Abstract
Feminism’s contribution to homiletics so far has arguably been restricted to exploring gender difference in preaching. In 2014, however, Jennifer Copeland identified a need not merely to ‘include women “in the company of preachers” but to craft a new register for the preaching event’. This article considers what that new register might be and how it might be taught in the academy. It defines preaching as ‘the art of engaging the people of God in their shared narrative by creatively and hospitably inviting them into an exploration of biblical text, by means of which, corporately and individually, they might encounter the divine’ and proposes that in both the Church and the Academy, women’s voices are suppressed by a rationalist hegemony. For the stories of women to be heard, a new homiletic is needed, in which would-be preachers first encounter themselves, then the Bible as themselves and finally their congregation in communality. Findings of researchers in practical preaching discover that women preachers are being influenced by feminist methodology, while the teaching of preaching is not. In order to achieve a hospitable preaching space, it is proposed that the Church and the Academy work together towards a new homiletic.
Introduction
‘Jesus calls us to be fishers of men’, pronounced the preacher to a bemused congregation of baptismal visitors. The only fishing with which they had any acquaintance was solitary angling in the local lake. But more puzzling was the question of what the well-dressed woman currently occupying the lectern might mean by ‘fishing for men’. Although the speaker used words directly from the Bible (Mt. 4.19), the fact she was a woman, combined with her gendered utterance, and her congregation’s lack of biblical knowledge served only to confuse (Shercliff, 2014). Her appearance, what she said and the positional authority she assumed seemed at odds with each other. Possibly the congregation expected to hear a man speak. When a woman presented herself to do so, and perhaps because of the society in which we all now live, they expected her language to be inclusive. Standing at the lectern, the (in that church) place of power, even as a woman the speaker adopted a patriarchal style in which the preacher speaks with unquestioned authority.
The preacher that day, as on all days when women preach, communicated clearly before she even began. The very act of preaching as a woman, even in a church where it is not unusual, challenges historic assumptions; a woman preacher always steps into a space traditionally reserved for men. The response of this particular speaker was to occupy it consciously as a woman. She was not robed. She wore a bright skirt, necklace, boots, make-up.
Delivering her message in a woman’s tones, she nonetheless failed to allow a woman’s voice to be heard. Language is never neutral, and the characteristic of post-modernity is heightened awareness of the words we use (Vanhoozer, 2005: 73). When the preacher used the phrase ‘I will make you fishers of men’, the congregation likely assumed that ‘men’ meant ‘men’. Speaking as a woman to a congregation in which women sat, the speaker subsumed the discipleship of women into the masculine noun.
Delivering and expounding her phrase plain, as recorded in her particular translation of the Bible, the speaker not only assimilated women’s discipleship into that of men but also, in this instance, rendered the purpose of evangelism an increase in men. Any biblical message to women about women was lost. Worse, the fact that the Bible can speak directly to women was obscured. If it had anything to say to them, women hearers were intended to unpack and appropriate it for themselves.
This preacher, along with many other women preachers, was accommodated to male norms and expected the same of her congregants. She worked within, and colluded with, a paradigm in which women are subaltern, not overtly oppressed, but without representative voice. In so doing, she maintained the Church’s status quo, where male discipleship is the norm.
Despite standing in a physical position of authority, the words spoken by the preacher suggested that she ought not to be there. The authority of a gendered Bible drowned out anything she might have said as a woman to women. Her style of preaching accepted patriarchal authority by emulating it. The story of Jesus calling his first followers became not part of a community narrative, but a teaching point understood by the preacher to be passed on to passive hearers.
I have reflected on this incident in some depth because it illustrates how women have been rendered silent or invisible, whether in pulpit or pew, by the authority of the Church. It is of particular interest to me not only because I preach regularly, but also because I teach homiletics in the Church of England to those preparing for public ministry. I was prompted to consider how the teaching of preaching leads to the practice of it and how Church and Academy interconnect.
What I found was correlation between Church and Academy where women’s preaching is concerned. Each institution silences women’s contributions, sometimes by forcing them into an assumed model, sometimes by discounting what they say. If women are to be heard, there is a need not merely to ‘include women “in the company of preachers” but to craft a new register for the preaching event’ (Copeland, 2014: xvii). The need is not simply to continue preaching as we always have, with the caveat that women too must count, but for a redefinition of preaching and an examination of how it is taught. Academy and Church must both be enlisted in the task, working together and informing each other. Feminist homiletics is well positioned to challenge existing hegemonies and imagine things anew, to wrestle in Academy and Church with the question of how ‘formerly silenced communities find their way into speech if the predominant culture has rendered their lives “unspeakable”?’ (Graham, 2014: 198).
In this article, I will argue that a feminist approach to the teaching of homiletics requires its practitioners to adopt what Copeland terms ‘a new register’. By that, I mean a new way of thinking about the preacher, the Bible, the hearers and the context in which they come together. I will argue that ‘silenced communities’ of women can ‘find their way into speech’ if the ‘predominant culture’ in academic and practical homiletics is challenged and changed by engagement with feminist methodology.
Within my earlier analysis, I identify five characteristics that contributed to making meaning from that sermon. The preacher was a woman, dressed as a woman, with a woman’s intonation but without a woman’s ‘voice’. Her biblical interpretation maintained a male dominance. She worked within a male paradigm and adopted the position and presentation of patriarchal authority. These characteristics broadly mirror the feminist themes of embodiment and voice, biblical criticism, context and experience, and authority.
Some Definitions
To further this discussion, some definition of key terms will be required. I do not intend to offer precise, generally applicable meanings but to describe how I will use particular terms here, writing from the context of a White, European, Christian feminist who preaches and teaches others to do so.
I will take as my definition of preaching ‘the art of engaging the people of God in their shared narrative by creatively and hospitably inviting them into an exploration of biblical text, by means of which, corporately and individually, they might encounter the divine’. Preaching will therefore be the activity that takes place in the Church. I will take as my definition of homiletics the study and teaching of preaching – the activity that takes place in the Academy.
My thesis is that in each institution women’s voices might be heard by moving away from a rationalist model of homiletics to one in which alternative ways of knowing are welcomed.
Moving Away from Rationalism
‘Women are frequently required not only to justify their stories in a male-dominated institution, but also to express them in the language and thought-forms of male-dominated philosophical, psychological and religious traditions’ (Bennett, 2002: 40). Teaching and assessment of homiletics in theological training institutions privilege rationality. Learning Outcomes and Assessment Criteria alike require critical analysis and sound argument (see, for example, Common Awards modules 1347 and 2387). Because learning must be demonstrated and criteria met, the very structure of academia can be challenged as a patriarchal attempt to control and standardise learning (see Bennett and Brady, 2012). Since academic homiletics accepts a male norm, the structure of its teaching and assessment can certainly be seen as a means of requiring women preachers to share the biblical narrative in the language of male thought-forms. The privileging of reason simply confirms the ‘epistemic authority of the currently dominant groups’ (Jaggar, 2013: 495)
Academic research is also influenced by the legitimising of reason as a key criterion. Whenever it is suggested that women preach ‘differently’, the comparator is rational, propositional preaching, for the question is not always asked ‘differently from whom?’.
Rationality as a standard for preaching is equally oppressive for the congregation. The task of preaching becomes the presentation of a reasoned argument, an argument the preacher makes in order to bring the congregation to agreement with her. It therefore asserts the authority of the preacher over the congregation and reinforces the passive role of listening. A barrier is created between speaker and hearers. They are no longer ‘members together of Body of Christ’; rather, one is knowledgeable and the others naïve.
Rationalism in preaching has a further significant effect. It excises from the biblical narrative propositional truths to be presented as the definition of what the preacher already believes and the congregation must come to believe. The narrative of the people of God is concealed beneath neatly structured, well-argued doctrinal statements that become the faith of the Church and replace its story.
Finally, rationalism has one particular consequence devastating to women of faith. It presents the gospel as cerebral and makes the preacher a ‘talking head’ (Baker, 2009: 14). This is certainly to the detriment of the woman preacher, for women are always embodied in ways that men are not, and is an issue worth exploring.
Preaching as a Woman
Natural cycles ensure that women are always conscious of their bodies; ubiquitous media present women primarily as bodies; women’s bodies become the subject of political debate in ways men’s are not (e.g., discussions between the Conservative minority government in Britain, and their potential parliamentary partner, the Democratic Unionist Party, women’s bodies, and their rights to abortion, were key). Women are shaped, and judged, by gender. When a woman stands to preach, some of her congregation may assume she has nothing to say because of the body she inhabits, while others might hope for a word with which they can empathise, a distinctively woman’s word. Both assumptions are based on physicality.
Feeling themselves in treacherous waters, some borrow masculine power by hiding their bodies in androgynous robes, thus rendering their proclamation indistinct from that of men and suppressing their own woman’s voice. Not doing so, however, makes women vulnerable to body-focussed criticism. Teresa Fry Brown questioned 485 Black women preachers to explore their experiences. Among the comments on embodiment were those about appearance: ‘too much or too little make-up, too long or too short hair, too colorful or too dull dress, too low or too high shoes, too long or too shiny earrings, or too long or too red fingernails’ (Fry Brown, 2003: 13). The phenomenon is not unusual. I regularly speak with women ordinands who have been told by congregation members they will need to wear duller clothing or less make-up or lower shoes once ordained. Such occurrences stem from implicit gender bias – looking like a man is acceptable, looking like a woman is not.
When sermons, whether preached by women or men, present ‘truths’ as context-free and presuppositionless, they eradicate truths gleaned from lived experience, particularly the lived experiences of women in patriarchal cultures. While women might suspect the existence of an authentic identity for themselves within their faith, neither the Academy nor the Church does much to develop language with which they might speak of it.
Although within the Academy there exists research into women’s experiences of faith (e.g. Llewellyn, 2015; Saiving Goldstein, 1960; Slee, 2004), the findings rarely find a home in homiletics classrooms. We might know something of how women find God, experience sin and seek salvation, but in the practice of preaching, we do nothing about it. Phenomenological study does not result in practical change.
On the contrary, observation of women’s preaching might offer reason for hope. More than a quarter of a century ago, Elaine Lawless’ (1996) study of over 150 sermons and their women preachers led her to conclude the following: Although I am quite aware of the pitfalls of any suggestion that women are ‘inherently’ one way or another or that they are ‘essentially’ prone to collaboration and community, I am prepared to argue that women’s lives and experiences, their roles within the sociopolitical and domestic spheres of their worlds, their interaction with one another, and their private and collective explorations of who God is and how God is revealed, make them conscious of the importance of such concepts as community, connectedness, collaboration, inclusiveness, diversity, empathy and love in ways that critically inform their lives and their ministries. (p. 155)
Lawless identified from observation significant changes in the pattern of women’s preaching. There were signs that women’s concerns were challenging existing norms, and feminist principles, centred around communality, were being incorporated into practice. Feminist homileticians need now to explore how these principles can be handed on to the next generation of preachers, rather than hoping they might develop purely by chance.
The pre-eminence of masculine language and thought-forms results not only in the marginalisation of women’s faith experiences but also in the contortion of God’s self-revelation so that it fits only a male mould. Elimination of the feminine leads to the eclipse of a full revelation of God. God becomes male, male becomes god and women’s place in the narrative of God’s people is further diminished.
I have already spoken of the way in which the rationalist handling of Scripture obscures women’s voices. Based on evidential reasoning, much teaching in the homiletics classroom proposes as its normative model an exegesis-sermon model. Where a teaching point is identified from the passage under consideration, it is often presented as unassailably true. The effects of this interpretation on subaltern groups are ignored. The voices of women within the biblical narrative are lost (and they are rare – only 49 named women speak in the whole Bible; Hardin Freeman, 2014). The voices of those oppressed by the passage are ignored. If a critical voice is raised, it is challenged on the basis that it is not ‘biblical’ (Perrin, 2016). Almost irrespective of what is learned in Biblical Studies classes, would-be preachers handle the Bible as though it is self-evidentially true and beyond critique.
Even where a preacher is willing to handle a text more critically, opportunities to do so are few. The Church of England lectionary does not present to its followers readings from the whole Bible, and often the texts which are missed include the stories of women.
A decade ago, Susan Durber (2007) wrote that ‘there is, neither in the Academy nor in the Church, very much considered reflection about preaching, let alone preaching and gender’ (p. 2). I am not sure that this remains the case. However, it does seem possible that the means by which theological studies are divided within the Academy contributes to women’s voices being unheard. The distinctiveness of women’s voices discerned in studies of spirituality or biblical interpretation has not commanded attention in homiletics. The discipline exists in a ‘dysconscious’ environment, where an uncritical attitude of mind largely accepts the status quo.
Similarly, the Church context too is largely uncritical, yet freighted with normative assumptions. Influenced by Greek gendered understandings, in which what is male is reasonable and ordered, while what is female is bodily, passionate and chaotic (Beattie, 2007: 127), preachers and congregations inside the Church expect sermons to be well-argued presentations of doctrinal statements.
Yet, while promoting privileged preaching, Church and Academy exist in a postmodern culture, bemoaned by some for its scepticism about authority (Brueggemann, 2010). While the Church practises preaching as a cerebral activity, post-modernity is aware of ‘situatedness: in a body, in culture, in tradition, in language’ (Vanhoozer, 2005: 73). Here is another disconnection between the Christian religion and the surrounding culture that feminist methodology can help to address.
I want to finally consider how patriarchal authority in Church and Academy has silenced women’s contributions to homiletics. The Church has, historically, enjoyed the authority to determine the canon of Scripture. It has done so by means of flawed processes, for decision makers influenced not only what was to be included, but what was subsequently to be regarded as true. In a cyclical process, what is then true determines who has authority. ‘The canon is fixed, the creeds are composed, and the tradition is transmitted by those with “authority”’ (Copeland, 2014: 22). Despite a growing acceptance of women’s preaching ministry, male predominance is established because the source of authority has already been rendered male.
Similarly, in the Academy (by which I mean the institutions in which homiletics is taught), authoritative voices are male. Among texts commended to Anglican ordinands, Craddock (1985), Buttrick (1987) and Long (2011) predominate. While they do offer space which alert educators might exploit, opportunities to consider women’s contributions are obscure. Lived experience is key to Craddock’s (1985) homiletic, and his assertion that ‘one cannot separate what one hears in a sermon from the one who delivers it’ (p. 84) is liberating, although women’s distinctive contribution is not made apparent. Similarly, Buttrick (1987) points to ‘orientation’ as essential to preaching, but does not deal with orientation of gender. Despite the fact that Long, a third primary source for homiletic thought, speaks of ‘bearing witness’, he also fails to explore ‘how proclamation is enriched and enlarged by the voices of women’ (Copeland, 2014: 34).
The problem in the Academy is predominantly dysconsciousness, an almost complete lack of awareness of gender bias in what is said. An example of this comes from Stephen Wright (2010), and relates to the literal voice. ‘Undoubtedly an inherited cultural bias against women having prominent public positions, not least preaching, continues . . . in many settings today’. Both women and men ‘need to work at countering’ this if ‘communication by women is to be received as effectively as that of men’. However, he says, ‘if a woman does have a quiet voice and is uncomfortable proclaiming a message from a high pulpit in a large church’ yet has a clear call from God ‘would it not be better for both preacher and listeners to create spaces within the life of that church where she could feel at home . . . rather than squeezing her ministry into an alien shape?’ (Wright, 2010: location 2131). What is to happen to men whose voices are not loud or who are intimidated by high pulpits and large churches? Such preachers apparently either do not exist or are deemed irrelevant to the argument. The implication is that women must either fit in or duck out. Here too, ‘the tradition is transmitted by those with “authority”’.
Towards a New Homiletic
I have established that women are marginalised in the Academy by the separation of areas in which they are heard from the homiletics classroom, and the imposition of unstoried norms in the teaching and assessment of preaching, and that they are silenced in the church by their embodiment and responses to it, by normative biblical interpretation and by the imposition of male authority. Each of these obstructs homiletics as the study and teaching of preachers in the art of engaging the people of God in their shared narrative by creatively and hospitably inviting them into an exploration of a biblical text, by means of which, corporately and individually, they might encounter the divine.
I want now to explore feminist classroom practices that might liberate academic homiletics to fulfil the role I have suggested for it.
My key move is away from rationalist preaching to sermon construction that builds a community of faith. It will already be clear that the new homiletic I propose has little in common with the privileged preacher model, in which the Word of God is disseminated by God’s chosen instrument to God’s people. In my proposed model, preachers bring into the sermon space three elements: their own experiences of life and faith, as influencers of their biblical interpretation; the Bible, as the book of the community; members of the community of faith, who witnessed biblical events, have influenced biblical interpretation through history or who will witness and interpret the particular sermon as part of a distinct community.
In the classroom, homiletics would now begin with self-awareness – the consideration not only of how ‘this woman’ comes to ‘this text’, but her narrative, and how it has determined her approach to the text. The next phase would be to consider ‘this text’, moving towards a contextual form of homiletics in which the text has meaning first in the life of the preacher and then as part of the overall narrative of God and God’s people. Finally, homiletics would focus on how ‘this’ woman might invite into ‘this’ text ‘this’ congregation.
Self-awareness is already understood as part of theology and practice (Brown, 2014: 113). Its inclusion in homiletics will mean beginning not from the realisation that no reader comes to the Bible in a vacuum, and beyond attending to ‘real women in the real world’ (Bennett, 2002: 97) to awareness of the preacher’s own positionality, thus rejecting the assumed objectivity of much exegesis. A female preacher should consciously be a ‘detective of divinity’ so that her own daily life is a source of theological reflection, living a ‘preaching life’ (Brown Taylor, 2013). By learning to tell her own story, the woman preacher can make ‘explicit and visible’ the story of at least one woman’s life ‘to validate their experience’ (Llewellyn, 2015: 51). This is not to essentialise one woman’s experiences, but to build community with her hearers beginning with her own narrative.
We define, reveal and identify ourselves, through narrative. Recognising and re-telling our own narrative is not simply a way of being known; therefore, it is also a way of knowing ourselves (Stoddard, 2014: location 207). Would-be preachers need, in the classroom, to learn to tell their stories, for the sake of learning good practice and also as a means of opening opportunities for growth.
In addition, of course, women preachers need to recount their own narratives in order that they recognise how they come to the Bible. Each passage they hope to explore with a congregation already has a context in their own lives; they do not approach from a position of sterility, but one fraught with ‘biases, blindspots and partial views’ (Bennett, 2013: 90).
It is having recognised these biases and blindspots that a woman can authentically approach Bible reading and preaching. On the basis of lived experience, the text can be interrogated, problems identified and light shed on new meaning. In this approach, the Bible is no longer handled as a normalising text, and its accumulated androcentricity is dispelled. Rather than treat the Bible as a self-authenticating document, in the hands of a self-aware preacher it becomes a living narrative with which its readers interact and of which they are a part. The role of the preacher is not to propose ‘biblical truth’ to their congregation, but to be biblically truthful. The core task of preaching is no longer ‘“getting something said”; it is not even “getting something heard”; it is getting something experienced that can transform your life for God and the gospel’ (Sweet, 2014: 46).
The Bible’s own biases and blindspots will also need investigation. Often the question might be not ‘who is speaking?’ but ‘who is not?’. Students will learn to read the Bible not as a mere window into the world, nor as a lens through which to see but as an ongoing conversation between text, preacher and congregation. In a distinct turn away from traditional exegesis, would-be preachers learn to ask not about what the original author intended, but how they sought to relate to the community of which they were a part – human and divine.
Having approached the text as herself, and allowed her experience to be the lens through which she views and examines it, the woman preacher arrives at the task of creating from it a hospitable space into which she can invite her congregation. How might she liberate her text and her congregants from ‘patriarchal myth-making’ (Graham, 2014: 201)? Her task is to learn a language that might speak of a woman’s experience, and in doing so, to model to others how it might be done. Her purpose is to invite all the people of God, including those most often marginalised, into their own narrative. Key to liberating the text, and its hearers, will be reading each passage within the context of the whole Bible. My feminist interpretation assumes the central biblical message to be human liberation.
At this stage, sermon preparation moves on from the preacher’s own encounter with the text to consideration of women’s experience. Without essentialising, there is sufficient commonality among those who live in a world where violence against them is tolerated and where their stories are not heard to engender ‘common language’ (Stevenson-Moessner and Snorton, 2009). In terms of faith, much has been done to uncover what is common among women. In skillful preaching, this can be employed to build communality not only between preacher and hearers but with biblical women too.
Here, the practice of preaching for women should turn to the Academy. The work of Valerie Saiving (1960), Nicola Slee (2004) and others provides more than commentary on how sin, salvation and God are manifest in women’s lives. They provide analyses useful to preachers in creating plausible sermons and checking their biblical interpretation. If ‘the temptations of woman as woman are not the same as the temptations of man as man’ (Saiving, 1960), then what a woman says from the pulpit about sin must not be the same either. When a woman preaches as a woman, informed by the stories of other women, she demonstrates that she has heard the voices of the oppressed and challenges the dominance of male expressions of faith.
In homiletics, such preaching might be encouraged by appeal to justice. The need for women to preach as women might be expounded as an act of integrity by considering the idea that ‘we empower one another by hearing the other to speech. We empower the disinherited, the outsider’ (Morton, 1985: 127). Subaltern voices are able to challenge the dominant narrative by telling their stories, in ways that are not possible if argument is engaged along lines established by the dominant. Marginalised voices are provided to an audience when their story is told. Experience of debate with many ordinands convinces me that part of a good homiletics course will make plain the need for gender justice.
In order to gain a hearing, the narrative needs to be creatively shared. In the new homiletics classroom, work of imagination will be needed that is not required in propositional preaching. The scene is to be set, the sermon space made hospitable, the ‘sacred text’ opened in such a way that its hearers might walk ‘around in the wild places exploring all that can be experienced there’ (Walton, 2007: 169). Narrative preaching convinces not by argument but through lifelikeness, and it will need to be informed by empathy, the work of imagining oneself into the place of another.
Working imaginatively and accepting a multiplicity of stories means challenging the academic hierarchy in which rationalism and coherence are privileged at the expense of located experience. It will require wrestling with Althaus-Reid’s (2000) question ‘what is so wrong with being incoherent . . .?’ (p. 24) and becoming confident to live with ambivalence.
Here, a valued characteristic of preaching is challenged. Both in the homiletics classroom and often among congregation members, relevance is prized. The gleaning of practical instruction from a biblical text, applied to the presumed lives of hearers by an all-knowing preacher, is esteemed. Ambiguity about a text’s meaning is overcome by practical interpretation. Based on the ability of a preacher to make direct links between the biblical text and the lives of the congregation – ‘if the Bible says this, then you must . . .’ – relevance is defended as a way of engaging hearers. It is, however, just as likely to interrupt communication as to facilitate it. It is, after all, a means of imposing the authority of the preacher. And if their assumptions prove false, their specific teaching points break down, and the whole sermon is rendered suspect.
Relevance encourages individualism, in the sermon by seeking application to the practices of individual Christians and in the congregation by segregating those who perceive its pertinence and those who do not. In homiletics, as elsewhere, communality will be built by avoiding individualism and essentialism and creating ‘community [that] does not bond through the unification of individuals based on similarity, but through the differences between the individual and other, and the ethical commitment required to allow and welcome one another into community’ (Llewellyn, 2015: 61). In preaching, whether in development or practice, new possibilities can be explored through a commitment to community. A feminist pedagogy will resist simplistic binaries in favour of asserting the importance of perspective and lived experience, understanding them as contextualised and bound to power structures.
An alternative to relevance is resonance. Resonance is akin to throwing a pebble into a pond. It opens space and makes an initial impact, but continues its work as ripples of meaning relentlessly head to shore, causing transformation as they go. Once released, resonant sermons are unstoppable, reaching beyond the margins and transcending context. They are based on lived experience, personal or corporate narrative. They demand creative imagination and solicitous language. It is not enough for a resonant preacher to say something, she must say it well. So ‘imagination needs to be part of the cargo of the preaching curriculum’ (Bruce, 2015: 156). Not imagination based on fantasy, but empathetic imagination deeply rooted in the real experience of preacher and hearers.
The context of the sermon has now changed. The preacher does not come as one in authority to dispense to the congregation truths of which they have thus far been unaware; rather, she is involved in the story, giving voice to some participants while challenging others. The Bible is not presented as ungendered, unassailable doctrine; it is the living narrative of the community by which people can live by faith. The congregation is no longer passive recipient, but partners with the preacher to make meaning at the interface of multiple stories. As a result, the locus of authority has shifted. It no longer lies with rationalism or patriarchy, but in the community of faith itself, working out collective, contextual meaning.
Preaching as Shared Narrative
Authority based on the community of faith will challenge all hierarchical structures, not only patriarchal ones. Communality resists hierarchy altogether by seeking shared practices that will facilitate deep connections among people of faith, between them and their narrative and the community and God. The task of the preacher is to create a hospitable space in which a community is formed to work with a particular text at a given time. Within this space, there will be room for individuality and commonality. Transforming encounters with God will be made possible for individuals and the congregation.
Such a community can only be built on a basis of mutual trust. Often sermons do include my proposed sermon partners – the preacher, the Bible and the congregation. Rather than build community, however, the preacher joins with the text (or their interpretation of it) to chastise the congregation. Such preaching does not engender the kind of mutual trust in which there is room for all stories.
Since it is most often the preacher who assumes the authoritarian role, it is they who must earn the trust of their hearers. A significant means by which a preacher might do this is allowing themselves to be known, moving away from a stance of objectivity to one of vulnerability.
The characteristics I have identified thus far are a move away from rationalism in both Academy and Church; engagement with self-awareness as an embodied person and as a sharer of ‘women’s experience’; critical engagement with the Bible as living narrative; and challenging patriarchal dominance. I have proposed that the sermon become a hospitable space, created by the preacher, in which the congregation work in communality to make meaning for their faith lives and to encounter God.
Further research work is needed to identify how such preaching might be developed, particularly how the gaps between Academy and Church might be bridged. Primary areas for research would be how a preacher might make a sermon a hospitable space and how a ‘sermon community’ might be created. Most significantly, for the discipline of homiletics, research will be needed into how such preaching might be assessed. A final thesis would propose how Academy and Church might collaborate to teach, and assess, a homiletic that might equip such preachers.
Conclusion
I began by recounting the experience of a sermon that had noticeably failed to communicate and exploring the reasons why. I concluded that a new register for preaching is needed. This led me to consider the interface of Church and Academy, and how they might work together to give voice to ‘formerly silenced communities’. I defined the practice of preaching as ‘the art of engaging the people of God in their shared narrative by creatively and hospitably inviting them into an exploration of biblical text, by means of which, corporately and individually, they might encounter the divine’. A briefer definition would be that preaching is speaking of God and God’s people. I defined homiletics as the ‘study and teaching of preaching’.
Engagement with feminist methodologies is essential to the work proposed in this article. They value lived experience as a source of meaning and communality as a means of resisting male dominance. They embrace the work of reading the Bible critically and seek to redeem its central message of liberation from oppressive patriarchy.
Jennifer Copeland (2014), whose work inspired the title and work of this article, concluded her book with the following conviction: men do not have the power to transform the preaching paradigm. Power is less about control and dominion and more about the capacity to produce change. Those on the margins – in this case women – bring the transformational potential with them and offer it to those in the center. (p. 133)
The challenge of this article, and the research it proposes, is to consider how teachers of preaching might develop women preachers whose sermons are resonant and liberative, charged with understanding of women’s experience and woman-focused reading of Scripture. Ultimately, its challenge is in seeking to make sermons that create new spaces for imagination and transformation, where the community explores its narrative and encounters God.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.