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The relationship of preaching to leadership is significant. The pulpit provides valuable opportunity for the preacher to lead the congregation by putting a vision before the people and inspiring people to follow faithfully as God leads. Of course, this requires more than just preaching the church’s mission statement every January. William E. Hull, in his significant book, Strategic Preaching offers a comprehensive description of how Christian proclamation can guide a congregation in the fulfillment of its mission. “In pointing the way to God’s tomorrow, the preacher not only gets out in front of the congregation as a leader but thereby opens up a path that invites the congregation to undertake the journey with its pastor. (2)”
Hull is correct when he says that the intersection between the world of homiletics and the world of leadership studies has been under-explored. I found the book to have done a good job of integrating the two disciplines. There is a lot of detail here, describing not only homiletic features, but carefully laying out a useful approach to strategic planning in the local church, not to mention a theological foundation for his approach.
Hull offers a five-step strategic planning process: (1) start with the future, (2) look back to the past to discover the resources already available, (3) correlate these two understandings at the point at which they converge, (4) create a strategic plan, and (5) create a continuous feedback loop.
With respect to the first step, he writes, “Since many strategic planning efforts soon get bogged down in the ‘paralysis of analysis,’ surprise everyone by starting with the future rather than the past. Before becoming inhibited by a mass of historical trend data, ask leaders and followers alike to describe their understanding of the biblical vision that they would like to see the church implement at an appropriate point in the future, say five or ten years hence. Create a serendipitous climate in which the imagination can improvise, restrained only by ‘the art of the possible.’” (172)
Preaching, then, is the means by which the plan is championed among the congregation. Any disconnect that is felt between the nuts and bolts of the plan and the more rarified air of the sermon needs to be overcome. The best way to do this, Hull suggests, is to make preaching and worship “a unified experience more integral to the life of the congregation in today’s world.” (92) To that, I would heartily concur.
William E. Hull is a research professor and former provost at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He is also a Baptist pastor serving as Theologian in Residence at Mountain Brook Baptist Church in Birmingham. Readers should note that he is not the Bill Hull associated with T-Net who has written extensively on disciple-making leaders.