Dr. Sharon R. Fennema

Sharon R. Fennema (she/her) is a facilitator, ritualist, activist, teacher, and scholar whose work lives at the intersections of critical race, postcolonial and gender theories and embodied spiritual practices which form identity and craft theology. She is passionate about empowering faith communities and changemakers to become the communities of justice and love we seek in the midst of the struggle for freedom, because she believes that each moment, from the most mundane committee meeting to the most profound direct action, can be an unbreaking of the kingdom of God.

Dr. Fennema currently serves as the Join the Movement Curator and Storyteller. In this position, she helps lead the denomination’s antiracism initiative using stories as both inspiration and lessons for cultivating a life of practices that move us toward racial justice. Prior to joining the UCC national staff, she was Assistant Professor of Worship and Director of Worship Life at the Pacific School of Religion and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley CA where she taught classes in antiracist and decolonial spiritual formation, organization leadership as care work, mourning as resistance, and ritual, trauma and social change. She also collaboratively shepherded PSR’s Community Worship services as a laboratory for striving and failing at liberation in practice. 

She is the author of several articles including “Postcolonial Whiteness: Being-With in Worship” in Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives: Only One is Holy and “The Forgetfulness of Gentrification and the Pilgrimage of Protest: Re-Membering the Body of Christ” in the journal Review and Expositor. One of Sharon’s greatest passions is creating prayers, rituals and worship resources that help communities respond to the needs of the present moment. 

You can find much of her liturgical writing on social media: 

@sharon_fennema

https://www.facebook.com/sharon.fennema