Leading with the Sermon

Preaching as Leadership

William H. Willimon, William H. Willimon

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781506456379
• eBook ISBN: 9781506456386
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Prolific author William H. Willimon makes the compelling case that two key pastoral tasks--preaching and leadership--complement, correct, strengthen, and inform one another. Preaching is the distinctive function of pastoral leaders. Leadership of the church, particularly during a challenging time of transition in mainline Protestantism, has become a pressing concern for pastors. This book shows how the practices, skills, and intentions of Christian preaching can be helpful to the leadership of a congregation.

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Courage to Lead from the Pulpit

On a June night in 1974 I was ordained to preach by a denomination of over ten million members. The next morning, for the first time in history, my church began losing members. During my four decades of sermons, we’ve lost four million. As Stanley Hauerwas and I announced in Resident Aliens, the once comfortable alignment of church and culture that North American mainline Protestantism had worked to our advantage began unraveling. North American culture has made our congregations countercultural, salmon swimming against the stream, whether or not we wanted to be.

I doubt that our unfaithful preaching has led to denominational demise, though that’s possible. More detrimental to our church has been our pastors’ inability to lead the body of Christ in a time of mainline disestablishment when Christians have begun to feel like missionaries in the culture we once thought we owned.

Leading and Preaching in a Divergent Age

It’s tough to teach either leadership or preaching in seminary because both of these pastoral tasks are highly contextual. Pastors are wise to be suspicious of quick-fix leadership books with their allegedly knock-down, surefire leadership principles; good leadership is context-dependent. Equally wise to avoid the book titled “How to Preach a Good Sermon Every Sunday.”

Before anyone can ask, “Which way ought we to go?” there must be a prior contextual question: “Where are we on the map?”

The chief challenge in my four decades of ministry has been the radical change of cultural context in which we lead and preach. The “good” preaching that once gathered a crowd now ricochets back at the preacher from empty pews in a decade-long “attendance recession,” and the good-enough leadership that once maintained a healthy congregation is no longer appropriate for a church that must change or die.

Preachers look out on a conglomeration of people who hardly know one another, making our pious references to our “church community” and our “church family” sound hollow. We boast of diversity and inclusion, but the median age in my denomination is well over sixty. We bishops devised the slogan “Making disciples for the transformation of the world.” The gap between our public aspirations and the reality of our results is laughable. There’s an embarrassing (bordering on deceitful) disjunction between our grand declarations and our weakened internal condition.

“We’re discovering that being a welcoming church requires more than simply unfurling a rainbow flag from our steeple,” a pastor said recently. “A series of sermons on why we ought to be an inclusive and welcoming congregation does not a welcoming congregation make.” People don’t do right by being told in sermons to do right.

Although my church brags of being “inclusive” and “diverse,” we have a lower percentage of African American Methodists than we did at the time of my ordination in 1974. We’ve attempted to substitute slogans and false advertising for the hard, adaptive work of coming to terms with our true condition.

It’s not that our past preaching and leadership were wrong; it’s just that the changing reality of the church requires that we must work differently. In 2005, I assembled Sermons from Duke Chapel, with selections of sermons from the chapel’s seventy-five-year history.^[1] The same year the book appeared, I became bishop in Alabama. A few months into my episcopacy I realized that none of the sermons I heard preached in the churches I visited sounded like the sermons in the book. In just a couple of decades, the preaching of the gospel had radically changed into direct, personal, energetic, engaged sermons that promised immediate relevance to the listener’s situation. None of the hundreds of books on preaching published in the past decade could have been published just a decade before.

Having dramatically changed our preaching, now we must adapt our leadership in light of our new context. Our changed situation is a God-given moment for us pastors to step back and ask not only, “What’s the right way to lead?” but also a more basic question: “Which way should we be going here and now?”

What are the chief aspects of our changed context that church leaders ought to note? Gil Rendle, author of Quietly Courageous, the decade’s most helpful book on church leadership,^[2] says that most of us who lead the church today grew up in a convergent culture, whereas we now find ourselves leading in a divergent culture. A convergent culture is characterized by commonality, a sense of unity, common purpose, and shared values; a divergent culture craves variety and diversity and stresses generational, racial, and gender differences. Whereas a convergent culture urges individuals to hide their differences or to try to fold their differences into the larger group, a divergent culture encourages people to lead with their differences and to cultivate and express the ways they deviate from cultural norms.

Mainline churches like mine thrived in a convergent culture. As Gil says, “It isn’t difficult to lead people in the direction they are already going.” The questions and the answers are the same for everybody. We dream the same dream. Everybody wants to look average.

The cultural context in which we worked really didn’t matter much because it simply confirmed who we were as compliant members of the majority culture. Congregational unity wasn’t much of a challenge when we could rely upon an already well-formed common identity and purpose. Rather than creating and inculcating a common, distinctive sense of mission, church leaders could rely on people’s desire to fit into the larger group.

At some point people stopped saying, “We’re here because my family has always been Baptist” (convergent), and started asking, “What can your church do for us?” (divergent).

Divergent leadership is complex because our organizations and institutions have become multifaceted in ways that are often experienced as fragmented and dissonant. Gil says that a question like “Where is the nearest Presbyterian church?” (convergent) has become “Why do you want to go to a Presbyterian church?” (divergent).

Just as our sermons must appeal to a diverse group of hearers, most of us pastors find ourselves in institutions where we must both attend to the current demands of the congregation and at the same time move our people to a new paradigm. We must continue to know how to do the basic tasks of ministry, to fulfill many of the congregation’s traditional expectations, and at the same time constantly be learning how to do what we do not know how to do. Learning and adaptation, experimentation, and discovery are the order of the day. We’ve got to move from fixation with fixing toward being obsessed with learning, from planning and goal setting to understanding and re-visioning, from asking how to wondering why.

More than one congregation has debated whether or not to begin an additional, alternative worship service different in style and focus from their accustomed service.

“We don’t want to split up our congregation between the ‘contemporary’ and the ‘traditional’ crowd,” some argued.

Most of these churches came to the realization that they were already divided; the new additional service reached those whose worship needs had been denied.

“The easiest, surest way to increase your Sunday attendance,” advised one consultant, “is to begin a new service.” But then he turned to the pastors and said, “Don’t begin a new service unless you are willing to reinvent your preaching. The sermons you’ve been preaching at your traditional service have been aimed at a different congregation from the one you’ll speak to at the new service and will seem out of place in this new context.”

Gil thinks the major change from a convergent to a divergent culture is our society’s move from “communal” to “individual.” Divergent institutions tend to be a conglomeration of individuals. In a divergent age, advertising and technology encourage us to fulfill our individual needs by exercising individual preference.

“I’m trying to lead a church where half of ’em get their news from Fox and the other half from MSNBC,” groused one pastor. “While I’m trying to preach the good news that can bring us together, they’re trying to pigeonhole my message into one of these two containers.”

The media identifies a plethora of segments and plays to our segmentation. We find ourselves living in the functional equivalent of gated communities in which personal preferences tend to outweigh a sense of common purpose. The subjective feelings of individuals, along with the fulfillment of individual desires, preoccupy a diversion culture.

Throughout my ministry I’ve preached the Christian necessity of a racially, ethnically inclusive and diverse congregation. Yet I never succeeded in forming a congregation that matched my homiletical exhortation. It’s difficult to urge a church to violate its divergent expectations for individual fulfillment with talk of merging and converging those differences in one body.

When divergent Millennials say that they don’t want to be part of “organized religion,” what they mean is that they don’t want to be part of a congregation; congregations are the way that Christians organize. Even more troubling theologically, they may be saying they prefer a disincarnate God, Christ without a body. How do we entice people toward an incarnational faith, an embodied spirituality, when they believe their highest calling is to discover and to express their individuality apart from a group?

Curiously, many of these Millennials are more open to preaching—think: one person standing and delivering in a TED Talk—than they are to congregating. They may download a hip preaching video but resist the hard work of rolling up their sleeves and joining a congregation. In such a climate, perhaps preaching becomes a door, an invitation toward our peculiarly corporate Christian way of being spiritual—the congregation.

We’ve got our work cut out for us in a divergent age because pastors are ordained by the church to lead the church, to be engaged in essentially communal, group, ecclesial concerns. Elsewhere I’ve called pastors “community persons.” Good pastors are ordained to keep building up the Christian community, keep wondering what it takes for this conglomeration of individuals to become the body of Christ, and keep worrying about who’s out and what it would take for them to be in.^[3]

To be honest, my biblical interpretation and preaching show that I, too, am a child of a divergent age. One of the greatest weaknesses in many of my moves from the biblical text to the preached sermon is that I neglect the communal, corporate intentions of Scripture. I turn a text that addresses the whole congregation into an existential, subjective matter. That’s what happens in a radically individualized (“What’s in it for me?”) culture.

So my sermon on 1 Corinthians 13, Paul’s great hymn to love, is transformed from Paul’s corporately derived and delivered word to a divided church to an exhortation for individuals to be more loving in their daily interactions or, worse, as instructions for a happier marriage.

Scripture tends to be communally concerned before it is individually so. Why do I so seldom preach from the letters of Paul? The epistles arise from essentially in-house, parochial, congregational concerns—urging the rich and the poor to share with one another in the church, pressing people to lay aside their differences and cease squabbling, advising a younger associate to utilize...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Leading with the Sermon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Preaching: The Most Important Leadership Activity of Pastors
• Preachers Are Leaders
• Leading as Teaching
• Courage to Lead from the Pulpit
• Preaching: Telling the Truth about Jesus Christ
• Pastors as Preachers
• Preaching Is Leading
• Notes
• Index of Names
• Scripture Index