Dialectical Formation and Moral Agitation in Contemporary Homiletics
Rev. Dr. Paris L. Smith, Sr.
Founder, Justice Scholars Society
Doctoral Researcher, Public Theology and Community Engagement
Hampton University School of Religion
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-3401-9671
Justice Scholars Society Research Series
Publication I — Foundational Conceptual Essay
Version 1.5 — JSS Publication Edition
Designated date: November 9, 2026
Abstract
Contemporary congregations encounter persistent social contradiction through racialized inequality, institutional mistrust, political polarization, economic precarity, and recurring moral exhaustion. These conditions present a significant challenge for prophetic preaching, particularly when proclamation exposes injustice without adequately preparing communities to sustain moral engagement beyond the sermonic event. This essay introduces Prophetic Stabilization Preaching (PSP) as a constructive Black homiletical framework integrating dialectical formation with disciplined moral agitation. Drawing upon Samuel DeWitt Proctor's dialectical homiletics, Frederick Douglass's rhetorical confrontation with moral contradiction, Black liberation theology, womanist theological criticism, and African American preaching traditions, PSP advances four interrelated movements: Faith Stabilization, Emotional Stabilization, Vocational Stabilization, and Prophetic Mobilization. The framework proposes that prophetic proclamation should cultivate theological coherence, emotional endurance, vocational responsibility, and communal agency while confronting unjust realities. Stabilization is distinguished from pacification: the former develops capacities for responsible resistance, whereas the latter suppresses dissent to preserve existing arrangements. PSP is sequential in its formative logic but recursive in practice, recognizing that prophetic action generates new contradictions that require renewed interpretation, discernment, and formation. The essay advances PSP as a constructive contribution to contemporary homiletics and public theology while identifying questions for subsequent empirical investigation.
Keywords: Prophetic Stabilization Preaching; Black prophetic preaching; dialectical homiletics; Frederick Douglass; Samuel DeWitt Proctor; moral agitation; congregational formation; womanist theology; public theology; prophetic mobilization
1. Introduction: Beyond the Moment of Prophetic Proclamation
The contemporary Black pulpit confronts a theological and pastoral challenge that cannot be resolved through rhetorical intensity alone. Congregations gather amid conditions that threaten their material well-being, moral imagination, theological confidence, and capacity for sustained public engagement. Racialized inequality, economic insecurity, institutional betrayal, political hostility, and the continuous circulation of social crises intensify the demands placed upon religious communities.
Within these circumstances, prophetic preaching remains indispensable. The preacher must expose injustice, challenge institutional hypocrisy, confront theological distortions, and summon communities toward moral responsibility. Yet the effectiveness of prophetic proclamation cannot be assessed solely by the intensity of congregational response or the clarity of denunciation.
A sermon may awaken conscience without cultivating durable responsibility. It may provoke righteous anger without developing discernment. It may inspire immediate participation without preparing hearers for the disappointments, conflicts, and long-term commitments that accompany meaningful social transformation.
Tisdale (2010) approaches prophetic preaching as a practice requiring attention to both the demands of justice and the pastoral circumstances of the congregation. Osmer (2008) similarly situates practical theology within disciplined interpretation of concrete situations and the development of faithful responses. These perspectives invite a further homiletical question: What capacities must preaching cultivate within communities repeatedly called to confront injustice?
This essay proposes Prophetic Stabilization Preaching (PSP) as a constructive response.
Prophetic Stabilization Preaching is a constructive Black homiletical framework in which dialectical proclamation forms communities to interpret contradiction without theological collapse, cultivate emotional resilience without denying suffering, sustain vocational responsibility amid instability, and engage unjust realities through disciplined prophetic action. Stabilization therefore functions not as an alternative to agitation but as a formative condition for its sustained moral practice.
The framework advances four interrelated movements: Faith Stabilization, Emotional Stabilization, Vocational Stabilization, and Prophetic Mobilization.
Its central proposition is that prophetic preaching must do more than disturb the conscience. It must help form communities capable of responding faithfully to what conscience discovers.
2. Black Prophetic Preaching as Historical and Communal Formation
Black preaching cannot be understood apart from the historical circumstances that shaped African American Christianity. The religious practices of enslaved Africans and their descendants developed within systems of domination that attempted to regulate both material existence and theological imagination.
Raboteau (2004) demonstrates how enslaved African Americans appropriated and reinterpreted Christian traditions within the realities of bondage. Their religious practices included resources for communal identity, spiritual resistance, and alternative understandings of freedom.
The Black preaching tradition later developed forms of proclamation that integrated biblical interpretation, communal memory, theological imagination, and moral responsibility. Mitchell (1990) emphasizes Black cultural expression and celebration within preaching, while LaRue (2000) examines the interpretive relationship among Scripture, African American experience, and proclamation.
Crawford's study of call-and-response, developed with Thomas H. Troeger, illuminates the participatory and musical dimensions of African American preaching (Crawford & Troeger, 1995). Fry Brown (2008) further examines the embodied dimensions of sermonic communication through voice, movement, and animation.
Together, these contributions establish preaching as more than the transmission of religious information. It is a communal practice through which meaning is interpreted, identity affirmed, memory preserved, and hope expressed.
Nevertheless, Black preaching should not be romanticized as uniformly prophetic or universally liberative. Black churches, like other institutions, remain vulnerable to hierarchy, exclusion, accommodation, and internal contradiction.
Cone's theological work insists that Christian proclamation remain accountable to concrete realities of racial oppression (Cone, 1997, 2011). Womanist theologians provide equally necessary correctives. Cannon (1988) locates moral wisdom within Black women's experiences of oppression, while Williams (1993) challenges theological accounts that glorify suffering or obscure the struggle for survival and quality of life.
These interventions establish an indispensable boundary for PSP: congregational formation must never become a religious demand that oppressed people accommodate injustice.
The historical resources of Black preaching therefore establish a double responsibility. Proclamation must confront oppressive realities while cultivating communities capable of resisting their dehumanizing consequences.
PSP proposes a systematic account of this formative responsibility.
3. Samuel DeWitt Proctor: Dialectical Proclamation and Theological Formation
Samuel DeWitt Proctor provides a significant homiletical foundation for understanding preaching as a disciplined theological practice that engages the contradictions of human existence while maintaining the integrity of Christian proclamation. In The Certain Sound of the Trumpet: Crafting a Sermon of Authority, Proctor (1994) develops an approach to sermon preparation grounded in a governing theological proposition, contextual awareness, biblical interpretation, and intentional sermonic development.
Proctor begins with the conviction that responsible preaching requires knowledge of the congregation's circumstances. The preacher must attend to the social, psychological, and theological realities of the people receiving the message. His description of the congregation's contextual situation as the sermon's ecology underscores that proclamation cannot be separated from the circumstances in which it is heard (Proctor, 1994, chap. 1).
This contextual responsibility becomes particularly significant when congregations arrive for worship carrying anxiety, grief, social uncertainty, institutional disappointment, and competing interpretations of contemporary events. Proctor's approach does not permit the preacher to disregard these conditions. Instead, the sermon must establish a meaningful relationship between the theological proposition and the human circumstances requiring its proclamation.
Within his dialectical method, the proposition establishes the sermon's governing theological affirmation. As the sermon develops, the proposition becomes the thesis, which responds to the condition or contradiction identified as the antithesis. The relevant question emerging from their relationship directs the development of the synthesis, the principal body of the sermon (Proctor, 1994, chaps. 1–6).
Importantly, Proctor does not impose a mechanically fixed sequence. His illustrative sermons show that thesis and antithesis may appear in different orders, depending on the theological and rhetorical demands of the message. What remains essential is the coherence of the relationship among the governing proposition, the condition requiring attention, the theological response, and the sermon's developed argument.
Proctor's treatment of the antithesis is especially important for PSP. He identifies theological, ethical, social, psychological, political, economic, and spiritual conditions as legitimate concerns for proclamation. His examples include racial inequality, institutional hypocrisy, economic injustice, social exclusion, and questions of human freedom and moral responsibility (Proctor, 1994, chap. 3).
These examples establish that dialectical preaching cannot be confined to abstract theological discussion or private religious consolation. The preacher must recognize the contradictions confronting the congregation and the wider community.
Proctor also distinguishes among expository, narrative, topical, and thematic sermons while identifying devotional, evangelistic, didactic, and social-action purposes for proclamation. His method accommodates these different forms without requiring every sermon to possess an identical structure (Proctor, 1994, chap. 4).
Particularly significant is his recognition that social-action preaching may seek to strengthen commitments to justice, fairness, peace, community, and compassion. His illustrative treatment of the Good Samaritan demonstrates how the recognition of suffering can become the occasion for theological interpretation and moral responsibility (Proctor, 1994, chap. 5).
The relevant question plays a decisive role in this process. It maintains the sermon's integrity by connecting the theological thesis to the implications that the congregation must consider. The synthesis subsequently develops an answer that remains accountable to the sermon's governing proposition (Proctor, 1994, chaps. 5–6).
Proctor's method also requires pastoral judgment. Although controversial realities must be addressed, proclamation should not provoke hostility merely for rhetorical effect. The preacher must distinguish the necessary discomfort produced by theological truth from avoidable alienation generated through careless communication.
These commitments establish an important foundation for Prophetic Stabilization Preaching.
PSP appropriates Proctor's contextual and dialectical resources while extending their formative implications. Where Proctor provides a method for constructing sermons through theological proposition, antithesis, thesis, relevant question, and synthesis, PSP asks how such proclamation may contribute to congregational formation over time.
The distinction is foundational. Proctor's method addresses the sermon’s internal theological and rhetorical development. PSP advances a constructive framework identifying four interrelated formative movements: Faith Stabilization, Emotional Stabilization, Vocational Stabilization, and Prophetic Mobilization.
These movements are not additional stages within Proctor's sermon outline. They constitute a separate account of the capacities prophetic preaching seeks to cultivate.
The relationship is therefore one of intellectual inheritance and constructive development rather than conceptual identity.
Proctor supplies resources for dialectical sermon construction; PSP advances a framework connecting theological interpretation, emotional endurance, vocational responsibility, and sustained prophetic engagement.
4. Frederick Douglass: Moral Agitation and the Exposure of Contradiction
Frederick Douglass's July 5, 1852 address at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, provides a foundational example of moral confrontation through exposing contradiction. Delivered during the nation's celebration of independence, the address challenged the relationship between American declarations of liberty and the continued enslavement of African Americans (Douglass, 1852).
Douglass's rhetorical force emerged from more than denunciation. He examined the nation's professed commitments and demonstrated the moral incompatibility between those commitments and its institutional practices. His address confronted civic celebration, religious hypocrisy, and the refusal to extend recognized principles of human freedom to enslaved persons.
I interpret this rhetorical practice through the category of Douglassian moral agitation: the disciplined exposure of contradictions between professed values and lived realities to disturb moral complacency and demand ethical accountability.
This terminology offers a contemporary analytical interpretation of Douglass's practice, not a claim that Douglass himself formulated this framework.
Prophetic Stabilization Preaching brings this interpretation into conversation with dialectical homiletics. Where moral agitation exposes contradiction, stabilization concerns the theological and communal formation necessary to sustain responsible engagement with that contradiction.
The relationship is complementary:
Agitation exposes the contradiction; stabilization forms the community that must confront it.
Without agitation, stabilization risks becoming accommodation. Without formation, agitation risks remaining episodic, leaving communities morally awakened but insufficiently prepared for sustained action.
PSP therefore understands prophetic proclamation as both disruptive and formative.
5. The Four Movements of Prophetic Stabilization Preaching
The distinctive architecture of PSP consists of four interrelated movements. These are constructive homiletical categories rather than empirically established psychological stages or a rigid formula that every sermon must reproduce.
5.1 Faith Stabilization: Interpreting Contradiction Without Theological Collapse
Faith Stabilization concerns the congregation's capacity to interpret suffering, uncertainty, institutional failure, and social contradiction without surrendering theological coherence.
The problem is not that faithful people encounter questions. The problem arises when available theological resources prove insufficient for engaging those questions honestly.
A sermon committed to Faith Stabilization does not deny suffering or promise immediate deliverance. It cultivates interpretive practices that help congregants distinguish institutional failure from the total collapse of theological meaning.
Thurman's (1996) examination of the interior consequences of oppression provides an important resource. His attention to fear, hatred, and the spiritual life of the disinherited demonstrates that oppressive conditions affect both public relationships and interior experience.
Faith Stabilization therefore seeks theological coherence without demanding unquestioning certainty.
Its guiding question is: What must this congregation learn to believe, question, and interpret faithfully while confronting realities that remain unresolved?
5.2 Emotional Stabilization: Sustaining Hope Without Denying Suffering
Emotional Stabilization addresses the affective demands of sustained moral engagement.
Prophetic preaching may awaken anger, grief, sorrow, urgency, and hope. These responses can be morally appropriate when communities confront racial violence, institutional exclusion, or suffering.
However, emotional intensity should not be confused with enduring capacity.
Steinke (2006) examines how anxiety influences congregational relationships and leadership processes. His work offers a useful conversation partner for understanding the emotional conditions under which religious communities respond to disruption.
Within Black preaching traditions, lament, testimony, celebration, communal response, and embodied proclamation provide resources for expressing emotion collectively (Crawford & Troeger, 1995; Fry Brown, 2008; Mitchell, 1990).
PSP interprets these practices as potential resources for emotional formation without assuming that particular sermonic techniques automatically produce measurable psychological resilience.
Emotional Stabilization does not demand calmness as evidence of maturity. Righteous anger may remain necessary. Lament may remain unresolved.
Its concern is whether preaching helps communities sustain moral engagement without allowing despair, cynicism, or reactive hostility to govern their collective response.
Its guiding question is: How does proclamation help a congregation carry the emotional demands of justice without denying pain or surrendering hope?
5.3 Vocational Stabilization: Forming Durable Moral Responsibility
Vocational Stabilization concerns the movement from moral awareness toward sustained responsibility.
A congregation may understand that injustice exists without understanding how its members are called to respond.
Prophetic preaching must therefore connect theological conviction to concrete practices of discipleship, leadership, service, and public responsibility.
Jennings (2020) emphasizes the formative character of theological education and the importance of belonging within Christian formation. His work provides resources for understanding why religious knowledge cannot be separated from the persons and communities being formed through it.
PSP extends this concern into congregational proclamation.
Vocational Stabilization recognizes that prophetic responsibility is not restricted to clergy or public activists. Teachers, parents, students, workers, administrators, community leaders, and professionals encounter moral responsibilities within their respective spheres of influence.
The sermon must help them interpret those responsibilities theologically.
Such preaching resists reducing prophetic engagement to episodic enthusiasm. It encourages commitments that endure after immediate emotional intensity diminishes.
Its guiding question is: What responsibilities must this congregation recognize, organize, and sustain in response to the realities it has discerned?
5.4 Prophetic Mobilization: Translating Formation into Sustained Action
Prophetic Mobilization constitutes the outward movement of PSP.
Theological coherence, emotional endurance, and vocational responsibility cannot remain private achievements. They must inform concrete engagement with conditions threatening human dignity and communal flourishing.
Prophetic Mobilization may involve institutional accountability, community partnerships, educational initiatives, economic assistance, public advocacy, organizational reform, or other practices appropriate to the congregation's context.
Cone's liberationist theology reinforces the need to connect Christian proclamation to the material realities of oppression (Cone, 1997, 2011). Tisdale (2010) likewise underscores the importance of integrating prophetic responsibility with pastoral attentiveness.
Within PSP, mobilization emerges from formation rather than reaction alone.
The congregation must ask not only what injustice requires immediate attention but also what resources, relationships, disciplines, and commitments will sustain its response.
Prophetic engagement cannot be assessed solely by public declarations or the number of programs offered. It must also consider whether community needs are being addressed, whether residents participate in defining those needs, and whether institutional practices remain accountable to the people they intend to serve.
Its guiding question is: How will this congregation translate theological conviction into sustained, accountable, and contextually responsible action?
6. Stabilization Is Not Pacification: A Necessary Theological Distinction
The terminology of stabilization carries an inherent danger.
Throughout American history, appeals to stability, moderation, unity, and social order have been used to preserve unequal arrangements and discourage challenges to institutional power.
PSP must therefore reject interpretations equating stabilization with obedience, silence, emotional suppression, or avoidance of conflict.
Prophetic stabilization is not pacification.
Pacification seeks to reduce resistance to prevailing conditions. Prophetic stabilization seeks to cultivate capacities necessary to transform those conditions.
Pacification protects institutions from discomfort. Prophetic stabilization equips communities to confront institutional contradictions responsibly.
Pacification may demand endurance without justice. Prophetic stabilization understands endurance as a resource for pursuing justice.
Womanist theological criticism is indispensable to maintaining this distinction. Williams (1993) challenges theological accounts that normalize suffering, while Cannon (1988) and Grant (1989) insist that theological reflection take Black women's lived experiences and moral agency seriously.
These perspectives prevent PSP from treating suffering as inherently redemptive or interpreting resilience as an obligation to remain within abusive circumstances.
A stabilized congregation is not necessarily a quiet congregation.
It may become more demanding, discerning, organized, and willing to confront unjust authority.
The distinction between stabilization and pacification therefore functions as a normative safeguard within the framework itself.
7. Sequential Formation and Recursive Prophetic Practice
Although PSP identifies four movements, their relationship should not be interpreted as a rigid linear progression.
The framework is sequential in its formative logic but recursive in its practice.
Faith Stabilization contributes to theological interpretation. Emotional Stabilization attends to the demands of suffering and struggle. Vocational Stabilization clarifies responsibility. Prophetic Mobilization translates formation into action.
Yet prophetic action frequently produces new experiences of contradiction.
A congregation may confront institutional resistance after initiating a community partnership. Public advocacy may expose internal disagreements. Leadership reform may generate anxiety. Social engagement may reveal previously unrecognized forms of injustice.
These developments require renewed theological interpretation, emotional formation, vocational discernment, and public response.
The movement therefore returns upon itself.
This recursive structure distinguishes PSP from approaches that treat the sermon's concluding appeal as the completion of prophetic responsibility.
Within PSP, the conclusion of one sermon may mark the beginning of another cycle of communal discernment.
The framework also recognizes that formation occurs beyond the preaching event. Congregational worship, teaching, pastoral care, institutional decision-making, and community engagement may reinforce or contradict commitments proclaimed from the pulpit.
Consequently, PSP cannot be evaluated solely through sermon content.
Its formative claims must also be examined in relation to congregational practices.
8. Implications for Contemporary Homiletics and Public Theology
Prophetic Stabilization Preaching offers a constructive theoretical account of how preaching may contribute to sustained congregational formation. Its four movements identify dimensions of theological interpretation, emotional endurance, vocational responsibility, and public action that warrant further investigation.
First, prophetic preaching should be examined not only for its rhetorical content but also for its intended formative consequences. The relevant question becomes whether proclamation cultivates capacities for sustained moral engagement rather than merely generating immediate agreement.
Second, PSP strengthens the relationship between pastoral care and prophetic proclamation. The congregation's emotional and theological conditions are not distractions from public responsibility; they are part of the context within which such responsibility must be exercised.
Third, PSP challenges the separation of spiritual formation from public theology. Theological formation becomes incomplete when it does not address the institutional and communal realities through which human dignity is protected or violated.
Fourth, PSP invites empirical investigation.
The present manuscript does not demonstrate that sermons organized according to PSP produce measurable improvements in psychological resilience, congregational cohesion, or social outcomes. Such conclusions would require empirical research.
Future research could examine congregational interpretations of PSP sermons, the relationship between preaching and vocational clarity, the role of communal practices in sustaining engagement, and how congregations respond to conflict arising from prophetic action.
These studies would require appropriate research designs, ethical oversight where applicable, clearly operationalized concepts, and attention to alternative explanations.
The contribution of this essay is therefore conceptual and methodological. It proposes a framework through which scholars and practitioners may examine the formative relationship between prophetic proclamation and sustained communal action.
9. Conclusion: Stabilized for the Struggle
Prophetic preaching remains indispensable wherever religious communities confront injustice, institutional hypocrisy, and contradictions between professed values and lived realities.
Yet the prophetic task cannot be reduced to denunciation.
The sermon exposing injustice must also attend to the people who must confront it. Communities require theological resources for interpreting contradiction, emotional capacities for enduring struggle, vocational clarity for sustaining responsibility, and moral courage for engaging unjust structures.
Prophetic Stabilization Preaching proposes that these responsibilities belong together.
Its four movements—Faith Stabilization, Emotional Stabilization, Vocational Stabilization, and Prophetic Mobilization—offer a constructive account of how dialectical proclamation may contribute to sustained prophetic formation.
Drawing upon the intellectual resources of Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Frederick Douglass, Black prophetic theology, womanist theological criticism, and African American preaching traditions, PSP advances a distinctive synthesis: prophetic agitation must be accompanied by the formation of communities capable of sustaining its moral demands.
The framework does not promise that stabilization will eliminate suffering, resolve institutional contradiction, or guarantee social transformation.
Rather, it proposes that preaching should help communities remain theologically grounded, emotionally responsive, vocationally responsible, and publicly engaged as they confront conditions that resist immediate resolution.
The purpose of prophetic stabilization is not to make injustice more bearable. It is to form communities that can confront injustice without surrendering their theological identity, moral responsibility, or commitment to transformation.
The prophetic pulpit must therefore do more than awaken a moment.
It must help form a people.
And those people must be prepared not merely to hear the call to justice, but to sustain its demands.
References
Cannon, K. G. (1988). Black womanist ethics. Scholars Press.
Cone, J. H. (1997). Black theology and Black power. Orbis Books.
Cone, J. H. (2011). The cross and the lynching tree. Orbis Books.
Crawford, E. E., & Troeger, T. H. (1995). The Hum: Call and Response in African American Preaching. Abingdon Press.
(2016). Designing Educational Material for Scientific Intercultural Education: The Harvest of Milpa in Mexico as an Example for Dialogue. Revista Brasileira de Pesquisa em Educação em CiêNcias. https://core.ac.uk/download/201214370.pdf
Douglass, F. (1852). Oration, delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, by Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852. Lee, Mann & Co. https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/oration-delivered-in-corinthian-hall-rochester
Fry Brown, T. L. (2008). Delivering the sermon: Voice, body, and animation in proclamation. Fortress Press.
Grant, J. (1989). White women's Christ and Black women's Jesus: Feminist Christology and womanist response. Scholars Press.
Guenther, E. (2020). Keys to the Power of the Spiritual. Journal of Congregational Song, 71(2), 52-53.
Jennings, W. J. (2020). After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
LaRue, C. J. (2000). The heart of Black preaching. Westminster John Knox Press.
Malmstr\uf6m, H. (2015). “Listen and Understand What I Am Saying”: Church-Listening As a Challenge for Non-Native Listeners of English in the United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.1080/10904018.2014.880928
(2019). Minister as Mentor: A Biblical Model for the Preparation of a Mentoring Ministry at First Baptist Church in Reidsville, North Carolina. https://core.ac.uk/download/480299216.pdf
Mitchell, H. H. (1990). Black preaching: The recovery of a powerful art. Abingdon Press.
Osmer, R. R. (2008). Practical theology: An introduction. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Proctor, S. D. (1994). The certain sound of the trumpet: Crafting a sermon of authority. Judson Press.
Raboteau, A. J. (2004). Slave religion: The “invisible institution” in the antebellum South (Updated ed.). Oxford University Press.
Steinke, P. L. (2006). Congregational leadership in anxious times: Being calm and courageous no matter what. Alban Institute.
Swinton, J., & Mowat, H. (2016). Practical theology and qualitative research (2nd ed.). SCM Press.
Thurman, H. (1996). Jesus and the disinherited. Beacon Press.
Tisdale, L. T. (2010). Prophetic preaching: A pastoral approach. Westminster John Knox Press.
Turman, E. (2019). Black women's wisdom. The Christian Century, 136(6), 30-31,33.Williams, D. S. (1993). Sisters in the wilderness: The challenge of womanist God-talk. Orbis Books.
Williams, J. P. (2023). Preacher/artist: Incarnational and fully embodied preaching supported by actor training methodology. https://core.ac.uk/download/603243544.pdf
Yang, S. (2016). An other-typological illustration of the Exodus story according to Dr King’s perception of universal reconciliation in his sermon on Exodus 14:30. HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v72i2.3253
Zucker, D. J. (2021). In/Voluntary Surrogacy in Genesis. https://core.ac.uk/download/391337337.pdf
Suggested Citation
Smith, P. L. (2026). Prophetic stabilization preaching: Dialectical formation and moral agitation in contemporary homiletics. Justice Scholars Society.
Permanent article URL: To be inserted after publication.
About the Author
Rev. Dr. Paris L. Smith, Sr., is a public theologian, Black Baptist preacher, scholar-practitioner, and founder of Justice Scholars Society. He is pursuing doctoral studies in Public Theology and Community Engagement at Hampton University School of Religion. His research examines Black prophetic religious traditions, moral formation, institutional accountability, democratic responsibility, and community transformation.
Smith developed the Douglassian Methodology of Prophetic Agitation (DMoPA) and advances Prophetic Stabilization Preaching as a constructive homiletical framework connecting dialectical proclamation, congregational formation, and sustained prophetic action.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-3401-9671
Publication Metadata
Publisher: Justice Scholars Society
Series: JSS Research Series
Publication type: Foundational Conceptual Essay
Primary discipline: Homiletics
Related disciplines: Black Theology; Practical Theology; Public Theology; Black Church Studies
Primary framework: Prophetic Stabilization Preaching (PSP)
Related methodology: Douglassian Methodology of Prophetic Agitation (DMoPA)
Version: 1.5 — JSS Publication Edition
Designated date: October 9, 2026
Actual public release date: November 9, 2026
Permanent URL: Pending
DOI: None assigned
Framework Provenance Statement
Prophetic Stabilization Preaching is presented in this essay as a constructive framework developed by Paris L. Smith. Its intellectual antecedents include Samuel DeWitt Proctor's dialectical homiletics, Frederick Douglass's practice of moral agitation, Black preaching traditions, Black liberation theology, womanist theological criticism, and practical theology.
The named PSP framework, its four-movement architecture, its distinction between stabilization and pacification, and its sequential-but-recursive formulation constitute the author's constructive synthesis. This statement identifies the contribution advanced by the manuscript; it does not establish priority over every possible earlier formulation in the scholarly literature.
