The shepreaches Team
Rev. Neichelle R. Guidry, Ph.D.
Founder and Lead Curator
Rev. Neichelle R. Guidry, Ph.D. currently serves as the Dean of Sisters Chapel and Director of the WISDOM Center at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a spiritual daughter of New Creation Christian Fellowship of San Antonio, Texas, where the Bishop David Michael Copeland and the Rev. Dr. Claudette Anderson Copeland are her pastors and where she was ordained to ministry in 2010. She is a graduate of Clark Atlanta University (2007, BA, Lambda Pi Eta) and Yale Divinity School (2010, M.Div.), where she was the 2010 recipient of the Walcott Prize for Clear and Effective Public and Pulpit Speaking. She is also a graduate of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary (2017), where she completed her Doctor of Philosophy in the area of Liturgical Studies with a concentration in Homiletics. Her dissertation is entitled, "Towards a Womanist Homiletical Theology for Subverting Rape Culture." Under her leadership, Spelman was awarded a five-year grant for $900,000 to create programming and fellowships for young Black women in ministry. She is the creator of shepreaches, a virtual community and professional development organization that aspires to uplift African-American millennial women in ministry through theological reflection, fellowship, and liturgical curation.
For six years, Dr. Guidry served as the Associate Pastor to Young Adults and the Liaison to Worship and Arts Ministries in the Office of the Senior Pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ on the South side of Chicago, where the Rev. Dr. Otis Moss, III is the Senior Pastor. She served as the 2016 Preacher/Pastor-In-Residence at the Black Theology and Leadership Institute at Princeton Theological Seminary. She was listed as one of “12 New Faces of Black Leadership” in TIME Magazine (January 2015). She was recognized for “quickly becoming one of her generation’s most powerful female faith leaders” on Ebony Magazine’s 2015 Power 100 list (December 2015), and one of “Ten Women of Faith Leading the Charge Ahead” by Sojourners. Additionally, Dr. Guidry and the work of shepreaches were featured in the New York Times (April 3, 2015). She is a contributor to What Would Jesus Ask?: Christian Leaders Reflect on His Questions of Faith (Time Books, 2015), and the author of Curating a World: Sermonic Words from a Young Woman Who Preaches (self-published, June 2016). Dr. Guidry is a proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated.
Rev. Dr. Dawnn M. Pirani Brumfield
Rev. Dawnn, as she is affectionately known, has a calling to serve God’s people. Her life ministry is committed to educating church leadership on how to make the church accessible to ALL people regardless of race, gender, class or culture, sexual orientation, family design and physical, emotional or mental conditions. She was licensed in 2006 and ordained for ministry in 2010 through...
shepreaches Values and Guiding Principles
Since 2012, our work and identity have been guided by several values and guiding principles.
The Church universal has provided sanctuary and affirmation for followers of Christ for generations. However, it is also rife with social and spiritual concerns that intimately impact the lives of Black women. Embedded and institutionalized patriarchy, misogyny and misogynoir have made many Black women feel erased, invisible, un-called, and even unsafe. Our work is to aggressively work to end these historical trends. To do so, we root ourselves in the principles of Womanist Theology, or, theology that is done from the distinct perspective of Black women. First articulated by trailblazers such as Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, Rev. Dr. Delores Williams, Rev. Dr. Jacquelyn Grant, and Rev. Dr. Emilie Townes, this school of theological thought exists to call out the dehumanization of Black people in church and society, and to call forth the possibilities of justice and healing in God’s name. As a womanist organization, we believe that God is on the side of Black women, and is, indeed, enfleshed in Black women.
Black women are the cornerstones of the Black Church. As such, our primary work is to gather Black women to be affirmed, empowered, and spiritually nourished, in order to manifest the calls that are on our lives. We aim to cultivate of collegiality and sisterhood, thereby outsmarting the patriarchal pit of competing amongst women in professional and vocational spaces. While we build sisterhood, we are also liturgical curators. We create worship spaces and opportunities by which Black women answer their calls to preach, sing, dance, and lead God’s people. Moreover, our worship is reflective of the concerns and lives of everyday Black women. In so doing, we endeavor to remind our sisters that God has not forgotten about them.
While we believe in and promote sisterhood across racial and ethnic lines, our foundations in Womanist Theology compel us to centralize and prioritize the lives and lived experiences of Black women. Period.
We believe in and practice theologies of full inclusion and extravagant welcome. In shepreaches spaces, Our LGBTQIA+ kin are welcomed, affirmed, and empowered to live out their full identities as God’s beloved children. We work to increase our own knowledge and sensitivities to the lived realities of others, and continuously challenge ourselves to reflect the unconditional love of God in our attitudes, language, and relationships.
We are a body of Black Christian women, but we value and embrace opportunities to learn and collaborate across religious lines. We recognize the continuity between our various religious traditions, and work to manifest the central tenet of love that is common to many religious traditions.
As an organization that focuses on Black millennial women, we do not shy away from the unique particularities that our generation brings to ministry, theology and activism. We ask challenging and taboo questions, we preach on hard texts, we bring the fullness of our various expressions of our womanhood to the pulpit, and we make no apologies for our personal and collective advances in ministry. However, we are deeply mindful that we are beneficiaries of the labor and brilliance of many Black woman-proclaimers who tilled the soil before us. We revere our ancestors and predecessors. We honor them. We recognize that without them, we would not be here.