By Chuck Sackett
Preaching Team-Madison Park Christian Church, Quincy, IL
“Is this sermon serving God’s intent, or merely my routine?”
The inaugural entry in the Sermon Crafting Blog (December 6, 2024) set the tone for what I would call Homiletical Integrity (sermons appropriate to the culture, faithful to the text, fitting to the space into which they are preached). Today, I’d like to take a step back. I’d like to ask you to ponder Homiletical Intentionality (the why behind the sermons we preach).
In other words, “What intent does this sermon serve in the congregation’s life?” Asked another way, “Is this sermon supposed to move the congregation in a particular direction?” Or, more pointedly, “Am I preaching this sermon simply because it’s Sunday and that’s what the congregation expects?”
I asked a group of seasoned preachers, “What do you want your congregation to be in two years?” You could hear paint dry. I followed with, “Why did you preach the specific sermon you preached last week? Why will you preach the sermon you will preach next week?”
New York Yankee’s great, Yogi Berra: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” In the world of the church, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll go nowhere else. Homiletical Intentionality implies we preach with purpose. Not merely the purpose of teaching Scripture or calling for decisions for Christ, as important as those are, but with the purpose of accomplishing God’s mission in your world.
Christopher Wright cites Andrew Kirk’s statement,
“It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world but that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church, the church was made for mission—God’s mission.” (Christopher Wright in The Mission of God citing J. Andrew Kirk in What is Mission?)
If God’s mission involves redeeming a lost and hopeless world, then we best be about that. The most important question we may ask this week is, “Does our congregation include those hopeless and lost people?” If the answer is no, “Why not?”
William Willimon says, “Christian preaching is not merely the skillful description of the world as it is, but a bold, visionary, and demanding call to move toward a world that is to be.” Preachers need to ask, “Is my preaching issuing that demanding call?” In another place Willimon says, “Our care is concerned not to enable people to adapt and to adjust to the received world, but rather to let God move them to a new and different world.”
Derek Prime and Alistair Begg may be correct when they suggest, “Preaching is deliberately directive, and it ceases to be biblical if it is nondirective.” That doesn’t mean we are attempting to force people against their will. It does mean we are painting a picture of what God would have this community of believers become in this social location that will challenge the status
quo of culture. If you think of the prophetic voices of Isaiah, Micah, Paul, and James, you get the idea.
Historically, most churches have turned inward and seek only to speak to the felt needs of those who already attend. As Willimon says, “Who needs preaching for that? Leadership is not needed to guide people in a direction they are already headed.”
Effective preaching occurs when preachers, in company with church leaders, determine what their congregation needs to become to carry out God’s mission in their community. Then, whatever obstacles to that mission must be identified. Finally, preaching must present the Biblical means of overcoming those obstacles so our people may become participants in God’s mission-driven plan.
(For greater details about this process see: https://renew.org/product/effective-preaching-making-a-plan-to-reach-the-metrics-that-matter/)