congregations. The pastor wears many hats and has personal relationships with most congregants. The preacher also has the advantage of preaching almost every week with the discretion to focus those sermons freely. The preacher is an integral leader in almost every aspect of the church’s life. In such a context, the practice of using long-term sermons is easily accepted by the congregation and a gift to preachers as they prepare their weekly message. Since the preacher knows the strengths and weaknesses of the parish, they are also the best person in the parish to choose the long-term sermon focus, even if the process of making that choice involves other leaders.
In a church with multiple regular preachers, these ideas are still effective. They will require more coordination and involve a discipline from all preachers to shape their weekly sermons in service of the larger goal, even if they were not involved in choosing that goal. Our congregations are not going to get where they need to go unless we are willing at every level to give up some of our autonomy to work collaboratively and to be accountable to other Christian leaders.
In their book Rebuilt, Michael White and Tom Corcoran describe the process of revitalizing their multistaff Roman Catholic church. One of their key learnings was the importance of preaching in feeding people. When they looked at themselves, however, they saw incredible inconstancies in quality and substance. With multiple services each week, and frequent guest preachers, they realized they had given up their prime opportunity to lead their congregation with no expectations or quality control.4 They moved their church to a “one church, one message” approach where everyone preaching on any given weekend was covering the same themes in their homilies, and often those messages were parts of sermon series.5 White and Corcoran suggest that the preachers and other church leaders are invited into the process of determining the focus of sermon series.6 When they took their preaching more seriously, White and Corcoran saw significant church growth. They did not use the long-term sermon concept, but their approach to sermons series and involvement of multiple preachers, including guest preachers, provides a model for using the concepts in this book for larger parishes. While the implementation details may change a bit, the important work of leading a congregation through intentional, consistent preaching into long-term change applies to all churches.
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Practical Exercises
1. John Kotter, Leading Change (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996), 9.
2. Kotter, Leading Change, 90.
3. Kotter, Leading Change, 90.
4. Michael White and Tom Corcoran, Rebuilt: Awakening the Faithful, Reaching the Lost, and Making Church Matter (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2013).
5. White and Corcoran, Rebuilt, 142–43.
6. White and Corcoran, Rebuilt, 148.
Imparting New LanguageElements
All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, forreproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.
—2 Timothy 3:16
I KNEW I HAD to be creative. I was starting my new call in August. The vestry had impressed upon me the need to develop the congregation’s stewardship. The senior warden reinforced their emphasis by privately expressing concerns about being able to pay my salary after eighteen months unless something changed. Nobody, however, wants to hear the new preacher start begging for money out of the gate, nor does a winsome vision for the future start by focusing on financial fears. Most members of the parish had made pledges for the current year in November and were not likely to change them in the middle of summer. Confronting the issue immediately did not look promising.
I knew that stewardship development was more about fostering faith in the abundance of God than running a successful fundraising campaign. I decided that I could begin that work immediately if I approached it creatively. Rather than worry about how much people could give, I inserted topics into the sermons that the congregation would need if they were going to make more faithful pledges the coming November.
My first Sunday, the lectionary epistle reading was James 1:17–27, which contains an interesting phrase that in another context I probably would not have focused on. The end of verse 18 reads, “that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.” Understanding this phrase required an understanding of the Old Testament concept of first fruits giving, and I believe first fruits giving is key to faithful stewardship.
That morning, I spent about 40 percent of the sermon explaining what first fruits giving meant in scripture, how the concept is generally used today for tithing, and what that might have to do with us being the first fruits of God’s creatures. From that explanation, I moved onto the central points of the James reading. While preaching the text of the day, I began the process of teaching the congregation the essential vocabulary of the language of stewardship.
The following week’s gospel was the passage about Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman whose daughter was possessed by a demon, followed by Jesus’s healing of a deaf man in the Decapolis.
