Peace-ing Together, created in 2007, integrates my deepest commitments to healing, connection, and community.Having my own consulting business allows me to connect with and support a wide-variety of people, institutions, and communities. In 2016 John and I decided to step away from big-time football, and I accepted a call to be the Pastor/Head of Staff at Grace  Covenant Presbyterian Church in Asheville, NC.  Being the Senior Pastor of an active and emergent church means that my work is mostly focused on my roll at GCPC and in Western North Carolina. I still do some consulting and facilitating outside of my work at GCPC.

I grew up steeped in the cultures of the church and of the academy. My parents modeled the importance of working for justice as the fruit of belief. I am thankful for my heritage and for the ways my roots have kept me connected to the faith communities and to conversations in the academy around social change and transformation every step of my journey.

If you are interested in the details of my education and vocational history, you are welcomed to check out my Curriculum Vitae.

For most of my life I have worked on dialogue and healing around issues like embodiment race and power, trauma, and embodiment in academic, church, and community contexts. My book, Let the Bones Dance: Embodiment and the Body of Christ, provides a theological and spiritual framework for this sacred work around surviving and thriving for those who carry the weight of sexual violence in our world. My life as a mother also profoundly informs my work.

During the over two decades that my husband, John, was coaching in the NFL and Division I college football, I used a lot of my energy to advocate for student-athletes’ rights. Both my writing and my consulting work address issues of race, gender, power, and justice in big-time sports. My book, Touchdowns for Jesus and Other Signs of Apocalypse: Lifting the Veil on Big Time Sports, is a big part of that effort.

For several years I was deeply engaged in the multicultural movement in the Presbyterian denomination nationally. I served for two years as the Moderator of the Board of the Presbyterian Multicultural Network (PMN) and for four years as the Moderator of the Multicultural Committee of the Presbytery of New Hope.

My book, co-authored with Duke Divinity School theologian, Mary McClintock-Fulkerson, addresses the tenacity of white culture and privilege in mainline churches.  A Body Broken, A Body Betrayed: Race, Memory, and Eucharist in White-Dominant Churches, (Cascade Books, 2015).

My newest book, Liberating Bodies: Collective Transformation in a 21st Century Whitelash is forthcoming in the Spring of 2027 from North Atlantic Books.

My kids, Sidney and Mary Elizabeth, are both adults and out of the house. I live on a small farm outside of Asheville with many animals and growing things.

– Marcia Whitney Mount Shoop