we also focused on the spirit. It was this very full, holistic approach to the day, [and] I was thankful…to celebrate the legacy of Dr. King in that way,” Bowen remarked.
At the end of the concert, Isaac Wardell stood up and said that for the past couple of days they had been touring, they had been ending the night with the Doxology. However, he felt that, because it was MLK Day, it was only appropriate to sing a benediction written by one of the band members that was inspired by a quote from Dr. King. It was a powerful way to finish out a day of remembering Dr. King’s legacy and his mission “to make the kingdom more full here,” Bowen said. “We were so blessed by The Porter’s Gate and their music. [It was] a tangible, visible reality of what the kingdom of God really looks like, which was part of Dr. King’s message: being more fully the body of Christ and who we were meant to be, living together in community.”