Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit: The Expansive Homiletical Practice of Black Women
Preaching is typically considered to be a practice confined to ministry within the institutional church. Studies of preaching are often filtered through the lens of the pulpit, with Black women rarely positioned as central figures in this discourse. Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit lifts up Sojourner Truth, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Fannie Lou Hamer as crucial sources for homiletic theory. Chelsea Yarborough introduces a methodology for preaching arising from the witness and practices of these three Black women non-pulpit preachers, expanding our understanding of proclamation beyond traditional notions of its nature and purpose.

This shift away from the limitations of the pulpit into the public sphere and beyond has deep roots in the preaching legacy of Black women. Often denied places of authority in the church, Black women have carved out spheres for their proclamation, teaching us that the essence and purpose of preaching is less about place and more about impact and practice. By centering the lives and ministries of three historical Black women preachers who preached beyond the pulpit, Yarborough highlights a lineage of expansive homiletical possibilities and offers valuable insights for preachers across diverse platforms.

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Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit: The Expansive Homiletical Practice of Black Women
Preaching is typically considered to be a practice confined to ministry within the institutional church. Studies of preaching are often filtered through the lens of the pulpit, with Black women rarely positioned as central figures in this discourse. Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit lifts up Sojourner Truth, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Fannie Lou Hamer as crucial sources for homiletic theory. Chelsea Yarborough introduces a methodology for preaching arising from the witness and practices of these three Black women non-pulpit preachers, expanding our understanding of proclamation beyond traditional notions of its nature and purpose.

This shift away from the limitations of the pulpit into the public sphere and beyond has deep roots in the preaching legacy of Black women. Often denied places of authority in the church, Black women have carved out spheres for their proclamation, teaching us that the essence and purpose of preaching is less about place and more about impact and practice. By centering the lives and ministries of three historical Black women preachers who preached beyond the pulpit, Yarborough highlights a lineage of expansive homiletical possibilities and offers valuable insights for preachers across diverse platforms.

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Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit: The Expansive Homiletical Practice of Black Women

Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit: The Expansive Homiletical Practice of Black Women

by Chelsea Brooke Yarborough
Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit: The Expansive Homiletical Practice of Black Women

Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit: The Expansive Homiletical Practice of Black Women

by Chelsea Brooke Yarborough

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Overview

Preaching is typically considered to be a practice confined to ministry within the institutional church. Studies of preaching are often filtered through the lens of the pulpit, with Black women rarely positioned as central figures in this discourse. Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit lifts up Sojourner Truth, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Fannie Lou Hamer as crucial sources for homiletic theory. Chelsea Yarborough introduces a methodology for preaching arising from the witness and practices of these three Black women non-pulpit preachers, expanding our understanding of proclamation beyond traditional notions of its nature and purpose.

This shift away from the limitations of the pulpit into the public sphere and beyond has deep roots in the preaching legacy of Black women. Often denied places of authority in the church, Black women have carved out spheres for their proclamation, teaching us that the essence and purpose of preaching is less about place and more about impact and practice. By centering the lives and ministries of three historical Black women preachers who preached beyond the pulpit, Yarborough highlights a lineage of expansive homiletical possibilities and offers valuable insights for preachers across diverse platforms.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781481324243
Publisher: Baylor University Press
Publication date: 10/01/2025
Pages: 164
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Chelsea Brooke Yarborough is the Associate Director of Leadership Programming at the Association of Theological Schools. She earned her PhD in Homiletics and Liturgics from Vanderbilt University. She is also an ordained Baptist Minister.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction: That’ll Preach—Black Women’s Non-Pulpit Preaching
2 A Journey to Truth: The Life and Preaching Practice of Sojourner Truth
3 A Commitment to Black Women, a Belief in Black People: The Life and Preaching Practice of Nannie Helen Burroughs
4 Too Sick to Be Silent, Too Tired Not to Talk: The Life and Preaching Practice of Fannie Lou Hamer
5 Conclusion: A Homiletical Hermeneutic of Particularity—Insights of Black Women’s Non-Pulpit Preaching

What People are Saying About This

Jerusha Matsen Neal

There is so much at stake in Chelsea Yarborough's description of Black women preachers. Centering the voices of Sojourner Truth, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Fannie Lou Hamer to define preaching's purpose and method brings proclamation's life and death exigency into view. Often, books on preaching method are leveraged for gatekeeping. Yarborough leverages her astute methodological insights to throw wide preaching's gate to God's expansive Word.  This book believes in preaching's power to change the world - pulpit or no.

E. Trey Clark

In Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit, Chelsea Brooke Yarborough offers an essential contribution to the understudied practice of preaching outside traditional ecclesial environments. This well-researched, interdisciplinary book highlights the sacred rhetoric of three pioneering Black women:  Sojourner Truth, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Fannie Lou Hamer. Yarborough’s work expands the potential figures that deserve inclusion in the history of preaching while also offering new methodologies and practices for the work of proclamation amid the urgent challenges of our time. I suspect that this illuminating text will have a lasting impact on the field of homiletics.

Nancy Lynne Westfield

By helping us imagine the possibilities of preaching beyond the pulpit place, Yarborough helps us imagine the activity of the Holy Spirit in new ways. Of course, stories of African American women's knowledges are the vessels for what is new and necessary. This is a moment in the United States when we need the new, both ancient and untried. This timely text is for anyone - preacher, laity, artist, teacher, activist, prophet, healer, seer, or sage - who is about the business of creativity and justice.

Brian Bantum

While some corners of the church see emptier pews, Yarborough’s brilliant text reminds us that proclamation is always possible, and God still moves. Through attention to the lives of black women who did not have formal pulpits but nonetheless preached, Yarborough provides us with a vital reminder of what is possible in a world that tries to deny some their voice. Even more, this book offers us concrete ways to discover and proclaim an exigent word in these harrowing times, wherever we find ourselves. We need this book more than ever.

Lisa L. Thompson

Yarborough offers us a vital text for the future(s) of homiletic discourse and practice. Proclamation Beyond the Pulpit challenges our assumptions about where and how people engage in religious meaning-making, even as it interrogates the very impulses behind these practices. These pages lay the groundwork for examining our moral resources, contexts, epistemologies, pragmatics, and embodied integrity—while unapologetically exploring the fugitive histories of Black women’s sacred rhetoric. Taken seriously, this work disrupts the tidy categories within homiletic discourse that have never truly reflected the lived realities of religion on the ground. We’ve been gifted an urgent and long-overdue contribution to the resources that center religion, society, and the reimagining of collective accountability.

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