Life & Work with Princeton Parker

Today we’d like to introduce you to Princeton Parker.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
There’s something special about childhood playtime. It’s where the corridors of our imagination exist without bounds, and we have license to roam freely. We are our most free selves because it’s easy to run around whimsically when you haven’t yet been burdened down by life’s expectations and the limitations of who society says you should or shouldn’t be. It is at childhood where we are most acquainted with ourselves, and the rest of life is merely becoming reacquainted with who we already were and then finding ways to express that to the world. This is why when asked about my story, I start with my childhood playtime. From the time I was a baby, I would play in the living room. I would hold a brush to my mouth like it was a microphone. I would open the old Disney video cassette holders, take the VHS out, and lay the open cover on the table and pretend like it was a bible. I would take a dirty t-shirt and sling it over my shoulder like it was a towel and I would spend hours marching around my parent’s coffee table preaching my little heart out, saying whatever came to mind.

My mother, Dr. Symone Starr-Parker did what many other parents of millennials did in the early 90s: she grabbed a camcorder and filmed it. She thought nothing of it because my grandfather’s brother was the pastor of our church. She assumed I was performing the same behaviors like any other kid would who had been raised in a black, pentecostal family church. This type of play continued at bath time. When left alone in the water, I would put my washcloth over the edge of the tub like I was dressing the altar table. I would put the soap there like it was the bread, and then fill up the bowl that was used to rinse my hair with water and I would hold it up like a communion cup and pretend I was serving communion. My favorite place to preach was my room. We had bunkbeds so I would take half of my stuffed animals and put them on the bottom bunk, and the other half I would put on the top bunk (because my imaginary church had a balcony). I had another church that actually had real human members. It was around the corner from where I lived…Grandma’s house. My grandparents would observe me as I preached my baby heart out in their living room, and then eventually the service moved outside, where even the neighbors would let me come across the fence and preach to them. My mom decided that maybe some socialization would tone me down a bit so she enrolled me in preschool at two and a half years old. Soon into the school year, the teacher called my mom and informed her that at recess, I would gather the kids into a circle and…you guessed it… preach to them…and they would actually sit there and listen. It was in pre-school where my mom learned that I had a keen memory. I had memorized an entire three page speech just off of one day of in-class practice with the teacher.

To stimulate that memory she began teaching me poems and speeches that I recited upon invitation at schools, churches, and even political events. Finally after giving memorized speeches for two years, I was headed to share a speech at a church called Crusaders Temple in South Los Angeles at four years old. After getting out of the car, I asked my mom: “Do I have to say what you told me to say or can I say what God told me to say?” She looked at me with that look that every mom learns at black momma school like: “Bro you’re four, what is God telling YOU to say?” She offered to the church for me to be taken off program for fear that I may go rogue from what we had practiced, but the program host declined. That night, at four years old, I preached my first public sermon about David and Goliath which at the time was my favorite biblical narrative. My second public sermon was at the church where I grew up, some months later. From there, my personal playtime had become public presentation. Three years later, I was licensed as a minister at age seven by the Church Of God in Christ denomination upon the recommendation of my first pastor, James Starr Jr who wrote my letter of recommendation shortly before he passed away.

At that point, I was in full-time ministry; preaching three to four Sundays a month across the country and I hadn’t yet finished elementary school. I continued preaching at conferences, events, and churches. I also continued sharing speeches, this time composing my own that I shared at schools, corporate events, and political spaces like the CA State Assembly Floor and even the 2000 Democratic National Convention. It was in middle school that I discovered my second love: music. I began playing drums and later started studying jazz piano. I played drums and organ at church and continued my jazz training at school. My love for the arts continued into musical theater, producing, singing and songwriting which led me to attend Hamilton High School Academy of Music. I continued music, public speaking and ministry simultaneously through high school and then college at the University of Southern California. My last year of high school unveiled another layer of my story when I was accepted to participate in a program called Disney Dreamer’s Academy hosted and sponsored by the Walt Disney World Resort. The four days spent at that program changed my life and showed me a world that could use the fullness of my gifts even outside of the environments I had previously been exposed to.

A few years later, I was invited back to serve the Dreamer’s Academy as a member of the Speakers Resource Group: the board of celebrity advisers who speak at the annual event and also pick the 100 students who come each year. My journey came full circle when in 2016, I became a full-time cast member with The Walt Disney Company, serving at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim. Outside of work, I love concerts, traveling, men’s fashion, laughing and BRUNCH. The kid who preached to his stuffed animals has preached in over 25 states and two countries and is now a young man who serves as the assistant pastor of Crusade Christian Faith Center Church in Inglewood, CA. The kid who talked to himself and grandparents in the backyard now has a podcast called Building Without A Blueprint that is listened to in over 20 countries. The kid who used to play shoeboxes like they were drums is now a young man with a single on Apple Music and Spotify. And the kid who used empty Disney video covers as his bible in playtime is now a cast member who makes magic for millions of guests and cast members as a theme-park manager, Disney speaker, and host of the annual Disney Dreamer’s Academy. To reflect on who I am today, I start with playtime because my playtime foreshadowed my purpose.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The difficulty about entering into a field of work as a child is that you start to equate what you do with who you are, and the two are not the same. It took me a while to learn who I was outside of the kid preacher and also to learn how to affirm myself even when I wasn’t achieving something. I also think having so much so early made me believe that everything: marriage, career success, a large platform were all supposed to come just as early. This led to a huge wake up call through college and into my early twenties where I had to learn to make peace with the concept of seasons.

When the base of your life is spent achieving things that garner much attention and praise, it’s easy to conflate achievement and love. I believed over time that I had to be in a constant state of achievement to be loved. I was only as valuable as my latest noteworthy accomplishment. There’s a point in the pursuit of purpose where you stop living and start trying to either over-achieve your best self or to outrun your worst self. That inner struggle combined with the pressure that comes with hypervisibility and the responsibility of ministry made it very difficult at times. The interesting part was that I did not recognize just how hard it was until I got older. While preaching young, it still felt like playtime. I was simply loving God and doing what I loved. Over time I started to process how lonely certain moments were and just how heavy the pressure felt. I also dealt with extreme insecurities. I think the funny part is that most people who observed me preaching believed that I had extremely high self-esteem of never struggled with or in my faith.

The truth, however, is that just because someone stands tall in the spotlight doesn’t mean that they didn’t limp along the way to the stage. One of the hardest things to process was the death of my first pastor. He was my Superman. He was short in stature but a giant in faith and wisdom. His voice seemed to be louder than the thunder of a North Carolina summer storm. He was fair. He was consistent. He was my first model of preaching and leadership and care. When he died, I was too young to comprehend it. Too young to realize how big it was that one of his last earthly efforts was to license me. Too young to realize that he was responsible for seeing my future clearer than anyone else around, though he wouldn’t live to see it. It was around college when I really grieved it for the first time because I really wanted my own pastor who I could talk with as I was growing into a pastor. It’s like having your first kid but your father isn’t there to talk you through it. I grieve often that I don’t have him here to walk this journey with. I hope I make him proud, and I hope he knows that he goes with me into every pulpit I set my foot in.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
While I am most known for preaching, I love to share my gifts in non-religious spaces. This is one reason that I started the Building Without A Blueprint podcast. I wanted to carve out a space for other people like me who had an idea of what they wanted to do but no explanation or step-by-step guide on how to do it. Through sermons, interviews, and conversations, I unpack real-life stories and solutions for those of us navigating a dream without instructions. I get to talk about everything from dating to social justice to trauma, to pop culture, to faith and everything in between. As a part of my work for The Walt Disney Company, I get to inspire youth across the country with workshops and mentorship, but I also get to curate internal conversations about inclusion. One of my gifts is being able to take abstract concepts in any topic (faith, history, social justice) and make them accessible in a way people can understand. This skill has proven necessary as more groups are working to begin their journey within Disney and within the world at large to learn how to be more inclusive of marginalized groups. At the end of 2020, I released my first single called “What Hasn’t Changed” that I wrote and produced. It’s a song that articulates what a hard year last year was and the pain that I think we all felt, but then it points to the hope that we find in the fact that though a lot has changed, what hasn’t changed is love. That’s our hope, and that’s our way forward. I hope when people listen to the song they feel seen, and they feel inspired to lament and celebrate in the same six minutes. This is my first single and it is the teaser of my first album called “Building Without A Blueprint” that will be released hopefully later this year.

Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
Ok, so let me get my preacher credit first: The bible (ya’ll already knew I was going to say that). Two books radically changed my life and thinking: “The Emotional Incest Syndrome” by Dr. Patricia Love and “Emotionally Healthy Spirituality” by Peter Scazerro. I’m a huge podcast listener. Patrice Washington has an incredible podcast called “Redefining Wealth”. My favorite leadership podcast is called the “Craig Groeschel” leadership podcast. There was a time period where I was relearning faith in a huge time period of personal doubt and these podcasts/people really helped me gain deeper faith or built me up as a person. Jude 3 Project Truth’s Table Podcast Thirty Minutes With The Perry’s Jonathan Sprinkles Rev Dr. Neichelle Guidry Matthew Stevenson Dharius Daniels TD Jakes I could go on and on about people. The two apps I LIVE ON are actually pretty basic: the “Notes” and “Voice Memo” apps on my phone. I’m always either processing something or hearing music in my head, so I’m on those two apps all day just getting stuff out.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: princetonparker.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/princetonparker
• Facebook: facebook.com/princetonspeaks
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAgBLt1aPDzzI9V31ld3HNw
• Other: https://youtu.be/VCpQFibw3LM