Justice & Advocacy
Starter Kit
This starter kit equips women in ministry to deepen their theological grounding, strengthen their justice analysis, develop advocacy skills, and move faithfully from proclamation to praxis.
Justice ministry requires more than caring about what is happening in the world. It requires learning how to read the world, understand power, organize people, advocate for change, and act faithfully in public.
Read
Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community
Why read it: Cannon is foundational for understanding womanist ethics. She centers the lived experience, moral wisdom, survival strategies, faith, and resistance of Black women as legitimate sources for theological and ethical reflection.
Whose lived experience is missing from the way we understand what is right, moral, and just?
Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk
Why read it: Through the biblical story of Hagar, Williams challenges theology that glorifies suffering and sacrifice while ignoring the particular experiences of Black women. The book is especially useful for women ministers learning to distinguish between faithful sacrifice and systems that simply expect women to suffer.
Does our theology liberate people from suffering—or teach oppressed people how to tolerate it?
Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall
Why read it: Prathia Hall offers an extraordinary model of the preacher-organizer-theologian. Her understanding of “freedom faith” joined Christian discipleship, womanist thought, and social-justice activism.
What would my ministry look like if preaching and organizing were understood as parts of the same calling?
Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God
Why read it: Douglas demonstrates how theology can interrogate the narratives, histories, and systems that make racialized violence possible. It is an excellent example of doing theology in direct conversation with public crisis.
What does the justice of God require when Black bodies are endangered by public policy, culture, and violence?
Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil
Why read it: Townes helps us recognize that injustice is not produced only by individual bad actors. Culture, stereotypes, history, memory, public policy, and institutions can create systems in which injustice becomes normalized.
What stories, images, policies, and assumptions make the injustice we are confronting seem normal?
Reflect
“Speaking to Stop the Silence: A Womanist Ethical Confrontation of Injustice”
Mingo draws upon womanist ethics to examine how Black women confront injustice, particularly state-sanctioned violence. She identifies practices including radical subjectivity, communalism, redemptive self-love, and critical engagement.
What does faithful speech require when silence protects injustice?
“Womanist Theology: Empowering Black Women through Christian Education”
Smith moves womanist theology toward congregational practice, asking how churches can equip Black women and church leaders with actual educational strategies for addressing injustice and creating change.
Are we educating people simply to understand their faith—or equipping them to exercise it?
“Whosoever Will Let Her Come: Social Activism and Gender Inclusivity in the Black Church”
Barnes raises an essential challenge: participation in racial and social-justice activism does not necessarily translate into support for women in pastoral leadership.
Can a church credibly advocate for justice in the world while maintaining injustice within its own walls?
Analyze
Before responding to a justice issue, ask:
What is happening?
Separate facts from assumptions and rhetoric.
Who is most impacted?
Listen first to people closest to the harm.
Who has the power to change it?
Identify decision-makers, institutions, elected officials, corporations, agencies, or systems.
What policies are producing the outcome?
Move beyond personalities to structures.
What is the public narrative?
Ask what people have been taught to believe about the issue and the people affected.
What does our faith say?
Move beyond proof-texting toward serious theological reflection.
What is ours to do?
Every injustice does not require the same response.
Organize
Black Women’s Roundtable
The intergenerational leadership-development, mentoring, empowerment, and power-building arm of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation. Its work includes civic, policy, and leadership training, public-policy advocacy, and community organizing.
Faith in Public Life
Faith in Public Life organizes faith leaders to bring moral leadership into public life and equips its network for strategic action that can influence public narratives and policy.
Faith Out Loud
Faith Out Loud provides a place to move the learning into praxis. Its work centers equipping voices for prophetic public witness, mobilizing faith into action for justice and freedom, and amplifying voices too often ignored.
Advocate
Every woman in ministry doing justice work should begin developing competency in:
Legislative advocacy
Understanding legislation, identifying decision-makers, and making clear legislative asks.
Public testimony
Speaking before city councils, school boards, legislatures, commissions, and public agencies.
Narrative change
Connecting human stories, theological conviction, and public policy.
Media advocacy
Writing op-eds, giving interviews, holding press conferences, and communicating clearly under pressure.
Community organizing
Building relationships before mobilizing people.
Coalition building
Understanding that we do not have to lead every table in order to influence what happens at the table.
Nonpartisan civic engagement
Voter education, registration, turnout, election protection, and civic formation.
Act
“What should I preach?”
What should we teach?
What does our congregation need to understand?
What should we investigate?
What facts, policies, and power structures must we know?
Who should we listen to?
Who is closest to the harm?
Who should we organize?
Who shares our concern and can act collectively?
Who has the power to change this?
Identify the actual decision-maker.
What is our ask?
Be specific. Justice requires more than expressing outrage.
What public witness is needed?
A sermon? Meeting? Letter? Petition? Press conference? Public testimony? March? Boycott? Voter campaign? Direct action?
What happens after the moment passes?
Justice ministry is sustained work, not episodic reaction.
Choose one issue affecting your community. Spend the month moving through the pathway.
Read & Listen
Learn the issue and listen to people most affected.
Analyze
Identify the policy, institution, narrative, and people holding decision-making power.
Organize & Advocate
Gather partners and develop one clear, achievable ask.
Act
Take one concrete public action together.