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Angela Yarber
  

Rev. Dr. Angela Yarber holds a Ph.D. in Art and Religion from the Graduate Theological Union and she is author of Embodying the Feminine in the Dances of the World's Religions (2011) and Dance in Scripture (2013). She is currently Pastor for Preaching and Worship at Wake Forest Baptist Church. For more on her scholarship, art, or preaching, see www.angelayarber.com

                                                 

 
 
 
  
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The Gendered Pulpit

Sex, Body, and Desire in Preaching and Worship

 

 

In this book of compelling testimony and theologically challenging reflection, Angela Yarber, through her own witness as a lesbian Baptist minister, scholar, and artist, invites us to maintain the struggle for life-affirming, justice-loving, spiritually alive communities that practice radical love and bless the world.

              -Rev. Rita Nakashima Brock, PhD.

 

 

In The Gendered Pulpit, Dr. Yarber complicates the unspoken historical borders of exclusion in the Christian faith. By naming these silenced borders, she helps undo these exclusions and shows the ugly fissures of the Patriarchal system..

                   -Rev. Cl�udio Carvalhaes, Ph.D.

 

 

For all those who seek and yearn to preach the Good News, and for all who have lived in fear that the complexities of your own embodied ambiguity could "get in the way" of that Good News, pick up this book and read.

            -Rev. Marcia W. Mount Shoop, Ph.D.

 

 

The Gendered Pulpit will make your mind and spirit dance.   It provides practical methods for including women and LGBTQ people as worship leaders

                                  -Rev. Kittredge Cherry

 

 

Angela Yarber has written a delightfully insightful and helpful book that is both scholarly and personal.  

                     -Aaron Douglas Weaver, Ph.D.

 

  

From Chapter 1

 

Introductions

 

On a sunny Sunday morning in California, I was talking with my congregants following worship. I made it a point to find nine-year-old Jake because he had helped lead in worship that morning. I wanted to thank him and tell him that he did a good job. As I spoke with him, his five- year-old sister, Emma, stood behind him with her little head down, peeking out from behind her hair to glance up at her then twenty-something pastor.

  

"Hello, Emma," I said, knowing that she wouldn't respond. Emma didn't really talk to grown-ups, even if they were only twenty-something. "She's embarrassed," Jake informed me. "Embarrassed? Why?" I asked her brother, confused. "Because at home she dresses up and pretends to be you, dancing around the house and preaching. She even wears a scarf and pretends it's one of those things," he said, pointing to my stole. Emma's grandmother approached and added another detail to the story. "Sometimes she serves communion to her stuffed animals and then performs a dance," Grandma Betty informed me. Emma blushed and smiled. I squatted down to look in her little eyes and said, "Keep dancing, Emma; you can be anything you want to be."

  

Needless to say, I was flattered. But flattery does not capture the essence of Emma's emulation. Instead, I think back on Emma, now approaching her teens, and the other little girls in that congregation. I think about their perception of what it means to be a preacher. For Emma, her vision of a preacher is a young woman. When she receives communion, it is a lesbian who holds the bread and proclaims, "The body of Christ, broken for you." And when someone asks Emma what a professional dancer looks like, she describes her healthy minister who dances in worship and while preaching. If someone were to tell Emma that women or LGBTQ persons are not called to preach, she would have no idea what they are talking about. So, I begin a book about gendering the pulpit with the story of a five-year-old girl dressing up and pretending to be her preacher, dancing, proclaiming the Word, and serving communion to her stuffed animals.

 


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