Leading with the Sermon: Preaching as Leadership
In this addition to the new Working Preacher Books series, 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. It will also show how leadership is an appropriate expectation for sermons. In preaching, pastoral leaders can help a congregation face its problems and coordinate its God-given resources to address those problems. Sermons can be an opportunity to articulate, motivate, and orchestrate God's people in doing God's work in the church and in the world.
Leading with the Sermon includes chapters on why pastors must be leaders, why preaching is such an essential task in telling the truth about the gospel, how preaching makes better leaders, and how better leaders make better preachers.
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"Will Willimon's argument connecting preaching and leadership is fundamental to ministry. Preaching and leadership is as basic as connecting hearing and doing. The encounter with Christ is meant to change people and communities. 'The word preached leads to the word performed.' Worthy stuff in a church often unsure of its connection to God's presence and power." --Gil Rendle, author of Quietly Courageous: Leading the Church in a Changing World
"I believe that you have to love your people enough to preach the gospel to them--honestly, courageously, and, yes, prophetically. Will Willimon believes that, too, and says every pastor should lead by preaching. In these times, in particular, we need preachers who will preach the truth of Jesus Christ--all of it." --Jim Wallis, founder and editor-in-chief, Sojourners
"Will Willimon is right: to preach is to lead. Preachers, read and be renewed in your calling to this wondrous work." --Bishop Hope Morgan Ward, North Carolina Conference, United Methodist Church
"Willimon's passion for proclamation, his vivid storytelling, and his rich pastoral wisdom are evident on every page." --Angela Deener Hancock, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
"One of the great preachers of our time shows the intimate linkage between preaching and leadership, showing the synergies that emerge from seeing preaching as leadership. In an era when we desperately need our words to be appropriate to the Word, and to show the effects of those words in discipleship, Will Willimon charts an exciting and faithful path for preachers who lead, and leaders who preach!" --L. Gregory Jones, Dean and Williams Distinguished Professor, Duke Divinity School
"William Willimon keeps his eye firmly on what is too often forgotten: leading a congregation--together with its call, task and effectiveness--begins with the preaching with the Word of God. This book helpfully serves as an antidote to the widespread separation of pastoral preaching and leadership, as well as an immunization against the temptation to think of them more as personal accomplishments than gifts from God for the church." --Kimlyn J. Bender, author of Reading Karl Barth for the Church: A Guide and Companion
