Browsing by Subject "Homiletics"

A history of white supremacist ideology has long shaped white evangelical churches and their theology. This has never been more apparent since the election of Donald Trump and the response to the protests after the murder of George Floyd. Amid the racial reckoning in the summer of 2020, white evangelical preachers sought to address race, racism, and racial justice. This thesis aims to articulate theological resources and homiletical strategies for white evangelical churches as they address racial injustice from the pulpit. Specifically, two predominately white evangelical churches in San Diego, which have a stated belief in and pursuit of racial justice, are studied, and the six sermons after the death of George Floyd are analyzed. The study and analysis of Park Hill Church and All People’s Church are placed in conversation with present antiracist scholarship. Examination of antiracist discussions will illuminate the homiletics of these two churches and lead to practical theological insights and biblical hermeneutics that pursue an antiracist imagination. This thesis concludes by suggesting three biblical passages, Amos 2, Matthew 15, and Acts 15, as biblical companions for imagining antiracist homiletics.

Some recent trends in homiletics have begun to move beyond postmodern questions to postcolonial questions. One primary concern shared among many contemporary homileticians, and especially articulated by postcolonial homileticians, is “relationality.” How can diverse peoples with diverse histories interacting through a variety of power dynamics truly relate to one another? How can those people relate to God and God’s word, especially as God’s word is proclaimed through preaching by a human being who is caught up in those power dynamics? These questions touch on the relationality of bodies, minds, and teaching; they explore anthropology, epistemology, and practical theology. However, the issues at the heart of relationality are not new. This thesis explores the homiletical theory and practice of St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), with a view toward how Augustine anticipates some of the core questions of relationality raised in the 21st century. The first chapter synthesizes contemporary questions of relationality and suggests why Augustine is an apt conversation partner for these questions. The body of the thesis (chs. 2—4) focuses on a close reading of Augustine’s treatise, De Doctrina Christiana, and select sermons, through the lenses of the questions synthesized in ch. 1. The final chapter brings the insights gained from chs. 2—4 back into conversation with three contemporary sermons, each preached by a postcolonial homiletician. By setting Augustine’s sermons alongside contemporary sermons, this thesis seeks to show that there is much to draw on in the historic Christian tradition to help answer contemporary homiletical questions. Ultimately, it will be argued that Augustine’s way of interweaving various characteristics of bodies, minds, and teaching and his crucial reliance on the Holy Spirit to hold together the overflowing and intermingling relational dynamics of the preaching event outline a way of preaching relationally in both the 5th and the 21st centuries.

This thesis looks to Peter as a model of witnessing to Christ through the act of preaching. Its primary material are the speeches delivered immediately after the arrival of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2, 3, 4, and 5. A study of the similarities those speeches reveals the basic components of Peter’s model: the involvement of the Holy Spirit; building the sermon on recent miraculous events; presenting a clear, concise, and consistent version of the kerygma; making use of Scripture as evidence; and finishing with a call to response. To apply Peter’s model to a mainline Protestant pulpit, the author utilized her observations in the preparation and delivery of a Christmas Eve sermon. The effectiveness of that application was measured through an anonymous follow-up survey and a comparison of January attendance with the previous year, as well as the author’s own impressions. Although the application of Peter’s model did not translate into a miraculous increase in attendance, the survey responses and the author’s positive experience indicated that it is both possible and beneficial to follow Peter’s example in contemporary preaching.

The Hispanic Protestant population of the United States has grown dramatically in recent decades, yet scholars have paid little if any attention to the preachers or the preaching within Hispanic Protestant congregations. The thesis of this project is that the unique transnational experiences, immigration stories, bicultural identities, and contextual hardships of Hispanic preachers actually shape their calling, praxis, and proclamation in significant ways. The primary methodology employed within this dissertation is collaborative ethnography as described by Luke Eric Lassiter in The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. This study involved a multiyear period of participant-observation as well as several rounds of interviews and focus group sessions with twenty-four individual subjects engaged in preaching ministries within Hispanic Protestant congregations.

This dissertation highlights the ways in which the sermons of Hispanic Protestant preachers who are recent immigrants echo the particular concerns of immigrant communities while also focusing strongly on the importance of spiritual conversion. It also demonstrates the role of testimony and the power of the preaching platform for female preachers within this demographic. My collaborators revealed, through their stories and proclamation, the incredible homiletical importance of the preacher’s ability to understand and to speak from within the culture of his or her congregation. This bears significant implications for the way in which future ministers engage in both vocational discernment and theological education. It also highlights the encouraging possibilities of ethnography for pastoral practice. Furthermore, the practice of the collaborators featured in this dissertation reveals the sustaining power of preaching within marginalized communities. Finally, the aims of the predicadores involved in this work reveal their hopes for the future of their congregations, which do not easily fit within the typical categories assigned to them in sociological analyses.

Out of the crucible of racism, pain, dehumanization, subjugation, marginalization, discrimination, enslavement, and death inflicted upon Black bodies, Black persons responded with a hermeneutic of freedom and prophetic proclamation in the North American context. Amidst a death-dealing system of oppression and chattel slavery, Black persons through proclamation—sermons, stories, songs, spirituals, modes of worship, words, lived experiences, and embodied acts of resistance—utilized their faith to challenge the heresy of white supremacy. Black religion and spirituality were conceived and birthed in response to existential pain, suffering and death. Black religion and the Black Church were rooted in a proclamation that not only utilized Christianity in the West, but also refashioned it in order to liberate the mind, body, and soul of Black people from the pangs of unwarranted death – prophetic proclamation.

Undoubtedly, today, in a nation that is scorched by hate, systemic oppression, and injustice, the Black Church of the 21st century is in dire need to recover its ministry of prophetic proclamation in the face of death and evil powers. Although the Black Church’s conception is formed out of prophetic proclamation and resistance to perpetual crisis and death, a number of Black congregations have forgotten the history and tradition of the Black Church. Messages of prosperity have seemingly replaced prophetic proclamation. In this project, I suggest that the survival of the Black Church hangs on the tradition of prophetic proclamation. I suggest that the Black Church will only survive if its mission and ministry are rooted in addressing and responding to the pervasive reality of death inflicted upon Black bodies through varying forms of prophetic proclamation as seen through resistance in the Middle Passage to the modern-day Black Lives Matter Movement.

Given the monumental changes brought about by the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, and the continual and perpetual threat of death and oppression upon the Black body in today’s society, the Black Church has been forced to explore ‘church’ in a different way – beyond the four walls of a church building. This new reality shows the Black Church that we must embrace the fluidity and intricacy of proclamation which moves from traditional, pulpit-centered discourse to diverse, enlivened, and embodied discourse which will ultimately transform the lives of Black peoples.

Popular expressions of contemporary Christianity emphasize a version of the faith is not a religion, but a relationship. What would such a statement mean for people on the autism spectrum whose diagnosis in DSM-5 describes their kind of relating with words like disability, deficiency, and disorder? Are they to be considered disabled in their ability to relate to God? The answer is no. By first identifying the way that projection is at play in our phenomenology of relationships, this project takes the diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder found in DSM-5 and locates examples where the Bible witnesses to God behaving in a similar manner. This overlap of neurodiverse relational patterns and divine conduct does two things: First, it provides an opportunity for people on the spectrum to find their kind of relating in the God of the Bible. Second, it expands the palette of language and metaphor the church can draw upon to describe how people relate to God and how God relates to people. The final chapter includes captured learnings and examples for how a work like this can be implemented in parish ministry. In all this, autism reveals both where our relational theology is insufficient, as well as where new avenues of Christian faithfulness lie.

Popular expressions of contemporary Christianity emphasize a version of the faith is not a religion, but a relationship. What would such a statement mean for people on the autism spectrum whose diagnosis in DSM-5 describes their kind of relating with words like disability, deficiency, and disorder? Are they to be considered disabled in their ability to relate to God? The answer is no. By first identifying the way that projection is at play in our phenomenology of relationships, this project takes the diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder found in DSM-5 and locates examples where the Bible witnesses to God behaving in a similar manner. This overlap of neurodiverse relational patterns and divine conduct does two things: First, it provides an opportunity for people on the spectrum to find their kind of relating in the God of the Bible. Second, it expands the palette of language and metaphor the church can draw upon to describe how people relate to God and how God relates to people. The final chapter includes captured learnings and examples for how a work like this can be implemented in parish ministry. In all this, autism reveals both where our relational theology is insufficient, as well as where new avenues of Christian faithfulness lie.