Associate Professor of Preaching and Worship
Education
- B.A., Faith College
- M.A., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
- Ph.D., Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
To Proclaim and Live Into the Message of the Gospel
My vocation as a teacher, liturgical and homiletical scholar, and ordained minister is to proclaim and live into the message of the Gospel that the world is not yet as it should or could be and that through God and the beloved community, the world is being made and will someday be fully made well.
I believe that worship shaped by the dynamic interplay of liturgical practices, theology and ethics, and the pursuit of justice has the potential to sustain the beloved community in the pursuit of justice for those targeted by systemic violence along lines of race, class, sexuality, gender, ability, or any other reductive human characteristic. In light of this, I teach students to engage Christian liturgical and theological traditions in a manner that is attentive and responsive to contextual issues of power that relate to human and other creaturely bodies on the personal, communal, and social levels.
As a teacher, my agenda is to empower students to more fully be:
- participants in a liturgical tradition from which they draw insight for theological reflection and sustenance for the pursuit of justice in the world;
- liturgical and sacramental theologians who historically and contextually interpret the ritual encounter of God and humanity in a manner that informs the renewal of liturgical practices and provides an expansive liturgical vision of God’s kin-dom; and
- activists who upset violent narratives and dominating structures in the church, the discipline, our guilds, and in the broader world and who contribute to liberating liturgical discourse in the public sphere that carefully attends to non-dominant voices and non-dominant knowledge.