I don’t like how we’ve normalized the phrase “On Foe and ’Nem.”
I come from an era when that wasn’t just slang it was an oath. Something only 4 Corner Hustlers could say. Just like every organization had its own oath:
“On the Fin” – Vice Lords
“On Folks” – GDs
“On King David” – BDs
These weren’t things you just casually said. They meant something. They came with weight, consequences, and a level of lived experience that most folks repeating them today don’t carry.
Now? You hear it everywhere. Social media. Music. Random conversations. Folks saying it with no knowledge of the streets, the history, or the pain tied to those words.
I put it in the same category as how the word “mid” has shifted. Back in my day, mid meant average mid-grade. Not great, not terrible. Now this generation uses mid like it means trash. Words are changing. Cool. But some of us remember when they carried meaning, not just momentum.
And that’s the same way I feel about our music in the Black church.
From Oath to Anthem: How We’ve Let Worship Lose Its Weight
For generations, our songs were more than melodies. They were testimonies, resistance chants, oral histories, and prayers rolled into one. They carried the freight of our collective memory and the weight of our communal witness.
But over the last decade, I’ve watched a slow cultural drift one that replaced our tradition’s deep well of worship with a borrowed stream from Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). Not all CCM is bad, but much of it doesn’t come from our story, our soil, or our struggle.
This isn’t about musical preference it’s about spiritual formation. When you sing someone else’s songs week after week, you slowly start to think someone else’s thoughts, pray someone else’s prayers, and dream someone else’s dreams. Music keeps you culturally grounded and spiritually awake. But it can also lull you into a spiritual slumber if it’s not your own.
The Maverick City Moment
When Maverick City’s manager recently made commentscomparing Gospel music to Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), it reopened a conversation that’s been simmering in Black church spaces for years: What happens when we trade the sound of our ancestors for the polished production of another culture’s worship?
We’ve been here before. I warned a decade ago that singing certain Hillsong anthems wasn’t just about taste it was about spiritual formation. Songs are not neutral. They are part of a people’s “story.” They keep you culturally grounded and spiritually awake.
The problem is not that CCM artists are talentless they’re often brilliantly skilled. The problem is that the music is born of a theological and cultural ecosystem that is not ours. CCM emerges from a largely white evangelical frame: individualistic salvation, low engagement with systemic injustice, and a polished, professional aesthetic that prizes emotional crescendos over communal lament.
In the African American church tradition, music was never just “praise and worship.” It was survival. It was code. It was theology set to a rhythm you could march to whether that march was down the aisle for altar call or down the street for justice. It carried the groans of the Middle Passage, the hush harbors of slavery, the shouted joy of Reconstruction revivals, and the righteous defiance of civil rights rallies.
Ecclesiastical Colonialism
What’s happening is bigger than Maverick City or CCM. It’s what I call ecclesiastical colonialism the subtle takeover of a people’s worship life by outside influences that reshape their theology, dilute their cultural memory, and domesticate their prophetic witness.
Colonialism doesn’t always come with chains and ships. Sometimes it comes with chord charts and projected lyrics. It comes when our choirs stop singing spirituals, when our praise teams drop call-and-response, when our congregations learn the bridges to every Bethel or Hillsong song but can’t hum I’m So Glad Jesus Lifted Me without a lyric screen.
Hananiah vs. Jeremiah
The Bible gives us a warning for this in Jeremiah 28. Hananiah the prophet tells the people what they want to hear easy victory, quick deliverance. Jeremiah, on the other hand, gives the word they need to hear that the yoke will remain until repentance comes.
Some songs are Hananiah songs. They soothe. They flatter. They fit on a playlist. Other songs are Jeremiah songs. They wound before they heal. They remind us that God is both liberator and judge, and that freedom without justice is no freedom at all.
The industry loves Hananiah songs. But the church survives on Jeremiah songs.
The Real Cost
We used to know that “On Foe and ’Nem” wasn’t just a phrase it was an oath. It meant you were bound to the truth of your people, no matter the cost. Our worship should be the same. Every song we sing ought to be an oath, not a trend rooted in the lived history of our saints, not borrowed from someone else’s playlist.
Because the day we start singing without that weight, without that memory, without that promise to hold each other accountable before God—on our mamas, on our ancestors, on our very souls, that’s the day we stop being the Black church, and start being just another echo in someone else’s sanctuary.