If many of the people listening to you carry wounds of the heart, then no sermon reaches them neutrally. A sermon can help heal those wounds or reopen them. In her session for Jude 3 Project’s preaching conference, Dr. Nicole Massie Martin argues that a preacher can lower the risk of re-wounding by adopting four practices: prioritize healing, preach the trauma in the text, plan for care beyond the sermon, and tend your own soul. She also states the stakes plainly: “the worst thing that could happen is that someone is injured by words that were designed to bring them healing.”
This guide is for preachers, teaching teams and anyone who helps shape a church’s public ministry. It keeps attention on the listener, the person in the pew or on the livestream who hears your words through their own history. You can work through it alone over a week, or with a group in two sessions of about an hour each. If you meet as a group, the first session covers the first two practices and the second covers the last two. Each section ends with a task. Please actually do the tasks. They are where the learning happens.
First, get the definition right
Most preachers who worry about this question are missing one prerequisite, which is a working definition of trauma. Martin describes trauma as “a wound of the heart.” It is the effect of an event, sudden or prolonged, experienced directly or secondhand, that leaves a person overwhelmed with fear, helplessness and horror. Later, anything that sounds or feels like the original event can trigger that response again. She cites research suggesting that most Americans have experienced some form of trauma. She also insists that those figures describe people inside the church as well as outside it.
That definition explains how a sermon can do harm without meaning to. The preacher does not have to say anything cruel. A graphic illustration, a joke about a certain kind of family, or a quick promise that God fixes everything can bring back the original overwhelm for a listener whose wound the preacher knows nothing about.
The second idea you need is what “trauma-informed” means. Martin names a foundational principle of trauma-informed care: the person who went through the experience defines it. In her words, “I can’t tell someone that what they went through was traumatic or was not traumatic.” She draws a consequence for preaching that is easy to miss. If you cannot define someone’s experience for them, you also cannot hand them a set path to healing. “I release myself from being the expert,” she says. The preacher stays tied to the text, and God, whom she repeatedly calls the great physician, does the healing.
Keep that order in mind through the rest of the guide. The four practices are not techniques for managing an audience. They are ways of clearing the path so that the listener can meet God in the text without being hurt by the person reading it.
Task: Write two sentences in your own words. The first should say what trauma is. The second should say why a preacher cannot be the expert on another person’s trauma. If you are in a group, compare sentences and notice where your definitions differ.
Practice one: prioritize healing
Martin starts from what Jesus spent his time doing. She notes that healing makes up a large share of his miracles, and she reasons that preaching should give healing comparable weight. Her test is concrete. Look back at your sermons since 2020 and count how many were specifically about God’s power to heal, whether physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually.
Her main text is Mark 5, which contains three healings in a row: the man among the tombs (Mark 5:1-20), the woman with the issue of blood, and the daughter of Jairus. What she draws out is how Jesus heals, not just the fact that he does. Each healing restores a person’s identity and place. To the tormented man Jesus says, “What is thy name?” (Mark 5:9). After the woman touches his garment, he turns around and asks, “Who touched my clothes?” (Mark 5:30). Then he calls her “Daughter” and tells her, “thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague” (Mark 5:34). A woman who wanted to disappear into the crowd is named in public. The man who lived at the edge of town is sent back to his own people with a story to tell (Mark 5:19).
Look at the first story with some care. Martin describes the man as suffering both demonic torment and mental anguish. Mark presents a man with an unclean spirit who cuts himself with stones and lives among the tombs. A careful preacher can honor both parts of that picture without turning the passage into a diagnostic manual. Jude 3 teaches that spiritual warfare and mental health concerns are not an either/or, and it urges qualified care and prayerful support together. Preached that way, Mark 5 tells a listener who struggles with mental illness that Jesus moves toward them. It does not tell them that their struggle is simply demonic.
Observation task: Read Mark 5:1-43 aloud in one sitting. For each of the three people Jesus heals, write down what had cut them off from others, what Jesus says or does that restores them, and where they end up afterward. Then answer one question: what would a listener with a long-term wound hear from this chapter that they would not hear from a sermon about only one of these healings?
Practice two: preach the trauma in the text
This practice is harder, and Martin explains why. Preachers feel drawn toward victory language, such as more than conquerors or the head and not the tail. She affirms that those things are true. Her concern is what happens to the listener who is not winning right now. “When we preach the trauma in the text, we allow people to see their lives through the lens of the victims, and not only through the lens of the victors.” She also names the habit behind the problem: “sometimes we miss a moment to preach on the trauma because we’re so quick to preach on the hope.”
Her main example is Judges 19, the account of the concubine who was raped through the night and then dismembered. She remembers a sermon on that chapter preached with such compassion that she came to see God as grieved and angered by the story. Her second example is Genesis 22 read from Isaac’s side rather than Abraham’s. Isaac is the boy who asks, “where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” (Genesis 22:7). She also points to Rizpah, who keeps watch over the bodies of her sons in 2 Samuel 21.
Here is the necessary distinction, and preachers often blur it. Reading from the victim’s vantage point is a legitimate interpretive move when it attends to what the text actually reports. Judges 19 describes horror without approving it, and the book’s refrain that Israel had no king (Judges 19:1, 21:25) shows that the narrator expects readers to be appalled. Genesis 22 is different, because the text is almost silent about Isaac’s inner life. Martin goes beyond the text with some care. She frames her picture of Isaac as questions, and she admits that “the text doesn’t say.” She also notices that Genesis 22:19 reports Abraham returning to his young men and does not mention Isaac. That silence is real, but it is a silence. Imagining Isaac’s fear can help a listener feel the weight of the scene. Presenting that imagined fear as what the passage teaches would go further than the text allows. In a trauma-informed sermon, the preacher should say out loud which is which, because listeners who have been manipulated before need to know when they are hearing Scripture and when they are hearing a preacher’s reflection.
Martin then gives two safeguards that concern the listener directly. The first is advance notice with permission to step away. She describes a friend who announced a week ahead that she would preach on sexual abuse, promised that help would be available, and told people they could worship another way that Sunday. Martin knows this goes against the instinct to want everyone in the room, but she says “a trauma-informed approach allows people to opt out without judgment.” The second safeguard concerns examples. She warns that personal illustrations can shrink the pain of others: “We can localize it too quickly.” Instead, “it is best for us to leave the examples open enough so that anyone experiencing trauma can find themselves within the story.”
Interpretation task: Choose one hard passage, such as Judges 19, Genesis 22 or 2 Samuel 21:1-14. Make two columns. In the first, list what the text actually states about the person who suffers. In the second, list what a preacher might imagine about that person. Then draft the sentence you would use in a sermon to mark the move from the first column to the second.
Practice three: plan for care beyond the sermon
Martin reads the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) with attention to its ending. The Samaritan bandages the wounds, and then he arranges care that continues after he leaves: “Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee” (Luke 10:35). Her point is simple. God can heal in the moment of preaching, but “healing doesn’t stop in the preaching moment.” She compares this to a surgeon who sends the patient home with instructions for after the operation.
She offers three levels of care, matched to what a church actually has. A church with a counseling ministry should mention it in every sermon on pain. A church without one can train one or two people to lead healing groups. She points to the trauma healing work stewarded by American Bible Society. Every church can at least alert its prayer team ahead of time so that people are ready to pray with anyone who responds. She stresses timing, because a sermon creates immediacy: “People wanna come to the well, not tomorrow, but today.”
From the listener’s side, a care plan answers a quiet question: if this sermon opens something in me, where do I go? A sermon that opens a wound and then sends people home with nowhere to go is the very re-wounding this guide is trying to prevent. Two boundaries belong in any plan. Someone who discloses abuse needs safety and trusted help first, never pressure to reconcile with the person who harmed them. Your responders should know the National Domestic Violence Hotline, 1-800-799-7233, and the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which takes calls or texts. They should also know their limits. Prayer does not replace professional care, and Jude 3 teaches that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith.
Practice: Before your next sermon on a painful subject, write a one-page care plan. Name who will be available afterward and where they will be. Write the exact words you will say from the pulpit to invite people to them. List the referral options you can offer, both local counselors and the hotlines above. Finally, decide who on your team will follow up with anyone who responds. If you cannot fill in a line, that tells you what needs to be built before you preach the sermon.
Practice four: tend your own soul
Martin calls this practice perhaps the most important, and her reasoning connects it back to the listener: “When preachers ignore their trauma, they tend to be less capable of preaching in a trauma-informed way.” She draws special attention to secondary trauma, the weight that pastors carry after standing beside grieving families, leading funerals and sitting with people after violent loss. Her conclusion is direct: “Every preacher, every leader, every counselor, every pastor needs a counselor.”
She grounds this in Jesus, who regularly withdrew to pray and poured out his anguish in Gethsemane. Luke reports that “his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44). Note that the text speaks of sweat, not tears, and that Luke 22:43-44 is one of the passages whose earliest manuscript support is debated. Your point here does not depend on those two verses. The surrounding passage shows Jesus praying in agony before the cross (Luke 22:39-42, 45-46), and that is enough to show that the Son of God did not treat his own anguish as something to hide.
The misreading to avoid
A common mistake is to treat trauma-informed preaching as cautious preaching: skip the hard texts, soften the hope, and say nothing that could upset anyone. Martin argues nearly the opposite. She wants more preaching on the hard texts, done with more care. She also keeps proclaiming victory and resurrection. What she rejects is preaching hope in a way that tells hurting people their pain is invisible to God. The goal is not to protect people from the text. It is to protect them from careless handling of it.
Questions for discussion
- Martin says the person who experienced trauma defines it. Where in your preaching have you named or labeled other people’s pain for them?
- Read Mark 5 again. Which of the three healings does your congregation hear about least, and what might that leave unsaid to some listeners?
- When you preach from a victim’s vantage point, how will you show your listeners where the text ends and your reflection begins? What could go wrong if you blur that line?
- What objections would leaders in your church raise to giving people advance notice and permission to skip a sermon? Which of those objections deserve a serious answer?
- If someone left your last sermon with a wound reopened, what would actually have happened to them next?
- What makes counseling for preachers feel optional in your setting, and who would need to model something different?
Facilitators should treat the last two questions as optional sharing. Some people in the room may carry exactly the wounds this guide describes, and no one should have to tell their story in order to take part.
Before you plan your next sermon on suffering, look at the care plan you drafted. Ask whether a listener whose history you will never know could hear that sermon, find themselves in the text, and know where to turn on the same day.