Decolonizing Preaching

Colonialism and imperialism continue to impact the personal and social identities of North American preachers and listeners. In Decolonizing Preaching, Sarah Travis argues that sermons have a role in shaping the identity and ethics of listeners by helping them formulate responses to empire and colonization. Travis employs postcolonial theories to provide important insights for the practice of preaching today. She also turns to the social doctrine of the Trinity to offer a vision of the divine/human community that effectively deconstructs colonizing discourse. This book offers preachers and other practical theologians a gentle introduction to colonial history, postcolonial theories, and Social Trinitarian theology, while equipping them with tools to decolonize preaching and strategies for preventing, resisting, and responding to colonizing discourse. Travis effectively casts a vision of a ""perichoretic space"" in which preacher and listener encounter the living God-in-Trinity and are transformed, reconciled, and sent out to others in the church and beyond.

""Sarah Travis offers two great gifts to preachers. First, she makes us aware of an insidious colonial entanglement within much of our preaching. Second, she provides us with the theological resources to free our preaching from this colonial quagmire and preach with a genuinely postcolonial imagination. Her tone throughout is both hopeful and helpful. The result is a wonderful new resource for all preachers.""
--John S. McClure, Vanderbilt Divinity School, Nashville, TN

""Anyone interested in how pervasive the vestiges of empire can be and how preaching might shed its sometimes hidden colonialist heritage will benefit richly from reading Sarah Travis. Through becoming aware of its colonizing discourse, the church can model more closely the kind of relations with the world God desires.""
--Paul Scott Wilson, Emmanuel College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

""In Decolonizing Preaching, Sarah Travis names out loud the world as it is, and what it is becoming: a postcolonial reality marked by oppression and dazzling difference--held in God's Trinitarian embrace. . . . Travis offers a stunning, imaginative vision of how postcolonial preaching can be otherwise.""
--David Schnasa Jacobsen, Boston University School of Theology, Boston, MA

""Thoughtful and timely, this pioneering text applies postcolonial theories to the field of homiletics and provides valuable tools for decolonizing preaching to transform the church and society. I highly recommend it.""
--Kwok Pui-lan, Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, MA


Sarah Travis is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. She teaches worship and preaching at Knox College, University of Toronto.