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Home›Traditions›Progressive/Social Justice

Progressive/Social Justice Illustrations

Reading scripture through liberation, equality, and advocacy for the marginalized.

Key question: “How does this text speak to issues of justice, equality, and the liberation of the oppressed?”

25,724 sermon illustrations through the Progressive/Social Justice lens

Sermon Illustration

Florence Nightingale and the Wards of Scutari

In 1854, Florence Nightingale arrived at the British military hospital in Scutari, Turkey, and found a nightmare. Wounded soldiers lay on filthy floors, neglected by...

Ezekiel 34:11-16Universal

227 words

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Sermon Illustration

The Moravians Who Would Not Wait

In October 1731, a young Moravian named Johann Leonard Dober attended a gathering in Herrnhut, Germany, where he heard Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf describe the...

Luke 2:15-21Universal

234 words

Sermon Illustration

A Miner's Thirst That Flooded a Nation

In the autumn of 1904, twenty-six-year-old Evan Roberts trudged out of the Welsh coal mines each evening with lungs full of dust and a soul...

John 7:37-39Universal

221 words

Sermon Illustration

The Nurse Who Kept the Night Watch

In 2014, when Ebola swept through Liberia and the world recoiled in fear, a Liberian nurse named Salome Karwah did something remarkably simple. She held...

Isaiah 42:1-9Universal

231 words

Sermon Illustration

The Bible That Took a Hundred Hands

In 1525, William Tyndale hunched over a desk in Cologne, Germany, translating the New Testament into English for the first time from the original Greek....

1 Corinthians 3:1-9Universal

222 words

Sermon Illustration

The Stream from Herrnhut

In 1722, a handful of persecuted Moravian refugees stumbled onto the estate of Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf in Saxony. They were exhausted, homeless, and few...

Ezekiel 47:1-2, 8-9, 12Universal

233 words

Historical

A Love That Would Not Let Go

On August 5, 1942, German soldiers surrounded the Dom Sierot orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto and ordered its nearly two hundred children deported. Their director,...

John 15:13Universalsacrificelove

242 words

Sermon Illustration

The Artist Who Traded Fame for Unsearchable Riches

In 1888, Lilias Trotter stood at a crossroads in London. John Ruskin, the most influential art critic in England, had told her she could become...

Ephesians 3:8-12, 14-19Universal

234 words

Sermon Illustration

The Yes That Changed Everything

In 2015, a twenty-three-year-old kindergarten teacher named Sarah from small-town Missouri received a phone call that made no sense. A nonprofit director asked if she...

Luke 1:26-38Universal

241 words

Sermon Illustration

The Tree on Riverside Drive

Every morning for thirty-seven years, Margaret Chen walked the same half-mile stretch along Riverside Drive in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She knew every tree on that path....

Psalm 1Universal

252 words

Sermon Illustration

When Thousands of Rams Were Not Enough

In 1787, William Wilberforce sat in the garden of his estate at Holwood House in Kent, wrestling with a question that would define his life....

Micah 6:1-8Universal

235 words

Sermon Illustration

The Lighthouse Keeper of Galveston

When Hurricane Ike slammed into Galveston, Texas, in September 2008, the storm surge swallowed entire neighborhoods. Streets became rivers. Homes folded like cardboard. In the...

Nahum 1:7Universal

232 words

Sermon Illustration

The Light That Holds Until Dawn

In 2018, a team of twelve boys from the Wild Boars soccer club and their coach became trapped deep inside the Tham Luang cave system...

2 Peter 1:16-19Universal

232 words

Sermon Illustration

The Foreclosure Papers She Never Signed

In March 2019, Maria Gutierrez drove to First National Bank in Tulsa with a folder of documents and a lump in her throat. She had...

Mark 16:1-8Universal

233 words

Sermon Illustration

The Pastor Who Already Knew Why Wilberforce Had Come

In the autumn of 1785, a young Member of Parliament named William Wilberforce was in spiritual crisis. His recent conversion had left him torn —...

John 1:43-51Universal

242 words

Sermon Illustration

The Shepherd Who Came Back for Them

In 2018, when the Camp Fire tore through Paradise, California, school bus driver Kevin McKay refused to abandon his route. With flames closing in on...

Jeremiah 23:1-6Universal

233 words

Sermon Illustration

The Librarian Who Already Had the Book Waiting

In 2019, a young woman named Cara walked into the public library in Asheville, North Carolina, not sure what she was looking for. She had...

John 1:43-51Universal

238 words

Sermon Illustration

Wesley's Strangely Warmed Heart

By May of 1738, John Wesley had already been ordained for thirteen years. He had crossed the Atlantic to serve as a missionary in Georgia,...

John 3:1-17Universal

228 words

Sermon Illustration

The Oncologist Who Danced

In 2019, Dr. William Matsui at Johns Hopkins watched a patient named Gerald, a retired Baltimore bus driver, ring the brass bell mounted on the...

1 Corinthians 15:55-57Universal

253 words

Sermon Illustration

The Clerk Whose Genius Was Already Seen

In January 1913, Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy opened an envelope postmarked from Madras, India. Inside were nine pages of mathematical formulas scrawled by an unknown...

John 1:43-51Universal

234 words

Sermon Illustration

The Seeker From Punjab Who Burned the Book

Sundar Singh was fifteen years old in 1904 when he tore a Bible apart and burned it page by page in his village courtyard in...

Matthew 2:1-12Universal

232 words

Sermon Illustration

Augustine's Tears in Milan

On the night of April 24, 387 AD, in the great basilica of Milan, a forty-two-year-old rhetoric professor named Aurelius Augustinus stepped down into the...

Mark 1:4-11Universal

246 words

Sermon Illustration

The Words That Cost Polycarp Everything

In 155 AD, the Roman proconsul gave Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna a simple way out. The elderly pastor, eighty-six years old, stood in a packed...

Romans 10:9Universal

236 words

Sermon Illustration

One Loaf, One Family

Every Sunday morning at Grace Community Church in Tupelo, Mississippi, eighty-three-year-old Martha Jenkins arrives early to bake communion bread. She has done this for thirty-seven...

1 Corinthians 10:16-17Universal

238 words