Introduction
“My favorite thing is when you get us to feel something!” This was the exuberant Sunday-morning greeting of Mary “Chilli” Barlow, one of my congregation members. She was in her late eighties when she uttered those words, and I have not forgotten them. Even years later, after her death, her words remain a guidepost for my sermons. They constitute better advice than much of what is set down by mentors, colleagues, and preaching manuals. So simple: Get people to feel something. So simple, and yet so . . . challenging. Really, how does the preacher ensure the congregation not only receives but also feels the message?
Most preachers know Chilli’s words contain valuable insight. Done well, preaching engages mind and heart, soul and body. It lures people into a world of felt experience. Unfortunately, worship and preaching become solely intellectual affairs all too often. This may happen because of the preacher’s training or upbringing, neither of which made room for passion. Religious leaders may not know how to express themselves with feeling and power. In other cases, leaders may feel that passionate, emotional sermons are perfectly authentic and suitable to their style, but they find themselves preaching to unreceptive congregations. For them, shifting a resistant culture can be perplexing and frustrating. Whatever the reason, clergy may lack the resources to achieve a more passionate, embodied preaching experience. The book you hold seeks to change that.
A lack of resources does not equate to a lack of interest. Many are eager to learn how to preach with passion. My friend Robbie is a good example of this. He is a seminary student preparing for ministry with the Episcopal Church. I met him through an interfaith event, and one Sunday, he decided to attend my congregation on what happened to be Earth Day. I chose to preach on a text about creation from Genesis, linking it with our obligations to the natural world. I felt good about the service. After it came to an end, I was especially keen to welcome Robbie and thank him for coming. He greeted me with a hug and then asked enthusiastically, “How did you do that?” At first I wasn’t sure what he meant, but he quickly elaborated, “None of my preaching mentors or professors discuss how to preach with that kind of passion. It was in your whole body. It vibrated through the whole space. How did you learn to do that?”
The truth is, I didn’t always preach that way, nor was it modeled for me. I serve a Unitarian Universalist congregation and grew up in that tradition. This is a progressive denomination rooted in the Christian tradition and inclusive of multiple spiritual paths. Like many other mainline and progressive communities, the emotional temperature of the services is often kept low. Sermons are frequently thoughtful expositions rather than embodied, passionate events.
The first time I noticed this, I was twenty years old and sitting with my young-adult group in a church basement. I had recently made friends with a young woman new to the church. She was thrilled to find a congregation that had progressive values. Indeed, until she found our church, she hadn’t known such a place existed. Having grown up in a conservative Evangelical home, she quickly came to love our church’s theological openness and commitment to social justice—but she wondered about the emotional tone of the services. Her Evangelical roots included emotionally expressive worship, which meant praise music, heartfelt testimonies, and fiery sermons. More than anything else, she found it curious that we did not incorporate more emotional depth into the worship experience. In that young-adult meeting, she put it this way: “Sometimes I wonder if we are committed to our values. We can sound so intellectual—even theoretical—about them. I just wonder why we don’t have more fire on Sundays.”
Her question stuck with me. As I continued through my ministry training and found little to no information on how to preach with passion in my Unitarian Universalist context, I started to wonder if it was even possible to learn. Why were so many mainline and progressive congregations less expressive, embodied, emotional, and passionate? There seemed to be multiple barriers to doing so, both in the congregation and within my own approach to crafting sermons. It felt daunting, and indeed it was. Preaching with greater passion and emotional depth is no casual affair; it entails changing the way one selects topics, structures the sermon, understands the centrality of emotion, and attends to embodiment and delivery. It may also require changing the culture of a congregation that does not expect such animation. Many challenges arise when preachers attempt passionate expression.
Why take on these challenges? The reason is simple: Passionate preaching is powerful. It communicates one’s emotional attachments to issues and values. Passionate preaching offers more than discussion about topics held at a distance; it claims a stake in them. Done well, it invites folks to experience a felt commitment to values that is both engaging and effective. As goes the apocryphal quotation attributed to Maya Angelou, “At the end of the day, people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.” By touching an emotional center, we enter a moment with the fullness of our hearts, bodies, and minds. The message registers at multiple levels of experience; it resonates deeply and is hard to dislodge. This kind of experience produces felt conviction that leads people to change their lives and social contexts.
I am especially interested in helping progressive clergy learn to preach with passion if it is not a part of their tradition. Despite the prevalence of conservative representation in politics and media, a vibrant tradition of religious progressivism persists in the US, extending back to abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights advocates, and peace activists. This religious progressivism includes people working for LGBTQ+ protections and equal marriage; it contains antiracists, environmentalists, and death-penalty abolitionists. It folds in luminaries such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Sister Simone Campbell, and Cornel West. It follows the faithful critiques of feminist, liberationist, and queer theology. It is represented by individuals and communities within a wide range of denominations and religious traditions, including the voices of socialist Rabbi Michael Lerner, antiapartheid Muslim scholar Farid Esack, and peace activist and Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Today, this tradition is embodied in the progressive Evangelicalism of Jim Wallis and Sojourners, the liberation theologians and liberal approaches in Catholicism, and the moral fusion politics of Rev. William Barber II and the Poor People’s Campaign.
To be sure, these religious voices will not concur on all issues, nor will they necessarily claim the label of “progressive.” Sometimes they will disagree heartily with each other. Instead of rigidly defining an in-group and out-group with this term “progressive,” I find a big tent of faithful witnesses that share certain tendencies. They discover a common cause in movement and change—progress—for social betterment. They believe faith is at its best when it seeks justice for those who have been excluded. They challenge systems of domination that harm and degrade. And the taproot of their conviction is religious tradition. They draw deeply from diverse wells, including the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures, the language of the Qur’an, and the teachings of the Buddha, as well as other sources that challenge and motivate the hope for justice. It’s a big project with a long history. And for it to continue, its good news needs passionate advocates. And preachers.