Hoodies and Holy Disruption: Black Protest Preaching and Multicultural Congregations

Abstract

Black prophetic preaching offers a moral critique of individuals and oppressive powers rooted in Scripture and divine promises. However, in an ever-diversifying contemporary landscape shaped by persistent racial injustice, social upheaval, and compounded oppression, Black protest preaching is emerging as a sub-genre of this tradition that serves as a source of resistance and renewal for all. This article explores the theology and practice of Black protest preaching, using Ezekiel’s embodied homiletic acts in Ezekiel 4–5 and the contemporary observance of “Hoodie Sunday” as interpretive anchors, and how this type of preaching can be used in multicultural contexts. While prophetic preaching typically draws on moral exhortation to call a community toward change and speak truth to power, protest preaching functions through symbolic action, embodied resistance, and spatial disruption to make that truth unavoidable.

“You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

(Tau 2012)

President Obama offered these words in response to a question screamed from a reporter at the end of a press conference that was called to announce a new World Bank leader. For someone who was measured in his responses, I suspect both because of nature and circumstance, this line and the rest of his statement were an emotional plea, an attempt to offer something more than political jargon and well-manicured statements. For a moment, it seems, President Obama let his guard down and he allowed himself to speak to the hearts of so many who were traumatized by the murder of Trayvon Martin, humanizing Trayvon for multicultural America that was divided on the issue: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” This public mourning from the President arrested my sermon writing process. I was moved to tears as we heard not just from the Chief Executive of this country, or the careful political operative, but from a Black father trying to make sense of a senseless killing.

On 26 February, the day I celebrated my 30th birthday, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old boy on his way back to his father’s fiancée’s house from the convenience store, was killed. Trayvon was followed by a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain named George Zimmerman. Mr. Zimmerman saw this young man, who happened to be wearing a hoodie and carrying a can of iced tea, and proceeded to call the police to report his “suspicious” behavior. Not satisfied with simply calling the police and alerting them about this seemingly “suspicious character,” Zimmerman pursued Martin against the explicit instructions of the 911 dispatcher. Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin weighed 140 pounds. Zimmerman weighed 250 pounds. After a brief scuffle, Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon, committing a tragic act that reverberated throughout the world.

As the father of a son who also looks like Trayvon, and as a man who himself could have been Trayvon, I was enraged to my very core, and like President Obama, I fought to find words to humanize this beautiful black boy that had been demonized by his killer. I wrestled with how to express my own pain and what a congregation needed to hear as they dealt with the news. I was not alone; this tragedy galvanized preachers from across the country (Jones 2012). Pastors and proclaimers organized and, in a collective act of homiletic protest, led “Hoodie Sunday” services to capture the emotions of the moment in a way that would provide pastoral care and prophetic witness. Congregations across racial and ethnic difference participated in this homiletic act as Black, white, Asian-America, Latino and Native American churches joined members of other faith traditions in the protest (Harper 2012). Skittles bags and hoodies became symbols of dissent as preachers collectively spoke of the injustice of Trayvon’s murder. “This tragedy was a community-shaking event that signaled what may be understood as the emergence of a new sub-genre of Black prophetic preaching that I identify as ‘Protest Preaching.’”

While prophetic preaching typically draws on moral exhortation to call a community toward change and speak truth to power, protest preaching functions through symbolic action, embodied resistance, and liturgical disruption to make that truth unavoidable. Black Protest Preaching dramatically confronts systemic injustice while rousing the congregation’s emotions to invite action across difference. Black protest preaching inspires through dramatic actions that can unify congregations in action. And though it is in a particular preaching tradition, that of the Black Church, I believe that preaching inspired by Black protest preaching can serve as a unifying force for multicultural congregations and for Christian churches that differ racially and culturally within our diverse society. Because of its use of symbolism and embodied action, Black protest preaching offers a homiletic that can allow members of multicultural congregations to imagine themselves collectively in the ritual act. Similarly to how the particularity of President Obama’s invitation to imagine a presidential child that looked like the slain Trayvon touched the hearts of people across different cultural backgrounds, Black protest preaching can ignite shared righteous indignation for congregants of different backgrounds.

This article offers a preliminary examination of Black protest preaching and its utility in multicultural congregations. After providing a working definition for Black protest preaching, the article will use Ezekiel’s embodied homiletic acts in chapters 4 and 5 as examples of “proto-protest” preaching and “Hoodie Sunday” as a modern interpretive anchor for Black protest preaching. By examining the practice of Black protest preaching and the Biblical foundations for this practice, I argue that this homiletic holds transformative potential across multicultural contexts, defined here as congregations shaped by racial, socioeconomic, or cultural diversity.

1. Black Prophetic Preaching

Black preaching has historically included prophetic impulses. From the hush harbors of enslaved Africans to the pulpits of Civil Rights era leaders to the streamed services of 2025, Black prophetic preaching is a critical aspect of the Black preaching tradition. In A Pursued Justice, Kenyatta Gilbert suggests that “from one generation to the next, prophetic preaching in African American church contexts has been the mediating apparatus for translating the message of God’s abiding love and hope for humankind.”(Gilbert 2016, p. 105) He further defines Black prophetic preaching as “God-summoned discourse about God’s good will toward community with respect to divine intentionality, which draws on resources internal to Black life in the North American context.”(Gilbert 2016, p. 6) Black prophetic preaching offers a moral critique of individuals, systems, and powers while also helping the community imagine a more just society. It calls the community to faithfulness, righteousness, and transformation, pointing beyond an immediate crisis to God’s ultimate intentions. Gilbert goes on to name the following as the four foundational elements of Black prophetic preaching: “(1) unmasks systemic evils and deceptive human practices by means of moral suasion and subversive rhetoric; (2) remains interminably hopeful when confronted with human tragedy and communal despair; (3) connects the speech- act with just actions as concrete praxis to help people freely participate in naming their reality; and (4) carries an impulse for beauty in its use of language and culture.”(Gilbert 2016). What I describe as Black protest preaching holds many of the markers of prophetic preaching, but with some significant differences.

2. Towards Black Protest Preaching

Using Gilbert’s description of Black prophetic preaching, I am suggesting that Black protest preaching, as exemplified by Hoodie Sunday sermons, is a subset of the genre that intensifies the delivery method. I posit that Black protest preaching is prophetic preaching animated by a particular injustice that wades into the urgency of a specific moment and that calls for a certain form of action. While both Black prophetic preaching and Black protest preaching offer hope, protest preaching insists that hope must interrupt. As a preliminary hypothesis, Black protest preaching utilizes embodied, symbolic, and disruptive forms of proclamation to interrupt normalized injustice and catalyze urgent response. It is deeply contextual, dramatic, and immediate. I imagine Black protest preaching to be the kind of preaching arises in moments of acute crisis and mobilizes communities through preaching as a symbolic act and liturgical disruption.

While all preaching is performance, Black protest preaching would be the preaching that is especially dramatic and embodied, as it plays with attire, affect, and physical presence to produce an immersive preaching experience. If I were to offer four potential foundational elements of Black protest preaching, they would be that it (1) uses symbolic and embodied action to dramatize the sermon; (2) exists as a disruption of liturgical time and space; (3) is marked by urgency and a sense of direct confrontation; and (4) uses the worship service itself as a site of protest and solidarity. To further distinguish the particularity of Black protest preaching, I will offer descriptions of hypothetical sermons preached from the same text: one as Black prophetic preaching and the second as Black protest preaching.

Using Ezekiel 37:1-14, and the vision of the dry bones as the sermonic text, one might preach a prophetic sermon entitled “Can these Bones Live?” whose theological focus is on the idea that God speaks life over what looks lifeless. God would be described as one who brings breath back to the broken. A central theme might be that though the bones are dry, they are not forgotten, and God is still speaking, so there can be life. The sermon could be situated in any context and speak to any injustice that besets a community. This is a popular text within the Black preaching tradition, and one might imagine using a sermon that poetically describes the process of the bones coming back together, delivering the hope for the future. The sermon would focus on envisioning a future where dry bones did not have to exist, and even celebrating God’s ability to blow breath back into the community.

A protest sermon from this same text might be titled, “We are the Bones that won’t Stay Dry!” To begin, the preacher might kneel with chains on their wrists, wait in a moment of silence before describing what it is like to be a bone, a chained, chalk-outlined, underfunded, overpoliced bone. They would make the direct connection between the valley of the dry bones and an event that had just occurred in the community. The focus would be on igniting the church to see how, like the bones in the text, they are sitting in the valley. The preacher would then be calling on them to act in response to a recent event. As part of the preaching act, congregants might be invited to write names of “dry bones” on index cards; names of victims, neighborhoods, and injustices; and lay them on the altar while music plays in the background. The closing of the sermon would be hopeful, but decidedly more action oriented, calling everyone to be the breath that brings life back to the community, by participating in some upcoming action. While these two imagined scenarios are similar, I believe protest preaching distinguishes itself by moving from hopeful exhortation to urgent confrontation, traditional pulpit rhetoric to embodied, participatory delivery, comfort and challenge to a direct call for action, and from preaching and worship to protest and symbolic action. To further understand protest preaching, I turn to the prophet Ezekiel as a proto-protest preaching example.

3. Ezekiel’s Proto-Protest Preaching

Ezekiel performs his prophetic actions during the Babylonian Exile, a time of significant national trauma and theological dislocation. His audience is a displaced people struggling to reconcile their suffering with God’s promises. This audience had known the pain and devastation of Babylonian oppression and needed to relearn what hope and justice could look like, considering their tragic circumstances. They needed a word that could snap them out of the malaise of disappointment. Ezekiel’s prophetic oracles are not unique in their apocalyptic visions. Other prophets had visions of creatures and figures that would be foreign to modern readers. But Ezekiel’s oracles are exceptional in their dramatic action. God ignites Ezekiel’s prophetic work by having him eat a scroll in Chapter Three. This leads to a series of homiletic performances that invoke a spirit of protest. I believe them to be a biblical precursor to the type of protest preaching described in this article. These actions, particularly those found between Ezekiel 4:1 and 5:4, invoke drama to make a larger point and call the people to action. In this sense, Ezekiel is a protest preacher, as his homiletic actions disrupt comfort, expose injustice, and embody divine critique through bold, symbolic, and often confrontational means. Ezekiel’s prophetic acts provide a foundational model for protest preaching by merging symbolism, spectacle, and public witness.

His first homiletic protest performance is found in 4:1-3, when God asks him to draw the city of Jerusalem on a clay tablet and lay siege to it. He is instructed to set up what amounts to a display model of the city, replete with an iron pan and an iron wall. This diagram was a stand in for the actual city. The clay brick served as a symbol to shock the listeners into action. The next homiletic act is found in Ezekiel 4:4-8 through the prolonged bodily performance of lying on his side. Ezekiel lies on his left side for 390 days and on his right side for 40 days. These days symbolize the years of Israel’s and Judah’s sin. Again, he embodies the weight of the community’s transgression, physically representing the wrong. While this kind of spectacle, the endurance of over 400 days of action, is beyond the types of preaching I am imagining, it offers an example of the invested embodiment of protest preaching.1 The next act comes in Ezekiel 4:9-17, where he eats defiled bread. By consuming bread that had been baked over cow dung, Ezekiel demonstrates the dire conditions that would exist during the siege. This shocking and plainly gross homiletic act was intended to awaken the audience to their actions. Here again, the urgency and severity of the problem were foregrounded. Lastly, in Ezekiel 5:1-4, Ezekiel shaves and divides his hair into thirds, showing the signs of judgment, death, and division on the way. These homiletic acts use striking metaphors to communicate God’s desire for the people. Each of them is an individual drama that exhibits similarities to the protest preaching that has been previously described.

Each act was the result of a fully embodied preaching performance. Ezekiel did not simply share or speak a message; his entire body became the message. Additionally, symbols were used in these acts to communicate meaning to the people. They also were all disruptive; the audacity of the actions paired with their performance in the public square served as a disturbance to the people’s actions, which provoked urgency and stimulated their moral imagination. Additionally, Ezekiel’s homiletic acts demonstrated a solidarity between the preacher and the people. By embodying the message, he becomes one with the people, showing solidarity in the struggle, and sharing in the pain of the people. As outlandish as these acts seem today, I believe that they offer a radical template for protest preaching. Protest preaching must do as much as it says. The preacher, like Ezekiel, is called to make the Word dramatically enfleshed to encourage the people into action. We turn now back to a more robust description and analysis of “Hoodie Sunday,” a modern example of Black protest preaching.

4. Hoodie Sunday

On a solemn Sunday in 2012, just weeks after the killing of Trayvon Martin, churches across the country witnessed a visual and theological rupture as preachers went to the pulpit in hoodies, carrying a can of iced tea and a bag of Skittles, mimicking that appearance of Trayvon when he was killed.2 Many congregations joined their pastors in this attire, as the hoodie became a sanctified symbol of solidarity, grief, and anger. These “Hoodie Sunday” services marked a profound moment in African American preaching where attire, liturgy, and proclamation merged to bear witness against racialized violence. These homiletic acts were a modern example of Black protest preaching as they built off the urgency of the moment, the particularity of an event, and called the congregation into immediate action.

In the weeks following Trayvon’s murder, protestors flooded the streets wearing hoodies, demanding justice for the slain teen (The CNN Wire Staff 2012). There was something about this tragedy that stoked the righteous indignation of the country, and that ultimately grabbed the attention of many Black pastors. The idea for coordinated Hoodie Sunday services was born through an online conversation between 30 and 40 Black pastors and church leaders who gathered in response to the protests that were happening across the country (Jones 2012). The call led to different communities figuring out their own version of a “Hoodie Sunday” liturgy, with varied responses catered to the needs of specific congregations (Jones 2012). As churches across denominations and regions took part, sermons were shared widely on social media, and images of Black pastors in hoodies went viral. In a real sense, sanctuaries became protest sites, and pulpits were engulfed in Black protest preaching.3

Using the four foundational aspects of Black protest preaching that were proposed earlier, (1) uses symbolic and embodied action to dramatize the sermon; (2) exists as a disruption of liturgical time and space; (3) is marked by urgency and a sense of direct confrontation; and (4) uses the worship service itself as a site of protest and solidarity, “Hoodie Sunday” services were a prime example of this practice. These sermons used hoodies, iced tea, and Skittles as symbolic markers to dramatize the moment and the message. Wearing a hoodie in the pulpit challenged many perceived norms of reverence and respectability in many Black church traditions. Wearing a hoodie was not countercultural so much as it was “counterliturgical” in that it offered an alternative kind of worship service. The hoodie became a homiletical device. It spoke before the preacher opened their mouth. It declared solidarity with the slain and served as a visible critique of a society that renders Black bodies suspicious based on appearance alone. In this way, the hoodie functioned like sackcloth in the Old Testament as a garment of mourning and protest. Secondly, these sermons superseded any previous liturgical planning and took precedence in the moment. Thirdly, these sermons were directly confronting the moment and served as a catalyst for congregations joining an already growing protest movement. Finally, the planning of these Hoodie Sunday sermons and the inclusion of the congregation furthered the solidarity between preacher and people, as in many instances, congregation members showed up in hoodies as well.

Sermonic Themes and Examples

Preliminary study suggests that Hoodie Sunday sermons followed certain thematic trajectories. Most began with lament, naming the pain and loss of Trayvon Martin’s life and often then shifting more broadly to lamenting similar kinds of losses in the community.4 They would also include theological affirmation around the sacredness of Black lives, asserting that Black lives are made in the image of God and are worthy of love, justice, and protection. These sermons also often called for protest action, encouraging the congregation to engage in advocacy and direct action in their communities. Congregations were also collaborators in these services. These sermons often included reading the names of Black people killed by police, moments of silence, and community prayers.5 By transforming the sanctuary into a space of protest, Hoodie Sunday services reclaimed the church as a site of social action. Furthermore, the integration of social media allowed these sermons to resonate far beyond the preaching moment. These sermons made their way around the internet and had an afterlife of effect in the public sphere. Preachers and their congregations, and more specifically those that managed the social media accounts, became curators of symbols, creators of public theology, and digital proclaimers. Hoodie Sunday sermons showed how hashtags and homilies could converge to spur protest and challenge the powers.

One of the more viral Hoodie Sunday sermons was preached by Howard-John Wesley at Alfred St. Baptist Church in Alexandria, VA.6 Entitled “A Rizpah Response,” Wesley uses the story of Rizpah and her grief found in 2 Samuel 21:1-14 to preach a masterful protest sermon about the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin. This sermon also fits all the markers of Black protest preaching that were mentioned earlier. Even the context speaks to the urgency. During the sermon, it is revealed that Wesley was not scheduled to preach that Sunday, but that the urgency of the moment called him back from what would have been a day off. Rhetorically, this demonstrates the importance of the moment and communicates to the congregation the full significance of this homiletic act. As the sermon begins, he enters the pulpit to a standing ovation, marking what feels like a transformation of the worship space. The applause is not to celebrate the preacher so much as to mark the moment; to demonstrate a solidarity with what is about to happen. His sermon begins well before he starts speaking, as he strategically pauses when he first gets to the pulpit. This allows the congregation’s response to swell, further solidifying the connection between the preacher and the people and allowing room for the emotion of the moment to grow. Wesley captures lament, righteous indignation, fear, and even hope in this sermon. It was a fully embodied performance, as he wore a Howard University hoodie, an HBCU located near this congregation, and throughout he danced on the line between preacher and person. At one point early in the sermon, he uses a version of the phrase, “the pastor in me wants to say this but the Howard-John in me says…” further placing himself and his emotions as a father into the moment. Similarly to what I have named earlier about my own experience preaching for a Hoodie Sunday service and what President Obama did in a few moments at a press conference, Wesley personalized and humanized the grief of the moment. It was clear from the audience’s response that this personalization brought about even further identification with the issue. It was not important whether you were Black, a father, or even a parent; that kind of sermonic personalization breeds connection across difference. And it is this kind of personalization and identification that I believe makes Black protest preaching a fruitful model for multiethnic congregations.

5. Black Protest Preaching for a Multicultural Environment

Black protest preaching can translate powerfully and provocatively to multicultural environments. This type of preaching is not simply “preaching while Black,” it is a homiletical stance of resistance, disruption, and embodied truth telling that emerges from the Black freedom struggle. The way that it uses symbolic acts, lament, direct confrontation, and communal memory to interrupt systems of injustice can work in a multicultural environment. Black protest preaching cultivates a homiletic of community and solidarity, hoping to bring everyone into the preaching ritual through drama and imagination. The more that the communal aspects of the preaching practice are emphasized, the more influential it can be in multicultural congregations. By humanizing issues of injustice, Black protest preaching becomes an otherwise preaching practice that connects people across differences.

In Other-Wise Preaching, John McClure proposes an ethic for preaching in postmodernity that emphasizes the connection between the entire congregation. For McClure, otherwise homiletics “strives to become wise about other human beings—to gain wisdom about and from others for preaching” (McClure 2001). He is arguing for preaching that makes the preacher and the members of the congregation feel obligated toward one another. McClure calls otherwise preaching a “deeply passive ‘act’ of proxemics—of ‘exposure’ to the other, of extraditing oneself to the neighbor (McClure 2001, p. 10). Utilizing French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, McClure notes that “the falseness of totality is exposed in face-to-face encounter with other human beings. In this encounter, the glory of otherness interrupts our attempts to cling to sameness” (McClure 2001, p. 8). In other words, our lived reality forces us to realize that our individual proclamations do not stand up to interaction with others. Black protest preaching does not allow members of the congregation to “cling to sameness” in that it forces a confrontation with the humanness of others. By personalizing the pain of tragedy, Black protest preaching creates space for any and everyone to identify with the horror of the moment. This becomes more important in multicultural contexts, as one cannot assume the same kind of cultural solidarity and identification that can be found in monocultural congregations. Black protest preaching attempts to build solidarity and even fellowship through its dramatic confrontation of injustice. The idea is that the entire congregation is discerning God’s will together through the sermon; the sermon itself becomes a place of koinonia.

In Preaching in an Age of Globalization, Eunjoo Mary Kim asks the following question, “if the ultimate concern for preaching is to help listeners search for the wholeness of truth, and if the context of preaching—the locus of God’s revelation—is interwoven into the wider human and natural world, where should the preacher go to discern the revelation of God?”(Kim 2010). One of Kim’s answers to this question is “the koinonia”(Kim 2010, p. 21). The koinonia is the result of God’s people fellowshipping in maturity, love, and togetherness. Despite differences in race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, and theological orientation, the koinonia is the community of true disciples of Christ (Kim 2010, p. 22). It is in this context that Kim suggests that the preacher can experience the real presence of Christ and that it is here that God reveals God’s divine will. Black protest preaching is a place for “the koinonia”; its emphasis on communal engagement allows the very act of preaching to be a place of communal discernment. I believe that the very experience of preaching together this way creates space for solidarity in multicultural congregations. Kim goes on to say that “we cannot live authentically without welcoming the other who vary in race, gender, ethnicity, culture, nationality, and sexuality, for we are created to reflect the personality of the triune God…humanization is a communal effort toward the transformation of the human community to become a new society like the perfect community of the Trinity” (Kim 2010, p. 48). Black protest preaching is a work of humanization that motivates the community to just actions in the world. Through its drama and sense of the moment, Black protest preaching is also a work of imagination that humanizes and builds connection.

Howard Thurman, noted preacher, mystic and theologian, had beliefs about the power of the imagination that are uniquely suited to this conversation about Black protest preaching in multicultural congregations. He was the pastor of one of the first intentionally multicultural congregations in the country, The Church for the Fellowship of all People, is from the Black church tradition, and while his preaching may not fit the parameters of Black protest preaching as named in this article, he was deeply concerned about building community through imagination. One of Thurman’s most explicit discourses on the power of imagination comes in his chapter on “Reconciliation in Disciplines of the Spirit”. In a conversation about how to get people to love, Thurman says that he needs to “find the opening or openings through which my love can flow into the life of the other…most often this involves an increased understanding of the other person. This is arrived at by a disciplined use of the imagination”(Fluker and Tumber 1998). Here, Thurman wants the reader to begin to see the imagination as a tool. He mentions that when one typically thinks of imagination as a “tool,” we do so when we view it in the hands of an artist (Fluker and Tumber 1998). Thurman then makes the claim for the place where he feels that imagination has its greatest import:

“But the imagination shows its greatest powers as the angelos of God in the miracle it creates when one man, standing on his own ground, is able while there to put himself in another man’s place. To send his imagination forth to establish a point of focus in another man’s spirit and from that vantage point so to blend with the other’s landscape that what he sees and feels is authentic, this is the great adventure in human relations”.

(Fluker and Tumber 1998, pp. 182–83)

Angelos is a Greek term for messenger. Thurman is suggesting that the imagination is a messenger, a carrier of a message that allows for connection. For Thurman, the imagination is a tool that could be wielded to get to the heart of another person. And this is where the emphasis on the imaginative use of drama in Black protest preaching creates space for connection between members in the congregation. The more that imagination is considered in the creation of these sermons, the more people can join to fight for justice. Black protest preaching creates solidarity through a collective call to action that imaginative, dramatic, otherwise, and based in fellowship.

6. Conclusions: Cultivating Black Protest Preaching in Multicultural Congregations

Black protest preaching is a practice rooted in the Black prophetic tradition that I believe can serve as an example to the wider church, specifically multicultural congregations that are committed to justice. The shared homiletic act of dramatic truth-telling, lament, and hope calls a diverse congregation to the world of building the beloved community in the world. Black protest preaching disrupts complacency and summons the whole congregation to become participants in God’s liberating work. For multicultural congregations, cultivating this kind of preaching requires both deep pastoral attentiveness and bold prophetic imagination as the context creates some barriers to solidarity absent from Black congregations. What follows are practical considerations for nurturing this homiletic in ways that build solidarity across difference.

1. 

Ground the Practice in Shared Theological Commitments

Preaching in multicultural congregations that is influenced by Black protest preaching must be understood as a faithful expression of the gospel. This is a practice that must be worked into the ongoing liturgy of the congregation and not merely something that occurs on a special occasion. By rooting protest preaching in Biblical witness, like Ezekiel’s proto-protest homiletic acts, preachers in multicultural contexts can help congregations see protest as central to the Gospel’s call for justice. One might even make the move towards naming Jesus’ flipping of the tables as another prime example of preaching protest in the Bible to further the theological grounding of the practice.

2. 

Listen Deeply to the Congregational Context

In multicultural environments, protest preaching must grow from an authentic reading of the congregation’s lived realities. This means listening, in formal and informal settings, to the stories that members share about experiencing injustice, what symbols resonate with their spirits, and where solidarity is already emerging. This kind of active listening builds trust amongst the congregation and ensures that protest preaching is an expression of the congregation’s shared life rather than a performance imported from outside. I would advise that sermon talk-backs be a regular part of multicultural congregations trying to build a protest homiletic. This would allow members of the congregation more space to share their stories.

3. 

Use Symbols that Invite Empathy Across Difference

The visual language of protest, hoodies, iced tea, Skittles, chains, etc., helps set the stage for developing the immersion into the moment that is necessary for protest preaching. In multicultural congregations, symbols should connect directly to the injustice being named while offering points of identification for people of varied backgrounds. Everyone has or at least is familiar with hoodies, for example. Also, acts such as writing the names of victims and placing them on the altar can invite broad participation while maintaining the dramatic and embodied character of Black protest preaching. Inviting members of the congregation to participate in this preaching is paramount, as the more the congregation embodies the sermon, the more that they bring their own symbols to bear in the preaching moment, the greater import that the message has for the community.

4. 

Disrupt Liturgical Space with Clear Framing

Disruption is essential to protest preaching, but in contexts where traditions differ, framing matters. When changing attire, reordering the service, or introducing a symbolic act, explain its theological grounding so that all can interpret it as worship. This framing helps prevent misunderstanding and deepens the congregation’s engagement in the act as a moment of shared witness. Furthermore, because of the differences in background, framing is necessary to even make sure that everyone is aware of any tragic event. While I would like to imagine that a tragedy like the murder of Trayvon would resonate with the entire community, there are many who might simply be unaware of the issue, especially those from different cultural backgrounds.

5. 

Make the Congregation Co-Proclaimers

Black protest preaching is most powerful when it transforms the congregation from an audience into collaborators. In a multicultural setting, this might include multilingual readings. Can you imagine, for example, people from many different backgrounds all in hoodies, line up across the altar saying in their own language, “I am Trayvon.” The harmony of voices would create a modern Pentecost protest that would surely resonate throughout the congregation. The aim is to embody the koinonia Eunjoo Mary Kim describes, where the sermon becomes a communal act of discernment and solidarity, not merely a solo performance from the pulpit.

6. 

Hold Lament and Hope Together

While protest preaching often begins in grief, it cannot remain there. In multicultural congregations, where members may have varied histories with protest, preachers should guide the movement from lament to the kind of hope that fuels action. This hope is built on the shared belief that God’s justice is still breaking in, and that the congregation is called to embody that justice together.

7. 

Extend the Witness Beyond the Sanctuary

The afterlife of a protest sermon can be as important as its delivery. Encouraging congregants to share images, clips, or testimonies on social media expands the reach of the message and invites others into the work. In diverse congregations, where members are connected to multiple networks, this digital witness can ripple far beyond the immediate community.

Black protest preaching in multicultural contexts is not about diluting its prophetic edge for broader appeal. Rather, it is about amplifying its witness so that it can be heard, felt, and acted upon by people across differences. When done well, it becomes a site of communal imagination and solidarity where we learn to see through one another’s eyes and act together for the sake of God’s justice. The goal is to preach so that diverse congregations find themselves as the angelos of God in the world, a unified body bearing witness to the gospel’s power to disrupt, reconcile, and bring life to dry bones. Hopefully, then, everyone would feel the sting of a loss of someone who looked like Trayvon, regardless of what they looked like themselves.