“Nevertheless, She Preached” (NSP) held its annual conference this week at the 04 Center in Austin, Texas. The gathering, now in its eighth year, brought together in-person and virtual attendees from around the world to hear faith and justice leaders preach on the theme of “Liberate: Imagining Faith Decolonized.”
In addition to the sermons and lectures, participants could participate in embodiment experiences, network with those sharing similar affinities, and receive one-on-one spiritual direction.
The conference opened on Sunday night with readings from Austin-area poets and open-mic poetry from participants. A Monday evening concert featured folk singer Crys Matthews.
Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart opened the keynote addresses on Monday with a sermon titled “Faith on Wilderness Road,” using the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-40) as her text. Washington-Leaphart is a theologian and activist currently serving as the Strategic Partnerships Director for Political Research Associates.
In her sermon, she connected various “stress-test” simulations, such as the FEMA emergency preparedness plans that went unused during Hurricane Katrina, to the cultural milieu in which Western Christianity finds itself. She described current and potential responses from the church to its own “stress tests.”
“How does a church that believes it is in imminent danger respond?” she asked. “What does a faith that perceives itself under threat do?”
She said one response could be found in a call Donald Trump held with faith leaders on the night before his recent presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. The call began with televangelist and Trump advisor Paula White-Cain praying against any demonic attacks against Trump.
The former President then joined the call and said, “We are a nation that’s failing right now. If Vice President Kamala Harris becomes President, she will ramp up the Left’s war on Christianity. Christians will be reduced to second-class citizens, and that’s exactly what they want.”
Trump warned that “Harris wants to have millions of criminal illegal aliens become citizens and vote, which would destroy the voting power of Christian conservatives forever.”
This stress-test response, according to Washington-Leapheart, was to interpret “demands for accountability as demonic attacks.” It consisted of “using sacred texts and sacred rituals as pre-texts for inciting spiritual and material violence. Instead of passing the peace [it was] spreading desperation and fear.”
Given this response, Washington-Leapheart said, “It’s really no wonder, then, that Christianity’s legacy is colonization. A church in danger of obsolescence resorts to extreme measures to survive. A church that miscalculates its own vulnerabilities arrogantly rejects self-examination and, instead, lashes out against anyone and anything in its path.”
However, Washington-Leaphart said the sermon text from Acts offers an alternative strategy.
With the Jesus movement growing and becoming an institution, she said, Peter ordained Philip to serve the community and tend to the needs of the hungry. “I’m sure Philip,” Washington-Leaphart said, “was excited about his commissioning to serve.” She added, “But I think he never imagined where his call would lead him.”
This was during a time when the early church was facing actual severe persecution, as opposed to the perceived persecution many in the American church see themselves in.
This put Philip in a position of ministering to “strangers in unfamiliar places” while Peter and John “got to be back in Jerusalem, dazzling the people with their anointed performances.” But Philip, Washington-Leaphart said, “gets directed by the Spirit to go away from Jerusalem, to a place called ‘Wilderness Road’” where he meets an Ethiopian eunuch.
Washington-Leapheart continued: “What if we allowed the spirit to show us to ‘wilderness road,’ to places unexpected, to the hoods and the ghettos and the corners that we vilify and romanticize at the same time? What if we follow the spirit to these places? Not to do charity, not for missional voyeurism, but to actually encounter Christ?”
She spoke of encountering Christ along “Wilderness Road,” away from the centers of power and with a spirit of curiosity, as a practice of decolonization, the conference’s theme.
Washington-Leapheart’s sermon set the stage for subsequent keynote presentations focusing on the struggle for liberation for the Palestinian people. These were given by Lisa Sharon Harper, Rev. Dr. Crystal Silva-McCormick, Rabbi Alissa Wise and Patty Krawec.
Harper, a public theologian and the founder of Freedom Road, walked participants through a history of Palestine and the Palestinian people, from the opening pages of the Hebrew Bible, through the actions of the Israeli government in the wake of the October 7, 2023 attacks from Hamas.
Speaking to how Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been hemmed in and killed, both before and after October 7 and in U.S. involvement in Israeli actions, she asked attendees: “So what if, when we govern in ways that topple or crush or cover over or fail to recognize or erase the image of God–what if when we do that we are actually declaring war against God, the King of the Kingdom of God? What will it take to renounce the lie of human hierarchy? What would it look like to repair what our politics have broken God’s world?”
Silva-McCormick, who grew up in El Paso as the daughter and granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, drew connections between the border policies of the U.S. and the policies of Israel toward Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
As a professor of evangelism and missions at Austin Seminary, Silva-McCormick confessed to wanting to “throw the book across the room” when she teaches her subject area. “Everything I read is colonialism,” she said.
“Christians coming with the cross in the name of Jesus and the Bible and stealing people’s land? Owning human beings? In the name of Jesus. Extracting everything they can from the land? In the name of Jesus.” She added, “And that should make us angry.”
Speaking to those who would bristle at that anger, she said: “We have made it seem that the only way to have peace and the only way to have love is to dialogue at the expense of the most vulnerable in this world. We are going to dialogue vulnerable communities into their very death every single day in the name of Christian love.”
Rabbi Wise, a co-founder of Jewish Voice for Peace, shared how her history as an observant Jew has not been enough to prevent leaders of establishment Jewish organizations from saying she is a “self-hating Jew, or worse.” This is because, she said, she embraces diaspora and rejects Zionism.
“At this point,” she said, “ almost everyone who speaks up for Palestine in one way or another has been lobbed with the accusation that their voice for justice and freedom for Palestinians is anti-Jewish.”
She added that “the conflation of anti-Jewish hatred and critique of Israel has become an actual threat to Jewish safety itself, as it threatens to desensitize us against actual anti-semitism, which has been on the rise in the U.S. thanks to Trump and the far-right.”
Krawec, an Anishnaabe writer from Lac Seul First Nation, added in a round-table discussion on Tuesday that “the left really needs to examine the antisemitism that it carries.” She said, “Israel is not controlling the U.S. government, and yet so many leftists are promoting that idea, which is rooted in globalist conspiracy theories.”
Drawing on Rabbi Wise’s Jewish idea that we should read our sacred texts repeatedly until they “read ethically,” Krawec used her keynote to explore themes of decolonization in the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11.
She suggested that the scattering that occurred after the tower fell, not the unity and centralization it brought about, was the true “return to home” for the people.
When asked about this in a later session, Krawec said: “I started to try to think about this differently, and thought, ‘so if they are all speaking the same language and holding the same beliefs, well, that’s residential schools. That’s plantations. Everyone speaking the same language and using the same currency is very important to empire.”
Each keynote speaker was invited to share what gives them hope. Washington-Leapheart replied, “At the core of the Christian faith’s narrative is that even when things die, new life can emerge. So even if the Christian church has to die, what emerges will be our salvation.”
Nevertheless, She Preached began in 2017 to counter the lack of female representation in Baptist seminaries and churches. Since then, it has increasingly worked to center the voices of not just women, but also queer and BIPOC voices. Each of this year’s keynote speakers represented one or more of these identities.
Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
