I am Rev. Dr. Renée Bradford

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For thirty-two years, I have given my life to one conviction: that every member of the body of Christ is gifted and called to something unique and purposeful, and that the church's work is to help them live that calling fully and authentically, in the sanctuary and far beyond it.

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My own purposeful calling found me before I found language for it. It has taken the shape of two church plants in Ohio and North Carolina, nearly two decades of administrative and executive ministry at Mount Carmel Baptist Church here in Charlotte, and a daily digital gathering, The Lemonade Stand, that has carried Scripture, contemplative practice, and honest community across continents for five years running. Different rooms, different seasons, same thread: equipping people to change and know who they are and to walk in it, with authenticity.

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Formed by Mentors, Grounded in Scripture

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I did not arrive at this work by my own design. Christ called me, and everything since has flowed from that call. But I was also shaped by my elders in specific, unrepeatable ways. Rev. Dr. Otis Moss Jr., under whom I served as his first intern, taught me the weight and the gift of pastoral presence: what it means to simply stay in the room with someone. Rev. Dr. Prathia Hall taught me to preach as though the Gospel is actually good news for the poor, the captive, and the oppressed. Dr. Myles Munroe taught me to pursue purpose as a life-long discipline. Rev. Dr. Gregory Ballard Sr., under whom I served in team ministry, taught me what it looks like to build something with others rather than alone. Rev. Dr. Casey R. Kimbrough, my Pastor and supervisor of eighteen years, has shown me what it means to offer a culture of care that meets people inside their humanity rather than asking them to leave it at the door.​​​

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​I carry that formation into everything I do now: as Executive Minister at Mount Carmel Baptist Church, as President of the Ministers Council for Area III of the American Baptist Churches of the South (ABCOTS), where I walk alongside pastors across 67 congregations, and as founder of Change and Know, my contemplative leadership practice.

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A Notebook and an Open Door

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I was an M.Div. student then, serving as a research assistant in the D.Min. office, when I first carried a stenographer's notebook full of notes from an urban church course taught by Drs. Daryl and Vanessa Ward. The class was shaping an idea we called City Bridges, reconciliation work that connected businesses, congregations, and the dispossessed, not in a straight line from giver to receiver, but in a circle where everyone brought something and everyone needed something. Between sessions one day, I gathered my courage and slipped into an empty office to ask Dr. Otis Moss Jr., who was serving as a Proctor for the D.Min. program, what he thought of the idea still forming in my notebook. He didn't just answer the question. He said, "You should come and be my intern at Olivet this summer."

 

That summer changed how I understood ministry's reach. I sat at tables where plans for the Otis Moss Medical Center took shape. I walked land where a mall site, congregations, and a city collaboration were being woven together into something that would eventually mean gainful employment for people the city had otherwise written off. I preached from that pulpit. I married a young couple there, standing where I had once only imagined standing, and I received a blessing I still have a photograph of.

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I did not earn that pulpit or that blessing. They were given, the way calling itself is given, and I have spent the years since living out that trust.

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The Holy Hill Framework

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Much of my leadership, teaching, and coaching moves through what I call the Holy Hill Framework, drawn from Psalm 15: Lord, who may dwell in Your sacred tent? Who may live on Your holy hill? It is a framework for integrity, for leaders and congregations who want to walk blamelessly, deal truthfully, and keep their word, even when it costs them. I don't offer it as a program to complete. I offer it as a way of walking that I have tested in the pulpit, with families in crisis, and in the ordinary work of building up a people in the context of community.

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A Scholar in Service of the Work

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In 2026, I completed my PhD in Leadership and Change at Antioch University. My dissertation, Building a Digital Altar for the Justice-Centered Torch-Bearers, asked a simple question with a complicated answer: what do racial justice activists actually need to sustain their work in digital spaces? The research confirmed something I already believed in my bones: that trust and relationship matter more than any platform or technology, and that contemplative practice is what keeps people whole enough to stay in the work for the long haul. That conviction shapes everything I build, online and in person.

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What shaped that dissertation began before the George Floyd uprisings themselves. In April, in the middle of my ILA-B, a program milestone where Dr. Moss was present as my mentor, he called me one morning and asked if I knew what day it was. It was the anniversary of Dr. King's assassination. He landed on one sentence I still have not set down: "If we had just paused." Weeks later, George Floyd was killed, and the uprisings began. I already had Dr. Moss's words sitting within me, and when the unrest broke open, I responded not with a plan but with Redeem the 10, ten-minute contemplative segments I began broadcasting live on Facebook with friends, artists, and fellow contemplatives. Until then, my path had seemed clear. I was moving toward consulting work in financial literacy for women and girls. That spring turned my research, and my life, toward ground I had not planned to stand on.

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Beyond the Pulpit

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I am, by nature, deeply introverted, and unscheduled time is protected time. A good Saturday usually means the farmers market, a jazz outing, or a run on the greenway. The rest of the day is centered on time creating memories with my husband Lovell, our children FaJhenée, Lovell Jr., and Seth, with our pup Rudy close by. I'll admit to being something of a foodie, so those market trips are rarely just about produce. Most people who know me from the pulpit or the page would not guess that I also curate timeless fashion, a love I get to indulge on Hey Good People, my YouTube channel, where thrifted finds and community spaces meet.

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Who I Walk Alongside

 

Change is not optional. It comes whether we invite it or not, in a diagnosis, a calling, a loss, a door closing. What I offer is not a way around it, but a way through it. I work with pastors navigating change they didn't choose. With leaders discerning a call they can't quite name yet. With congregations trying to remember their own story honestly enough to imagine their future faithfully. What The Lemonade Stand and my own research have taught me holds just as true for caregivers tending someone else's crisis, for those in the middle of a transition they can't yet see the other side of, and for everyone I have accompanied over these thirty-two years, in hospital rooms, at gravesides, and in the ordinary Tuesdays of a life being remade.

 

You may not yet have words for what's stirring in you. You don't need them to begin. This is where you come to change and know, to invite God into the becoming before you can name it. I'd be honored to walk with you.

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