Deeper Waters

Deeper Waters is a sermon collection--but also a manifesto. Its sermons sound forth a call for Christian preaching that is evangelical and emancipatory: unashamed of the good news about Christ's death and resurrection and resolute in resistance to white supremacy, male domination, and redemptive violence. The author, pastor Nibs Stroupe, is a white son of the segregated South, nurtured in its twin traditions of anti-black white racism and Christian faith. But through the courageous witness of black Americans engaged in the Civil Rights movement, Stroupe experienced conversion to a new theological vision. God's loving claim on humanity in Jesus Christ abolishes oppressive idols and breaks down dividing barriers. This conviction propelled Nibs into a lifelong ministry of gospel proclamation and antiracist struggle. For thirty-four years, Stroupe pastored at Oakhurst Presbyterian Church, a multiracial congregation in metropolitan Atlanta. The sermons of this collection present the mature fruit of that ministry, and they offer a gift and example to the next generation of preachers and workers summoned as witnesses of Jesus Christ to the American context.
""Jesus-centered, biblically learned, and dead-set against white supremacy--even as he retains awareness of his complicity with it--Nibs Stroupe is one of the most important models for preaching in our time.""
--Ted A. Smith, Candler School of Theology, Emory University
""In the midst of so much preaching that is timid, innocuous, and loaded with kitsch, these sermons by Nibs Stroupe strike a very different note. They lack the conventional frills of fancy introductions and entertaining ""illustrations."" They move directly and swiftly to the text; as a result they move directly and inescapably to contemporary assurances and challenges for obedient faith. Nibs has lived the stuff he preaches. We are moved by what he says. More than that, many preachers will be instructed by these sermons in the fresh, dangerous, compelling work of proclamation, and away from custodial safety.""
--Walter Brueggemann
Columbia Theological Seminary
""The sermons here hit like theological hand grenades--they're explosive, shattering in their honesty, destroying platitudes we've long had about race, class, and sexual identity. You can't help but be changed by them because Nibs speaks from personal experience as well as keen pastoral insight. It's both a confession and a summon to faith in a difficult age.""
--John Blake, author of Children of the Movement, religion writer for CNN.com
""For 50 years, Nibs Stroupe has been that rarest of voices in America--an idealist relentlessly confronting not just those with whom he disagrees but challenging himself and all believers in good to examine our own parts in society's systems of inequality and injustice. His sermons are clarion calls for all who seek a path toward a better America.""
--Douglas A. Blackmon, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black, Americans From the Civil War to World War II
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""Nibs Stroupe has been a mentor and preacher in my life for 50 years. Before he retired from the mighty multicultural Jesus centered Oakhurst, Stroupe was the best white preacher in Atlanta. Oh, I don't mean his words were fancy or his rhetoric as polished as those who take $100,000.00 a year from their congregation. I am talking about disturbing, nail piercing, bloody cross preaching. Nibs as person and preacher is just the kind of white minister Martin Luther King, Jr prayed for. Read his book.Move in different directions. Get real in troubled waters.""
--Ed Loring, Open Door Community, Baltimore, Maryland
Nibs Stroupe grew up in the Mississippi River Delta in Arkansas. He retired in 2017 after thirty-four years as pastor of Oakhurst Presbyterian Church, a church nationally known for its leadership in multicultural ministry. He is the author of three books, including the award-winning While We Run