2026 Annual Meeting:

Theopoetic Preaching

Theopoetic preaching speaks to the need for imaginative approaches to preaching in addressing the crises and hopes of the present day. At the intersection of divine justice and imagination, it  offers more than propositional speech or arguments about what to believe or how to behave but invites both critical reflection and creativity in designing sermons and communicative strategies that engage God’s life-giving purposes amid the death-dealing impulses and divisiveness that threaten the world we share.

Honoring the Academy’s call to build bridges (the 2024 AoH theme) and the importance of place in naming God’s presence and activity amid socio-cultural and religious differences (the 2025 theme), our 2026 theme invites theological, biblical, historical, cultural, and pedagogical reflections on the meaning and practice of imagination for preaching that addresses urgent
matters of life and faith (e.g., race relations, economic injustice, ecological crises, human sexuality, gender identity, violence between nations, groups, and individuals). How do the life of
Jesus Christ and the Spirit guide us anew as teachers and researchers who seek to break out of the dogmatic deadlocks and ideologically-driven narratives that keep us from seeing and hearing God’s loving and transforming purposes today?

Questions that connect theopoetic preaching to our Workgroups and current scholarship in homiletics include (but are not limited to):

• How does Scripture reveal and invite theopoetic ingenuity through its myriad genres and forms, prophetic witness, and the poetic justice it communicates?
• More than a metaphor or an idealized image, how is the reign of God spoken of in Scripture and proclaimed through the words, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ something other than populist notions of power, White Christian Nationalism, political theocracies, or other assertions of “power over others?”
• In what ways might moral imagination, spirituality, and poesis (the act of creating) help preachers to envision communal participation in the fullness of life promised by God?
• Which names, images, and metaphors for God faithfully, freely, and truly represent the being and values of the God we speak of when preaching?
• What performative expressions are needed to decry broken relationships and call for our re-creative participation in God’s life-giving intentions for this blessed and broken world?
• How do media and culture enhance and/or work against the need to creatively imagine God’s just and loving presence amid particular contexts and communities?

*Image of watercolor cross and torn newspaper by Paul Grout, former pastor and moderator of the Church of the Brethren, artist and prophet. (2026)*