The Rev. Teresa L. Fry Brown’s career is one of firsts.
However, this is Fry Brown’s second time at Chautauqua Institution, having preached here in 1996. Fry Brown is the Week Three chaplain at Chautauqua, and the theme for her preaching is “Keeping the Faith in Times Like These.”
Among Fry Brown’s “firsts” is her role as the Bandy Professor of Preaching at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, where she is the first black and the first woman in that position. She is also the first tenured, black, female professor at Candler, and in 2012 was elected as the first woman historiographer of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Fry Brown will preach at the 10:45 a.m. Sunday morning worship service in the Amphitheater. Her sermon title will be “On the Job Courage.” She will share her faith journey at the 5 p.m. Vespers in the Hall of Philosophy. She will preach at the 9:15 a.m. morning worship service Monday through Friday in the Amphitheater. Her sermon topics will include “A Cure for Spiritual Dehydration” or “Overcoming Justice Fatigue,” “Time to Move,” “Why Wait?” “A Taste of Assurance” and “Trust the Process.”
A member of numerous academies, including the Academy of Homiletics, Brown is associate minister at New Bethel A.M.E. Church in Lithonia, Georgia, and an ordained itinerant elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where she is executive director of research and scholarship, and serves as editor of the A.M.E. Review.
At Emory, she served as director of the Black Church Studies program from 2007 to 2015. According to her Candler faculty page, her research interests include “homiletics, womanism, womanist ethics, socio-cultural transformation and African diaspora history focusing on African-American spiritual values.”
Fry Brown is the author of numerous books, including Delivering the Sermon: Voice, Body and Animation in Proclamation, and Weary Throats and New Song: Black Women Proclaiming God’s Word. She received her Ph.D. in religious and theological studies from the Iliff School of Theology and the University of Denver, and her Master of Divinity from Iliff. Fry Brown also holds a master’s of science and bachelor’s in speech pathology and audiology from the University of Central Missouri.
