Preaching for Post-Traumatic Growth and Healing: Preaching and Worship After Communal Trauma

Our knowledge of the kinds of trauma people experience and the impact that it has has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. Some margin of that knowledge has crossed over into the religious landscape, particularly about pastoral care and theology. This paper will take up the idea that preaching and, by extension, the other parts of the liturgy can be a part of reforming and healing the fractured imaginations of persons and communities who have experienced traumatic events, leading them to post-traumatic growth and thriving.My knowledge of preaching being far greater than my knowledge of trauma theory, my first priority was extensive research in that field; I studied how trauma impacts both individual bodies and whole communities, first utilizing Bessel van der Kolk and Judith Hermann, two established and well-regarded researchers. From there, I moved into source material from the medical field, finding significant intrigue in a 1688 dissertation from a medical library that was one of the first texts to describe the way traumatic events fracture imagination. Then I moved to experts in the field of preaching and worship – Will Willimon, Barbara Brown Taylor, Rick Lischer, Luke Powery, and more. It became clear that preaching is a vocation of words and imagination, and trauma’s chief impacts rob people of those very things. Thus, preachers have a critical role to play in the healing of their communities by providing shared, sacred language and a space to reintegrate broken imaginations.