Sharing the Sermon: Facilitated Discussion as a Form of Nonviolent Preaching

This paper utilizes ethnographic research to examine how one ecumenical basement church uses discussion-style preaching to create an opportunity for congregants (including many people who experience homelessness) to process their experiences through the lens of scripture and communally interpret and reconstruct. Unhoused people are vulnerable to multiple forms of violence, including encounters with ecclesial practices that dehumanize the poor or treat people as mere “objects” of service. In this paper, I examine how this embodied nonviolent communication as preaching creates a space with the potential for communal processing and healing where people can imagine and enact resistance to violence together. While in this specific marginalized community “sharing the sermon” offers people experiencing homelessness space to process the forms of violence they encounter, I believe that within this example are opportunities for emulating this practice as a form of communication across theological (and other) differences and resistance to violence.