Rev. Dr. Teresa Fry Brown has spent a lifetime exploring that question. A powerhouse in the world of preaching and a trailblazing scholar at Emory’s Candler School of Theology, Dr. Fry Brown brings her expertise in homiletics, womanism, and even speech pathology to this conversation on what it really means to find—and own—your authentic preaching voice.
In this episode of Transforming Engagement: The Podcast, she joins host Rev. Dr. Seth Thomas to explore the delicate balance between personal authenticity, the needs of listeners, and the nuance of different contexts. How do we cultivate a preaching voice that is both deeply true to ourselves and deeply respectful of the spaces we enter? Dr. Fry Brown shares wisdom on everything from the technical aspects of vocal delivery to the spiritual and emotional demands of preaching through hardship.
And yes, we even get into why she preaches with her shoes off.
Join us for a practical and deeply inspiring conversation about preaching, presence, and the power of knowing your voice.
About This Season, “Reimagining Preaching”:
This season, we’re exploring how the church can proclaim the good news in our time by reimagining preaching. Host Rev. Dr. Seth Thomas is joined by experts in the preaching craft—leaders who think deeply and dream boldly about how we can bring a liberated witness to the pulpit and the world. As you listen to this season, please let us know what you think. We value your feedback and questions!
About our guest:
At at the Candler School of Theology at Emory, the Rev. Dr. Teresa L. Fry Brown is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Bandy Professor of Preaching, a chaired professorship created in 1986 with a gift from B. Jackson Bandy that is considered by many to be the country’s premier chair in homiletics. Fry Brown has taught at Candler since 1994, and in 2010, she became the first African American woman to attain the rank of full professor. She also served as the director of Candler’s Black Church Studies Program 2003-2015.
Fry Brown’s research interests include homiletics, womanism, womanist ethics, socio-cultural transformation, and African diaspora history focusing on African American spiritual values. She has authored five monographs, including Delivering the Sermon: Voice, Body and Animation in Proclamation (Fortress Press, 2008); Can A Sister Get a Little Help: Advice and Encouragement for Black Women in Ministry (Pilgrim Press, 2008); and Weary Throats and New Song: Black Women Proclaiming God’s Word (Abingdon Press, 2003). She additionally has written over fifty articles, commentaries, and chapters.
Related Resources:
- In each episode this season, we’ve asked our guest to highlight an organization doing good work in the community. Teresa shares a foundation close to her heart and led by her sister, Rochelle Fry Skinner, CEO. The Stomp Out Breast Cancer Foundation in Denver, Colorado, is empowered with knowledge, strengthened through action, sustained by community, & dedicated to working with African American women to promote breast health & support women living through transformative diagnosis. Connect with them on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StompOutBreastCancerFoundation/
Continue the Conversation at the Reimagining Preaching Conference: May 3, 2025
Join the Center for Transforming Engagement in Shoreline, Washington, for this skills-based conference equipping clergy, church staff, and lay preachers to bring the Word to life in Cascadia. Learn more and register at: https://transformingengagement.org/preaching-conference/.
Episode Transcript
Seth: Welcome to Transforming Engagement, the Podcast where we hold conversations about changes that serve the common good and the higher good. Hi, I’m the Reverend Dr. Seth Thomas, and I’m excited to host this season of the Center for Transforming Engagement Podcast. This season we are hosting conversations about how the church can proclaim good news in our time as we explore re-imagining preaching. I’m joined by experts in the preaching craft, folks who think deeply and dream boldly about how we can bring a liberated witness to the pulpit and the world.
At at the Candler School of Theology at Emory, the Rev. Dr. Teresa L. Fry Brown is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Bandy Professor of Preaching, a chaired professorship created in 1986 with a gift from B. Jackson Bandy that is considered by many to be the country’s premier chair in homiletics. Fry Brown has taught at Candler since 1994, and in 2010, she became the first African American woman to attain the rank of full professor. She also served as the director of Candler’s Black Church Studies Program 2003-2015.
Dr. Fry Brown’s research interests include homiletics, womanism, womanist, ethics, sociocultural transformation, and African diaspora history, focusing on African American spiritual values. She has authored five monographs, including Delivering the Sermon: Voice, Body and Animation in Proclamation; Can A Sister Get a Little Help: Advice and Encouragement for Black Women in Ministry; and Weary Throats and New Song: Black Women Proclaiming God’s Word. She additionally has written over fifty articles, commentaries, and chapters. Dr. Fry Brown, it is an honor to speak with you today. Thank you for coming on the podcast.
Teresa: Thank you, Dr. Thomas. It’s good to be here over the miles.
Seth: Yes, yes. Well, today we’re, this is part of an arc of episodes where we’re talking about reimagining preaching. We’re looking at the state of our world today and wondering how do we think in new ways, old ways, liberated ways about the craft of preaching and inspire new generations of people to speak up, to use their voices and to proclaim the good news of Jesus in our contexts. I would just love to sit with you and hear some of your thoughts on this topic. How do you understand the liberating of a voice and how we speak as preachers and how is your imagination taking that these days?
Teresa: So I’ve been preaching for 43 years and over the course of that time, we’ve run through these cycles of teaching people to preach. So they sound like their senior pastor or they sound like their homiletics professor, or now we’re in this era where people want to sound like the person that seems to have the highest metrics on a Sunday and not really understanding that although the size of our vocal folds are the same, that we have individual bodies and physical structures that make us sound differently. The thickness changes the way that we articulate words depending on where we grew up, how much we read. Those kinds of things affect our body as well as our emotions. And so one of the things that I speak with my students about is finding your own voice. We don’t have a recording of Jesus. We don’t have a recording of God or Paul who wrote most of his sermons because he probably didn’t have a great voice.
But using the instrument that you have and learning to speak from your own heart, your own mind, your own spirit is the beginning of recognizing what your voice is and how you want to sound. I say to people that if God wanted us to all sound alike, God could have made us physically all the very same way and we could have lived all in one place with one dialect and one way of pronouncing our vowels and our consonants. And so it takes a bit of owning who one is. It takes a bit of learning how to project one’s voice, how to pronounce things a certain way, how to not make up a pronunciation of something in the Bible because it’s expedient at the time, and giving the people the opportunity to accept your voice as your voice because they have so many voices playing in their head over their lives and maybe the voice they like the most or they adhere to it most, maybe their grandfather’s voice or the pastor when they were growing up or their Sunday school teacher or their grandmother, the mother, whatever. But that first few minutes one is up. You have to understand that people are adjusting the reception of your voice and your style and your phrasing and to not be afraid of that. When they don’t respond the same way they respond to other people because there’s so much, your external physicality, your melanin count, the way your hair looks, they attend to that a lot more sometimes than they do the voice. So some people’s voices are very gravel and some are, some men’s voices are falsetto and they think people won’t listen to them. But once people are acclimated to a voice, then it’s the content that matters and we have to understand that we have to get through people being acclimated to who you are and how you sound and then the content.
Seth: Wow. Talk to me about how you help people rest in that space of finding their own voice. I love that.
Teresa: So an exercise I do at the beginning of every preaching class or workshop or whatever is I ask people, what is the most compelling sermon you’ve ever listened to? And then what is the most offensive sermon you’ve ever listened to? And then we walk through why one is drawn to a particular voice. Then I do a multisensory piece with them, I talk with them about, and the people that are afraid to say that they’re preaching because some people don’t want to use that word because there’s a negative associated with preaching these days, right? Well, there always was, but at any rate, what does your voice sound the last time you spoke? What does your voice sound like? Not loud or soft, but metaphorically. Did it sound like a rushing wind? Did it sound like a quiet brook? Did it sound scratchy? Did it sound like beating something against the wall? And then we go from there and I ask them, the last time you preached, how did your voice look?
If you could see your voice, how did your voice look? So not flat or voluminous, but my voice looked like straw, my voice looked like marble, my voice looked like something. Then we go from there about how does does it sound? How does it look? How does it taste? How does it smell? What color is your voice? And not to just say a really mundane kind of answer, but to start fleshing out how you perceive your voice with all of its textures and all of its beauty because that’s how people are receiving it. The Old Testament is replete with all these beautiful colors and multisensory images of what it sounds like to be in worship. So where does your voice fit in there? And then have you listened to yourself speak before? Because some people don’t want to hear their voice because they don’t understand that physically your voice is going to sound different out there than it sounds to you because you have all this skin and bone and muscle that the sound is bouncing off and then it has to come back to you for you to hear it. So we work through the multisensory and we work through physically, we work with analyzing your own voice once you record it. And I ask people to listen to their own sermon at least once a month if everybody else has to. We have to too at least once a month and then to listen to it. And then I need them to turn off the sound to see if physically what they are saying is matching what they’re saying vocally.
And then ask themselves, would I listen to that voice if I had to listen to it? Do I like that voice? And then also to have some trusted people around you whom will be able to say, Theresa, you paused. Right? Why did you pause right there? Were you emotional right there because your voice broke up? Your voice broke down. And to understand that we have to own the emotion as well as the physicality of our voices, and we write sermons the way that we talk in an oral, aural fashion. So that’s how I began working with people. And then because I was a speech pathologist for hundred years, if someone has a cluttering where those words come and they’re falling over each other or someone has a stutter or they’re knocking off ends of words, then I meet with them and we do some practice with poetry or we do some practice with different translations of the biblical text so they can have a comfort, but also we record it so they can hear what they may be misarticulating, what they may be rushing. I have a rapid pace when I preach, but I also practice the words. And if one has a difficulty pronouncing a word, I say, go to a thesaurus and find a better word that you can in fact use. And that begins to work with a comfort zone. The other piece is there are people who are afraid of crowds. I think there was probably someone that said, why would you want me to stand in front of people and speak, God? And God said, I’ll speak through you. It happened a couple of places in the biblical text. And so we work with their comfort level being in front of people they know. And most of the time we’re more tense in front of people we know than we are people we don’t know. So we have to have a lot of practice up speaking. So when I teach preaching, you’re not just writing a thing and handing it in, you’re standing in front trying to find who you are. And also understanding that preaching is not competitive. So it’s not my job to sound like Seth when I preach. My job is to sound like Theresa. When I preach my nonverbal cues of my hands, as you see, they’re all over the place of my hands. And when I smile and the smile has to match what I’m saying. So I can’t say the joy of the Lord is my strength and frown. So we also work with emotion, but there you go. We work with emotion and what our physical body is saying because that’s part of speech and that my hands are saying exactly what I mean, so I’m not bringing in aircraft. So we do all those kinds of things to work with people so they’re comfortable in their own skin, that they begin to understand the embodiment of the word that they have when they’re preaching and they begin to appreciate even if it’s scratchy and slow and a drawl and something’s left out, the beauty of a voice that can still articulate the word of God, even it doesn’t sound like someone who has been recorded and has a regular YouTube channel. Okay.
Seth: I love that. And I hear in the kind of closing description, a nod back to what you said at the beginning of performance of living out the preaching act like someone else. I’m a Presbyterian and we have a lilt to our voices. That’s common and in a sense, especially as young preachers or new, we do want to take on, but you’re describing something wholly different, which is a resting in one’s own body as one’s own body is, with its anatomy and story that not be performance but be proclaimed, be lived out.
Teresa: To be lived out. And so I have students who are with cerebral palsy. I’ve had students that have such tension. There was one young man, and I remember when he would stand before me, he would start quivering. And you could watch it come from his diaphragm area all the way up and he’d turn red and it got here. And so we had to work on his relaxation things with him, but we also have to work with the listener because listeners impact the speaker because it’s a dialogue, not a monologue. And so it’s also talking with congregations about how they position themselves to hear something because that’s some added pressure. And if I’ve had deaf preachers I’ve worked with and people who were not sighted, but it’s also to work with the preachers in my class that say there is a variety of people that are going to receive this message, and our job is to paint the picture so that someone’s not sighted might be able to understand it, or someone that has to use another kind of device. We sometimes have to slow down because we have to understand that people are listening at different paces.
Sometimes we have to speed up because they can’t take it when you’re saying things slowly. So it’s this dance that we do and everything is, it’s not the Shakespeare in the whole world as a stage, but it’s not manipulative performance. There’s a difference between the performance, which is to produce, to communicate in a manipulative performance is when you say certain things or you phrase things a certain way or you use volume to enforce upon the people, you must listen to me instead of the natural dialogical. I’m saying something you want to listen to, so I can’t force you to say amen. It’s up to you then to receive it. That’s part of that communication change. So we’re working with both the speaker and the listener.
Seth: And what I hear there also is you’re dealing with the power dynamic and how the power of the congregation impacts the power of the preacher and vice versa.
Teresa: That’s right.
Seth: Could you say a little more about how power plays in with that?
Teresa: Yes. When I first started a thousand years ago preaching, I had been a musician, directed choirs and people listened to me one way, but then when I moved into this other kind of role, there were people who facially would shut down. There were people who would get up and walk out. And it hindered me at first doing what I was called to do, to assign to do until I had to understand that even people that are sitting there are not necessarily paying attention. And so my job is to present and share the word and do it the best I can, understanding that I’m responsible. This is my power dynamic as a preacher. I’m responsible for every word that comes out of my mouth and I can speak life to people or I can condemn them to hell. My job is to speak life. That’s the creative moment. I think that’s our assignment.
It’s not the prophetic affirmation of what you already know. It is I don’t want the people to leave bleeding. In like manner, sometimes a preacher will show up and that preacher embodies the first of a kind that somebody has seen. And so the audience may not be acclimated to that, and they may get up and leave you. Sometimes preachers come in with this braggadocios attitude of, Hey, I’m the preacher. God called me. You’re going to listen to me. I don’t care what, I wrote this thing. You’ll hear every word that I’ve said because I was called by God. So I also say to the preachers, there’s also precedent in the biblical text for people being muted as Zachariah or people being muted. And so we have to respect each other. So we also have to imbue this kind of respect that when we read the room is what I teach.
I have to understand that everyone doesn’t have the same politics as I do the same theology that I do the same position on certain matters that I do. They don’t like the same music that I like, but there’s something about the word of God that we have to both do this, that kind of connective dance that my particular hermeneutic on the text may not be yours, but I’m going to give you what God gave me. Then I have to depend on God to give you an interpretation. And sometimes you may hear something that’s not exactly what I said, but it does me no good to argue with you because that’s what you heard. So I have to stand on what God has given me as long as I’m not abusing the people. And I also have to be able to answer questions that people have that I may not even raise. So very, I always tell people that preaching is the most vulnerable and the most difficult task I think that we have. It’s vulnerable because no matter how hard we work on a text, what we really believe is going to come out someplace in that sermon, the work that one has to do. It’s I believe in spirit. I believe in spirit. I believe in spirit. I believe in spirit. I also know it’s my job to do some groundwork before I get there. So I’m not mishandling the text. I need textual integrity.
I just did a workshop last week with the Episcopal diocese here, and I said, if we are lazy preachers, that’s on us. The people come to hear a word that is enlightening and sometimes evocative, but one that’s encouraging and one that convicts. And they didn’t come to see us come in as if we are hoisted on somebody’s shoulders and above them. My father in the ministry used to say the ground is level at the foot of the cross. So I’m still trying to work out all the answers and you’re trying to make out wherever the answers. It’s not my job to make up stuff, but I can say, this is what it says in the text. And preachers also need to be able to say, I don’t understand all of it, but I’m still working on it.
Seth: There’s an authenticity to what you’re describing.
Teresa: Exactly.
Seth: Exactly. A wholeness that accepts our limitations and also works from the strength of our training and our traditions. Correct?
Teresa: Yes. And because I preach ecumenically, it’s my job to study where I’m going. So I’m reading in the right room that I know the traditions. I know the forms. I don’t necessarily preach in those traditions, but I have to respect those traditions because it’s like for me, when somebody visits my home, they’re coming into my space. And so if they smoke, they need to know my house is not smoking, so I’m not telling them not to smoke. I’m saying in my house we don’t smoke. So if you must do that, you can go outside. So then they have the choice of coming into my house or not. When I go to various churches, and there are different styles, whether they’re, I mean, I work at a United Methodist school and I’m African Methodist Episcopal, and in that school there’s some 40 some different denominations of faith groups.
And so hearing in my class, I do this thing at the beginning and I say, what are the denominations present? What are the faith groups present? And some people don’t go to church, but they’re searching for something. And so when I’m teaching, I have to understand something about the background of each and every person that I’m teaching and be open to the questions they may have on my interpretation about how we’re doing this thing called preaching. And if I don’t have the answer, I’ll say, let’s work it out together. Let’s both go, all of us go look this up and we’ll come back and talk about it. That piece that says, the sheep know the voice of the shepherd. And so sometimes when I first started teaching preaching, I would select preachers for people to look at because they were people that resonated with me. Now what I do is say, I need you to select a preacher, look at the preacher, and then tell me how that fits the model of preaching that you’re drawn to, not for you to be that person, but I need to understand the variety. I always tell people if there are 55 people in my class, there’s 55 different ways of preaching, but I don’t want clones in my class. I do not need clothes in my class.
Seth: We’ve heard the voice of another that perhaps resonates or caught our heart somehow, and we may want to follow that school or tradition, but I wonder, are you helping people unpack why they resonate with that?
Teresa: Yes, I ask them, there are denominations where you’re not allowed to preach a sermon unless the senior pastors reviewed it first. There are places that say, this is the form we follow. You must follow that form, that theme, that lectionary in order to preach here. There are others that whatever God gives you, you come. And so I say to people, know your comfort zone and know who God is calling you to be. Know what God is saying. You have first right of refusal. Nobody’s going to make you become an AME. Nobody’s going to make you become a Lutheran or Presbyterian or United Methodist. But find out what you hear in your own spiritual being God telling you to do. Because when there’s a mismatch, nobody’s happy and this sermon falls flat or you become bitter in the middle of and find yourself castigating people you don’t need to castigate or speaking not kindly of the denomination because they’re doing things the way you don’t feel comfortable doing. And so I always ask people, why are you a part of what you’re a part of? What is there is the polity, is the liturgy, what is it? And tell me the upsides and the downsides of that for you. And when you’re constructing a sermon, how does that undergird what you are now doing? It’s like telling people there’s a stereotype of Black preaching, but there are in fact as many different forms of Black preaching as there are people preaching. There’s a stereotype about Presbyterians. There’s a stereotype about Episcopalians. I preached at a bishop’s installation last summer, and when I finished, I knew that I was in this diocese in Mississippi, and I knew there were a variety of people there. And I knew Teresa’s style, so I knew what to temper and what not to temper. And when I finished, somebody said, we almost said, we almost said amen. And I said, I felt it. Because in their tradition, they’re told not to interrupt the preacher. So knowing that I can still preach there, but I respect their tradition, but then I have to read the people while I’m up to see facial expressions and body movement. And sometimes somebody’s (clearing throat) because they want to say something or I preached at Duke Chapel and everywhere, and they were told the person that was there before Luke Powery, they were told not to interrupt that it is rude to do that. Well, I’m from a tradition that when people don’t interrupt you, you have failed. So we have to understand that the magnitude of the differences, but the word is still there. You just have to practice and know people enough and respect the room enough to know how to do you and respect where you are. That’s authenticity.
Seth: Yeah. Yeah. It’s reminding me of some of the first years of preaching in my congregation and looking out at a lot of blank stares or what I thought were blank stares or quiet bodies and feeling discouraged, but then asking, Hey, what did you think of that? Or How did that go? And oh, I was so engaged. That was like, really? Oh yeah, great word, pastor. And just having to go, oh, that’s just how this group is. And then I find myself in my own body there and can live as that preacher.
Teresa: You can. In my first few years preaching, because I’d been a musician, I’ve been directing choirs and so on, sometimes I get I animated, sometimes I don’t. I’m not a person that walks. But I was in a tradition where people walk. I’m not a person that there’s a whole lot of celebratory things at the end because I use language and I celebrate throughout. And I remember when I came here, when I came to Georgia, whatever church I went to, people were very animated. And when I was up, people were not rolling. And my late husband said to me, Teresa, they’re processing. And because you have thick descriptions and you use a lot of language, they’re listening to the language. So let them listen. And then I found when I would have these talkbacks, sermon talkbacks, people would say, Dr. T., when you were saying that, this is what I was thinking about. So they were acclimating to a different style. And I think that we have to, if we’re going to our first church, our 50th church, we have to understand that we have to give people credit for acclimating to a different style.
Now, when I go places, people have watched me on YouTube before I get there, and so they’ll say on the backside of, I watched you on YouTube and I was expecting you to do this, but you didn’t, you did this. But now we have those kinds of pieces also that help us when we’re going from place to place to place that people have a record of what we’re doing, our language, our rhythm, our eye contact, our engagement with the people that we just look down when we preach, are we all over the place? And so that that’s another kind of layer of support for the varieties of ways that we can preach. And I say to my students and people, when I’m out doing workshops, when I vary what I do, people will say, but I was waiting for that. But that also allows them to listen more intently because they’re waiting for something that has become only what Seth will do. And that’s a Seth thing. And one of my young people, young preacher, I do this acrostic A through Z kind of run in my preaching and now they’re trying it. And I was saying last week when I was preaching, it is a memory piece that is used in the book of Psalms, and you can go A through Z, but it’s hard to do. So if you leave out some, it’s fine. So then I took the pressure off. So they’re trying these different kinds of things. And when I was learning to preach, there were people that came through Denver, the late Dr. Charles Adams or the late Parathia Hall that I could listen to. And I go, oh, that’s some good stuff. Or Frederick Samson, who was a psychiatrist who could use science in such a way in a sermon. I didn’t know you could do it, but I was a speech language pathologist and I was teaching anatomy and physiology and endocrinology and all that kind of stuff. So now I can use what is my background, because I believe everything that we have done and every profession we’ve had prepares us for our next sermon.
Seth: So what I hear there is this ongoing evolution and growth as a preacher where we learn about ourselves and we begin to stand in that place. But then we also are consistently pulling in new information, new inputs, new styles, new perhaps even growing as people we change. So how do you see that evolution going on in your students in yourself, and how can we maintain that sense of authenticity for who we were and are while also in wrapping ourselves with more and expanding?
Teresa: I sometimes have people go back and look at the first sermon they ever preached.
Seth: That’s scary.
Teresa: It’s because God saves people in spite of us and kind of do markers across the course of your preaching, even if you’ve been preaching for a year. And sometimes I have students as the first time they ever preached. When I go back and look at the manuscripts because I’m a manuscript preacher that I wrote, then my ethics have changed. My theology has changed. It’s broadened. I still believe in God, but it’s broadened. It’s become much more inclusive because I’ve also traveled enough and been around enough different people that sometimes we’re raised that the only way to preach is what our denomination is doing, or the only way to preach is the way men preach or the only way to preach is people of this age group preach. And I say to myself and to others, if you are preaching the same way you preached five years ago, you need to go back and revisit that.
Because the work that I did with pastors over COVID, when they had become so acclimated to response and having people in front of them, and it was more than just putting the pictures on the pews, right? It was okay, now we’re going to work with the word without the audience response. And I think that we need to have more than one way of preaching in our homiletical luggage. We have to have more than one concern in our homiletical luggage. When I teach prophetic preaching, and I say to people, if all you can talk about is gender and race and sexuality, you are a poor preacher because there’s so many other things out there that are intersecting that we need to be addressing. I mean, it was maybe 10 years ago when I was teaching a class about ecological justice and people had never heard of it. Now it’s big, but they hadn’t heard of it then. And so there’s so much more that can come into us. And I’m not saying that we become tabla rosa, but it enhances what we already are working on. We make more connections. The more people we’re around, the more we preach. It’s like our life that if we’re still acting like we were 12 and we’re in our forties, that’s problematic. And for preachers, if you are still at that first sermon or you were just trying to knit things together and you have not found ways to pause now, or you have not found ways to use another illustration, there are people that have been using the same illustration for 40 years and that does not work. And there’s so many other ways that not getting the book with 10,000 illustrations, I work with people saying, around your life, there are illustrations. You don’t need to always go online and get another illustration. And that’s that growth. And so what I found in myself, I’m more comfortable now in who Teresa is, the preaching as Teresa, I’ve looked at videos, I’ve looked at my idiosyncrasies where my students used to say, when I pause and the right side of my mouth goes up, I’m getting ready to say something difficult. And the first time I watched that, I went, oh, I guess I do. And I’ve tried to change it, but that’s just part of who I am. So we have these idiosyncrasies that are going to stay with us, but the way that we’re engaging texts becomes deeper. The more we preach, the way we engage social issues becomes deeper. The more we live. The way that we even are able to stand in front of people we never thought we’d been preaching in front of before has changed over the course. That’s the preaching life. Gardner Taylor used to say, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. And so mistakes that I made in how I preached 10 years ago, I don’t do those anymore because I learned from those. And they’re usually congregants that help, you know, made that mistake in the first place. And so I preach without shoes on. I have done this, and I love shoes. I love a good pump. I love a good stiletto. That’s just my life.
Seth: You’re literally saying you preach without shoes on, you take them off.
Teresa: Without shoes on.
Seth: Okay,
Teresa: About the third year that I was preaching, I’m setting in this pulpit and there are all these strictures about what women were supposed to do and how this was a dress and all this other kind of stuff that just drove me nuts. I grew up with boys, and so I knew all of the stuff that was, and women aren’t supposed to cry in the pulpit. My father, don’t cry and don’t fight and don’t do a difficult subject, all these don’ts, it was worse than 10 commandments. It was a do not kind of situation. So I’m like the grace of the New Testament now. And so I was just sitting in a pulpit one Sunday and all of a sudden, in my spirit, God said, take your shoes off it. I don’t know what it was, but when I got up, I was so grounded. So it’s not like just Moses, take your shoes off holy ground stuff. It was like God just said, in order for you to be grounded so that you don’t get so big that you stay with what I’m saying, shoes come off. And so since that time, there’s some place, it’s either introduction or someplace before I get up my shoes, my pumps come off, they sit and I feel grounded. I feel like I can preach with anybody. I feel like I can preach any subject. I can take critique while I’m up. I can take people walking away. I can take people throwing things at me, but there’s something about my feet being on the ground whether I’m in Europe or South America, wherever. And that to me is part of my idiosyncrasy. But I also hear from God differently when I’m grounded in a pulpit or outside. And that’s the most explanation. God never said, take your shoes off because it’s holy ground. It was like, Teresa, I’m going to need you to just do this. There are other women that, there’s a whole group called Preachers in Pumps because they talk about, I’m a woman and I can wear pumps and I can preach. Mine is quite different. I know I’m a woman, but I need to feel, I need to feel marble or carpet or wood or something in order for the word to bubble up and come out of me. It’s idiosyncratic. I said that right? But it’s my style. Because I’m… was a musician and sang and stuff. I’m poetic. My style’s poetic. It’s philosophical. I’m a scholar. It’s communal and pastoral because that’s who I am. And there are edges of prophecy around it. But prophetic for me means I’m a firm believer in what God’s already told you. It’s not demeaning you. So it’s that no, I had to grow into knowing myself and to not deny any part of myself. Even when I was first starting to preach, I was told to deny my femininity. So I’m very clear that I’m not a man preaching. I’m a woman who preaches. I’m not a person of a certain age who preaches. I’m a person God called to preach. I’m not a denomination when I preach. I’m Theresa who’s supposed to be preaching and sharing with all of God’s people.
Seth: That’s so beautiful. And it reminds me of the vulnerability that comes into this idea of authenticity. I wonder if you’d say a little bit more about how vulnerable you feel when you’re in those moments without your pumps on. Because there’s also, I get this hint of real strength there. So it’s authentic vulnerability, but it’s also with such standing and grounding.
Teresa: For me personally, I wear heels most of the day, most of the time. But that’s a part of a style that my grandmother imbued in me. That one must be dressed to go before the Lord because she was in that era of women that you saved your Sunday best, but it wasn’t for everybody else. It was for God. So I know that part of what we do when we stand in front of people, people are watching us and evaluating us. And so there are times when I’m in settings that I feel that evaluation from the time I arrive, my hair, my whatever, and there’s something about stepping down out of the evaluation into the relational space that God wants me to occupy while I’m preaching. And then when I’m finished preaching, I will go back to the space, the evaluative space. But I’m finished with my assignment. I talked to my therapist about it, so it’s really okay for me to do these things. But there’s a difference between the word place and space. A place is designated, A space has to be occupied. So I’m in this place called the pulpit, and there are all these rules. But when I step out of my pumps, I’m in a space that God now has created for transmitting the word of God. That’s the way I see those two things.
Seth: Oh, I love it. Love it. I think of my own pastoral identity very much in the tradition of St. Fred Rogers.
Teresa: I met him in Florida.
Seth: Did you?
Teresa: I did.
Seth: He’s my hero.
Teresa: Preach. And he came up to me. I was at a conference, it was in the United Methodist Conference, and I was in Orlando, and I had preached this big gathering and I was like, maybe one or two people looked like me in the whole place. So I finished. The bishop that was in charge of the conference said, can we go to my office now? I said, yes, someone wants to meet you. And I did. It’s Mr. Rogers neighborhood! He was a minister, right?
Seth: Yeah, Presbyterian.
Teresa: And it was so wonderful because I’d known all the stuff that he did, but he was such, he was like Jimmy Carter. He was such a gentle spirit that believed in God and believed in people. It was just, I’m sorry you took me way back right then. I didn’t.
Seth: But your idea of taking off your shoes, I mean his whole movement of coming through the threshold of his apartment or his home.
Teresa: Yes,
Seth: From the neighborhood into the space where he was going to make a space to occupy for kids and taking his shoes off and putting on his cardigan. So I had to mention how deeply that connects with how I understand the preaching act as well. So thank you. Thank you so much.
Teresa: Oh, that was good. Now I’m going to remember. I’m going to feel good all afternoon, but you just took me back to that. And I just remember that and I was like, Mr. Rogers thinks I did a good job. And I kept
Seth: That with me
Teresa: Because he just seemed so to me, he was the representation of what we’re supposed to be as human beings. I’m not deifying him, but his ability to understand, as you said, coming through the door, that it’s a harsh place that we occupy, but I can create a space where warmth can be there, genuine love of humanity can be present. And that to me is what we’re supposed to be doing when we’re doing holy speech is not touchy feely, but you can use language in such a way that you can tell hard truths without slicing people. You can use your imagination in such a way that you can transport people to, in your own vulnerability you can without bleeding all over the congregation or doing sappy stories all the time or anything like that. But you can transport people to a space where they weren’t so jaded that they can still think about possibilities and contemporarily. When I think about all the things that all kinds of people, regardless of their social political stance are encountering.
Sometimes when I’m traveling, people that I never, ever, ever thought would talk to me would sit down and they’ll say, so what do you do? And I used to not tell them, but I tell them, they go, really? So I thought, okay, here comes the critique. And then it’s all of a sudden – their life. Now this person will may never talk to anybody like me again, but for that little bit of time, we are sharing something that is unspeakable. That to me is what of sermon is. It is to speak the unspeakable kind of thing. There’s this old, old, well, it’s not really old, but from the seventies, I have the faith that sees the invisible, expects the incredible, I have the faith that will conquer anything. Vanessa Bell Armstrong in the eighties sang this song. And that’s what I want to, because we’re asking people when we preach to believe in something they cannot see.
That’s a tremendous responsibility. We’re asking people to follow someone they can’t touch. And we have people that in all the technology that we have, have a difficulty believing their best friend. But our job is to say, there’s this person called Jesus that lived all these years ago, and Jesus loves you, but we’re with people that want, they want tactile, they want immediacy. They want things just the way they want them packaged. But what we undertake as preachers is a phenomenal calling and that we have to suspend our own pain sometime to try to give a word that helps somebody begin to heal. That to me is sometimes I just say, God, look, you sure you want me to do this thing? This thing is hard. It’s not a power trip. I could have been doing some other stuff. I was on my road to be a lawyer and you said, I had to do this.
I wanted to be a doctor. You said to do this and that. We have to do it repeatedly, even when our hearts are breaking over humanity or our own family needs. That to me is when I say it’s vulnerable, it is an incredible call. And it doesn’t mean we’re better than anybody, but sometimes I go, why did you choose me to do this thing? Why? You could have found anybody, but you said, Seth, come on. We know you don’t have anything to do, but feel sorry for people. Come on. And then we have to do it with integrity. We just can’t make it up as we go along. We have to do it with integrity, but we’re asking people to do amazing things with someone they can’t touch or feel.
Seth: Yeah, it’s such a blessing to listen and sit with your wisdom. Thank you.
Teresa: Thank you, thank you.
Seth: Is there anything we have not covered that you would like to?
Teresa: I think I’ve done workshops the last, now four years, but particularly this last couple of months with groups of preachers. And I think it’s also important because of the weightiness around this. This is not the first weighty situation preachers have been in. I’m not a prophet. I’m not one of the disciples that’s going to be, hopefully I’m not going to be killed upside down for my beliefs, all those kinds of things. But I also want preachers to understand they’re human beings and to give themselves some grace because we’re not going to hit it out of the ballpark every Sunday. People are not going to believe us all the time. And sometimes we absolutely do not know because we too are experiencing the same things, types of things. And we too have the questions about where is God? Why won’t God do something? I mean, Micah, should I just give God a lot of livestock and some oil and some stuff and God will make everything okay? We are also human. And so I say to preachers, there are times when you know that the brook has dried up. That’s the time to phone a friend and have the friend stand in for you that Sunday because you may have to stand in for your friend pretty soon. Because we can burn out quickly. We can wear out quickly and think we’re absolute failures because there’s so much going on. It’s not a God complex. It’s the recognition that we are humans who are given a word by God to share with the people. But that does not mean we’re perfect, does not mean that we are exempt from what’s going on. We’re doing the best we can with what we have to work with right now. And if we study the prophets and also those persons working through the biblical text, even the apocrypha, whatever you’re looking at, we understand there are times that we’re going to hit a low. Doesn’t mean we’re going to stay there. It means today I’m in the valley of dry bones and I’m waiting for the wind to blow across so it gets better. And so it’s to recognize the humanity of yourself as a preacher. That to me, I think is important. Tomorrow marks nine years since my husband died, and early on it really took me under. Now it’s a celebration that I know what he was suffering, and he didn’t have to do it any longer. But it took me a while to get there. I preached through. We preached through members of our family dying. We preached through kids being sick. We preach through people not paying us. We preach through people critiquing us. And every now and then we have to go. Jesus took a sabbatical because they weren’t believing his sermon. So today I got to step back and know I just need to recharge and then I can come back and enter the fray. Preachers are human.
Seth: And I think that draws back to where we even began with talking about knowing the timbre of our voice and knowing how our body feels as the preacher. Because I think you just described knowing when things are off and knowing when we need that respite and space because we can’t make space without being able to take up some ourselves.
Teresa: That’s right. And the burnout rates have been all these things written about it. And some of it is because there are persons who allow themselves to be put on pedestals who articulate they’re closer to God than the congregation. I went back to the comment I said about my father in nursery saying the ground is level. Sometimes I need to just, when I’m writing and I run up against something, I need to get up and dance. I need to go cook. I need to sing. I need to go outside and drive around so I can then reconnect with, I’m back at grounding, reconnect with who I was called to be by God and not somebody else’s expectations. Yes.
Seth: Oh, thank you so much.
Teresa: You’re welcome.
Seth: So on our podcast, we’re asking our guests about organizations they would like to highlight and would love to just hear a little bit about the black women’s health programs that you work with specifically around breast cancer. Could you share a little bit about that and perhaps somewhere we could go learn about that a little more?
Teresa: Yes. I work with several kinds of, having had cancer myself at one point in time in my life, I have my next youngest sister. I’m the oldest, second oldest of seven, had breast cancer almost 20 years ago, and she was in Denver, Colorado. And at the time, there were not resources for women of color because it wasn’t a critical mass. And so she partnered through her own kind of what was going on in her body, partnered with Susan Koman and created Stomp Out Breast Cancer, which has been going ever since. And so they do makeup and hair and childcare and taking people to the doctor and all these other things. It’s called Stomp Out Breast Cancers in Denver, Colorado. And Rochelle Fry Skinner is the CEO. And that to me, knowing how it started and knowing the number of women that have been helped, and I know they have these kinds of organizations across the United States for women regardless of ethnicity, to help ’em and the men that work with them. Because I think it’s important that all of these organizations are not just the woman that’s going through, but their family, their spouse, their partners, their children, whoever their circle is, because this is not just in October, but it affects people every day and men with breast cancer also, because I think we leave that out sometimes. So that’s important too. So Stomp out Breast Cancer, Denver, Colorado.
Seth: Stomp Out Breast Cancer, Denver, Colorado. Thank you, Teresa. This has been a wonderful conversation and I know that folks are going to really resonate with so many things you’ve shared as we think about reimagining preaching and the whole idea of this craft going forward and being leaders in times of great need.
Teresa: I’ve had a wonderful time. Thank you.