About Meg
Meg’s academic inquiry comes from lived experience. Meg Jenista is an ordained pastor in the Reformed Church in America, serving two churches for a total of 15 years. Pastoring in Washington DC from 2012-2023, she is eager to better understand the role of preaching in relation to political discipleship. Standing at the intersection of public and practical theologies — specifically the disciplines of political theology and preaching — she finds compelling resources for her research interests (1) in the Neo-Calvinist tradition, especially the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa, (2) in decolonial hermeneutics and homiletics and (3) in the field of public theology more broadly. In conjunction with her PhD studies, Meg serves as the Project Director for The Center for Public Justice’s 5 year 1.25 million dollar Compelling Preaching Grant Initiative, entitled: Preaching Reformed Fellowship.
Education
Calvin Theological Seminary
2019 and 2008
ThM and MDiv
Cedarville University
BA in Communications, BA in Christian Education of Youth
Research Interests
Homiletics, Public Theology, Neo-Calvinism
Publications
"The Public Pulpit of Johan Cilliers"
2025 International Journal of Public Theology
South African pastor, professor and homiletician Johan Cilliers advocates for the capacity of preaching to shape a healing and healthy political imagination among God’s people. A brief biography of Cilliers, particularly his experiential and scholarly entanglements at key points in South African history, exemplifies what it looks like when the preacher serves the congregation as a public theologian. Cilliers offers cri- tique of what he calls the “closed seriousness” of apartheid era preaching followed by a hopeful case made in favor of “open seriousness” on the part of any preacher bold enough to stare down the powers and principalities from the pulpit. This essay concludes by suggesting possibilities for on-going discernment regarding the public pulpit, particularly during seasons of socio-political turmoil.
"The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders: Decolonial Homiletics for Expository Preachers"
2025 Evangelical Homiletics Society
The decolonial project seeks to interrogate and disrupt hierarchies of knowledge production and propagation. Preaching is, among other things, a production and propagation of knowledge. Therefore, this paper contends that decolonial homiletics offers both helpful critique and healing possibilities for expository preachers who desire to address what Willie James Jennings refers to as “the diseased social imagination” in white, evangelical and Reformed spaces. To substantiate this claim, I will first define the “coloniality of knowledge” and apply four of its categories to the practice of expository preaching. From this engagement, I will offer three symptoms of expository preaching’s insufficient, even deforming, influence on the social imagination of white, evangelical Christians. Then, utilizing de Sousa Santos’ vision of “ecologies of knowledge”, I offer three ways that decolonial homiletics can assist expository preachers who desire to counteract diseased social imagination in white, evangelical, and Reformed spaces.
"A Living Hermeneutic for Homiletics: Recapturing the Playfulness and Poetry of Scripture"
2025 Global Network of Public Theology
In this paper, I argue that Reformed theology does not require — and in fact presses hard against — a methodical approach to Biblical interpretation and didactic presentation of our findings. Beginning with the Reformed doctrine of creation, I will demonstrate its coherence with both Hans-Georg Gadamer’s literary theory of play and Calvin Seerveld’s aesthetic theory of allusivity. I conclude with a playfully Reformed case study featuring the poet Rod Jellema.
Preaching While White: Addressing Race in the Evangelical Pulpit
2019 Lester Randall Preaching Fellowship in Toronto, Canada
Dear colleagues entrusted with the ministry and responsibility of the pulpit, thank you for the opportunity to share what I have learned and am continuing to learn as a pastor in Washington DC in 2019: – That the church today struggles with a diseased social imagination because the church — from the very start of its existence — has succumbed to the temptation of “a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all.” – That faithful preaching can, in fact, cure a sick or atrophied imagination. – That faithful preaching can shape theologically literate congregations who move beyond a transactional model of salvation who recognize sin as systemic and embodied who celebrate the multiplicity of Biblical metaphors for our salvation. – Therefore, that preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ is political. May this truth set you free in your pulpits. May it expand the gospel imaginations of our congregations. To the glory of God and the faithfulness of God’s people in the world. Thank you.
Building a Church for the World: Kuyper's Contextually Adaptive Ecclesiology
2023 Kuyper Conference
Abraham Kuyper’s theology of the church is not poured in concrete or delivered to us as a prefabricated kit — some assembly required. Abraham Kuyper believed that, in every generation, new needs arise. Every culture raises new questions. New interpretations and understandings lead to new disagreements requiring adjudication. In Kuyper’s own words, “Everything that truly lives undergoes gradual development, and a church that fails to understand this and refuses to make adjustments becomes impoverished and petrifies.” It is my claim that Kuyper’s ecclesiology allows, even requires, considerable contextual adaptability. It is this contextual adaptability that makes Kuyper’s theology of the church relevant to the topics of this conference: business, the academy and society. In other words, contextual adaptability makes Kuyper’s ecclesiology not just relevant to, but necessary for, Kuyper’s public theology.
Fuller Seminary hosts these profiles as a courtesy to our doctoral students. Their views are their own and do not necessary reflect the views of the seminary.