The R.E.S.T. Mixtape: A New Wineskin for Digital Formation and Spiritual Fugitives

Tamice Spencer-Helms

Hi, I’m Tamice. I’m a pastor, educator, and cultural worker who lives at the intersection of rupture and reimagination. My life’s work centers on creating spaces—both physical and digital—where people can reconnect with their sacredness, their stories, and their power. Especially those who’ve been pushed out of traditional faith spaces or never felt at home in them to begin with.

For the past twenty years, I’ve walked with folks asking big questions: Where do I belong? What do I believe? Who gets to define the sacred? Whether it’s been on college campuses, in community spaces, or through digital gatherings, I’ve tried to make room for people’s questions, grief, and joy. I know what it’s like to outgrow a theology that no longer fits, and I also know that leaving doesn’t mean losing your connection to the Divine. It might actually be how you find it again.

That journey—my own and the one I witness in others—led me to develop something I call The R.E.S.T. Mixtape. It’s the focus of my doctoral work, and it’s also a way of life. R.E.S.T. stands for:

● Radical Truth-Telling – naming what’s real, even when it’s uncomfortable

● Ethical Nonduality – moving beyond black-and-white thinking to make room for complexity and grace

● Sacred Smallness – honoring slowness, vulnerability, and the wisdom that lives in the margins

● Tethered Wisdom – staying rooted in ancestral memory, cultural creativity, and community tradition

These are the tools that helped me and so many others move through spiritual burnout and identity loss into something freer, deeper, and more whole.

The R.E.S.T. Mixtape is a kind of spiritual technology, a remix of theology, ethics, and imagination that helps people reclaim what still feels true and let go of what no longer serves. I call it Resurrection Technology.

Resurrection Technology is my way of naming the ancestral intelligence that has always helped us rise. It’s the ingenuity, faith, and refusal to give up that helped our ancestors survive slavery, colonization, and erasure. It’s the spirit that shows up in Black joy, in protest chants, in kitchen-table wisdom, and in the brilliance of first-gen students showing up every day in institutions never designed for them.

When Jesus says to Martha in John 11, “I am the resurrection,” I don’t think he meant “someday.” In that moment, Jesus relocates resurrection from the realm of eschatology to the realm of embodiment. He’s saying resurrection is not a doctrinal statement but a way of being in the world. He’s not offering a future promise to his followers; he's offering a present-tense orientation. The future is always experienced as the present. It’s not about waiting for heaven—it’s about living fully, now.

The R.E.S.T. Mixtape builds on this concept of Resurrection Technology. The framework gives it shape and form, but the ultimate truth of resurrection power is the fuel. The blueprint means nothing if the fire isn’t there. When held together, or mixtapes together, they create a roadmap for spiritual fugitives—those of us who’ve had to leave behind theologies that no longer loved us—to find our way back to something real, something liberating. This is the impulse that inspired my work in the Phygital Fellows program.

Being part of Phygital Fellows helped me realize just how vital this kind of space is. It reminded me that at the root of my tradition is a clearing—a place where people trusted the Spirit more than the system, where they listened to their gut, followed the feeling, and found freedom. That’s what I’m trying to build now: a digital clearing for today’s sacred misfits.

I’m also producing a podcast alongside this project to document the stories, practices, and spiritual technologies that often go unnamed. Because people are already practicing resurrection in their everyday lives—they just might not know what to call it yet.

So let's build a Digital Hush Harbor—a sacred, hybrid space that lives both online and in community. It’s inspired by the secret gatherings of my enslaved ancestors who met in fugitive places and carved out spaces to pray, sing, and dream outside the control of the plantation. I hope that this digital hybrid community will be a vibrant place for remixing faith and identity through music, story, ritual, and collaborative creation. And like the Hush Harbor, it will be shaped by its participants, not just consumed like content but co-created like culture.