Preaching to Fans: Barbara Brown Taylor Fandom and the Possibilities for Mainline Aesthetics

Barbara Brown Taylor continues to shower the Christian spiritual tradition with gifts in the form of memoirs, essays, sermons, creative writing, and preaching resources. Yet I find myself drawn to a more indirect production: the Barbara Brown Taylor fan. I am struck by the way Taylor negotiates the delicate terrain of preaching to fans given the long and mostly messy relationship between preaching and celebrity. And more than that, I am captivated by the fans themselves and the impact they are having on the aesthetics of mainline preaching. Largely reflecting the demographics of mainline Protestantism, these fans include vast numbers of men and women, clergy as well as laity, and people who, for a variety of reasons, sit on the fringes of the church. In varying ways, these fans of Barbara Brown Taylor are shaping the church's conception of a good sermon.At the outset, let me say that I identify with the fans. Each time I hear Barbara Brown Taylor preach I, too, make the joyful walk back to my car with a handful of brilliant phrases that will be my manna for weeks to come. I still feel the electricity in the room before she preaches. So, in keeping with scholars like Joli Jenson, I break with the academic tendency to pathologize fans or assign them passivity. In more charitable light, fandom emerges as the appreciation of an aesthetic and is characterized by three primary movements: textual discrimination, productivity, and circulation.1We see this discrimination, productivity, and circulation among Barbara Brown Taylor fans when the blogger chews on a sermon nugget ad infinitum, when a preacher mimics her style, when the hospice chaplain shares a Barbara Brown Taylor sermon with a caregiver who cannot leave his wife's bedside to go to church, and when a line from a sermon is offered as counsel for a specific individual or tweeted generically to the world. In every case the fans discriminate, appreciate, and produce, even creating texts of their own in the process of reinterpreting and re-presenting Taylors content.2In subtle and direct ways fans affirm and circulate Taylors voice, that is, her persona, endearing quirks, and poet-sage manner of holding authority. Fans circulate her eloquence and optimism, her conceptions of the beautiful and constructions of the meaningful life, and her canon of art and literature. All of these factors contribute to an aesthetic. In this sense, a Taylor sermon becomes a "worlding," or rather, an experience "that is happening, that is unfolding and projecting itself, through human becoming, into a future."3 Further, by circulating her work, fans make aesthetic judgments and mold conceptions of a good sermon in the mainline church. Beyond vivid imagery, elegant prose, and a close reading of the text, the good sermon is one that honors inner freedom and foregrounds wonder. Conveying a deep sense of comfort in Gods abiding love is also essential.Given Taylors gifts as a preacher, it is no surprise that fans are so eager to share her messages. Yet sometimes it is hard to know exactly what fans are doing when they re-present some aspect of Taylor s work. Is the act of sharing simply the initiation of a dialogue about how spiritual thriving might be imagined? Or is the act of sharing also sometimes indicative of more-such as embracing a proclamatory voice? Motives on the part of fans vary but the net effect of this public validation is an increase in Taylor s influence and notoriety.Yet Taylor openly resists fame that stems from preaching the gospel. "When you get through preaching, the only name on anyone's lips should be the name of Jesus Christ," Taylor imagines Paul telling a group of famous preachers. She sides with Paul in refusing to "dazzle" the Corinthians "even if he could, so that their faith would rest not on his wisdom but on the power of God."4 Taylor often demonstrates this desire to avoid the limelight in her public life as well as her preaching. While at a dinner where Taylor was one of a few honorees, her seating card was misplaced and another guest took her seat. …