Who Gets to Tell the Story? Preaching Amid Extraction, Exploitation, and Resistance

Abstract

Contested narratives around fossil fuel extraction and the exploitation of Earth for human purposes pose challenges for preachers seeking to bring God’s word to bear for all of Creation. This essay explores the author’s experiences with preaching, teaching, and researching homiletics in three stages of her ministry – protesting fracking in Pennsylvania, teaching seminary students about witness and testimony in the coal regions of eastern Kentucky, and studying the stories of preachers for a project entitled Compelling Preaching for a Climate-Changed World. The author reflects on what she has learned by asking four key questions: What is it like to be you in this place? Whose story do we tell? Who gets to tell the story? How will that story be told? These questions enable preachers to engage in deep listening to a variety of voices, including our other-than-human neighbors in God’s Creation, and to discern how we can proclaim the gospel of liberation for a suffering world.