Preaching on difficult topics presupposes that God has a vision for diverse groups of people to actively engage in inclusive conversation. Through preaching sermons that name injustices and places of division, we invite the Holy Spirit to draw members who have been silenced into communal dialogue. By preaching God’s ministry of reconciliation, we challenge current praxis and create a longing for God’s authentic community to emerge. This project sought to practice dialogue and reconciliation guided and empowered by the Holy Spirit. Our thesis project preached a series of sermons that named the difficult topics of race, gender, power, and class to identify how our practices around these topics were creating division within the multi-cultural family of New Life Covenant Church. Using conversational preaching, we experienced in the sermonic moment why God calls us to honor our diversity. Examples from the biblical narrative reflected ways that we, too, could give evidence that the Holy Spirit was at work in, through, and among us, reconciling us to God and to one another. The congregation vocalized the concerns of silenced voices in our conversations, both before and after the sermon, that could hinder movement toward the goal of becoming an authentic community. I propose it is the role of preaching to introduce divisive topics in the sermonic moment. Preachers must not avoid conflict, we must embrace it. By using scriptural narratives as our back story, preachers can ignite the process of giving new language and perspective to difficult communal conversations.
