Abstract
It was hearing a woman preach in my teens that stirred my sense of a calling. She was a laywoman who spoke with freshness and honesty about her faith and her words inspired my own faith journey. In this book, Liz Shercliff asks a number of questions. What does it mean to preach as a woman? What kind of preaching might women need to hear? How might you find more honesty in your own preaching?
Too often, she says, debates have been about whether women can or should preach. In this book she wants to say that women should preach as women. Her approach is refreshing. She outlines the complexity of the patriarchal narrative in which we live and which has shaped the story of faith we share. Women need to know and acknowledge this and think through the different options for preaching in it, while, at the same time, critiquing its silencing of women.
She is experienced in teaching homiletics and offers short insights from different theologians about how we interpret and preach from the Scriptures that we have. However, the real joy of the book is learning from Liz herself. She talks about her own journey of seeking to preach with integrity, to move from the inherited pattern to one that more authentically represents her own female lived experience. ‘I try to speak from a recognizably women’s perspective and give voice to individual women too, particularly biblical women’ (p. 34). She shares many extracts from her own sermons and constructive suggestions about how to approach writing and preaching a sermon. It is extremely invigorating to see the way she brings new insights to familiar texts by asking three simple questions. Where is the power? What’s on the page? What’s the underlying story? Alongside the extracts from her own sermons she provides a ‘Time for reflection’ at the end of each chapter.
For the new preacher, many of the insights of this book will be invaluable, instilling a confidence in finding an authentic preaching voice. For an experienced preacher like myself, the book is refreshing, challenging me to reflect on my own preaching style and to question it. It is a book for women about preaching as a woman, but so many of the insights are helpful for any preacher, and so I hope it will be read by men as well as by women. In this book Liz has generously opened herself to us and shown us the workings behind her preaching. I have never heard her preach but the book makes me want to. It also makes me want to preach and reminds me of that sense of calling I first had listening to a woman preaching in a space which, until that point, had seemed only for men.