Preaching and the Wounds of Migration

Abstract

A few months ago, as my family was preparing to relocate from the Raleigh-Durham area, I was reminded once again of the unique hermeneutics at work in many Hispanic Protestant congregations. The occasion for this most recent reminder was an invitation to preach one last time at Iglesia Agua Viva, one of the principal sites of my multi-year ethnographic research project into Hispanic Protestant preaching in immigrant congregations. Although my time as a participantobserver at Agua Viva had ended several years earlier, I have maintained a close relationship with its co-pastors, Esteban and Diana, and many of its congregants as well. Esteban and Diana have called upon me regularly to preach in their absence when they were taking a vacation or engaging in short-term mission work in the Caribbean. While there are certainly other views as to how Hispanic preaching might—or even should—be oriented, this preaching experience provided still more evidence of the central finding of my study—that immigrant predicadores/preachers consistently focused their proclamation on healing the wounds their hearers had received through the trauma of migration and transnational identity.