PREACHING CONGREGATIONAL VISION AND LEADERSHIP Robert Stephen Reid

University of Dubuque A Paper presented at the 2009 Academy of Homiletics

Copyright 2009 Robert Stephen Reid

Pastoral Leadership is at the heart of becoming an Intentional Congregation and the vision bearing required in leading this kind of culture change finds its greatest expression in the pastor’s pulpit ministry. Every pastor who has ever brought a vision of change developed by the leadership of a congregation before the larger faith community knows that she or he has a responsibility to preach the vision. Whether the vision is simply to enlarge the facilities or to enlarge the faith practices of a congregation, where clergy need help is in understanding how this vision bearing task can be joined to their call to preach Gospel. Otherwise the necessary organizational task can too easily take over and even totalize the formative, theological purpose of preaching.

When acting together as a people of faith, a congregation can make tremendous difference in their community and in the world if they are implementing a vision of intentional practices. But helping that community move into realizing a vision’s claim on their corporate practices and faith identity often means they must surrender the comfort of a traditional identity. This process of disestablishing a former identity and embedding a new one requires that pastors will increasingly need to understand how to lead change. Much of a pastor’s day to day ministry in a parish is often managerial, but when a congregation chooses to move beyond its established identity to take up a missional identity, the pastor must be able to lead this change in organizational culture. The process of detraditionalization facing many congregations increasingly requires that pastors must become leaders who can move beyond the Christendom role of managing ministries and maintaining the connection to a denominational identity in order to take up a post-Christiandom role of facilitating the process of helping a congregation discover an intentional, missional identity and become the vision bearer of it.

It would be hard to imagine that a congregation, or for that matter any organization, could become intentional about this kind of change without the leader’s voice guiding the journey. Yet there is remarkably little help for clergy who want to understand how to negotiate this process. In fact, most literature on leadership ignores the role of preaching. Northern Seminary’s Michael Quicke notes that much of the extensive literature on church leadership has little or nothing good to say about the relationship between preaching and leadership. He challenges this assumption, arguing that just as “leadership without preaching is in danger, preaching without leadership is in desperate trouble too.”1 He maintains that preaching needs to turn to leadership studies to come to terms with change process, with conflict resolution, with understanding intentionality, and with understanding how organizational systems function. At the same time preachers must beware simply appropriating secular leadership assumptions across the board because its theory is not proposed in a presuppositionless

1 Michael Quicke, 360 Degree Leadership: Preaching to Transform Congregations (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 65. Cf. William Hull, Strategic Preaching: The Role of the Pulpit in Pastoral Leadership (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2007), 2-6.

vacuum. Most theories of leadership come with implicit and sometimes explicit assumptions about power, hierarchy, culture, systems thinking, adaptability, and influence, its relationship to management, its relationship with people, and a host of other variables. Pastoral leadership may be at the heart of creating and sustaining an Intentional Congregational identity as the people of God, but preachers who would lead a congregation to move from trusting in an Established Congregational identity to creating an intentional identity need to consider the relationship between preaching and leadership.

Detraditionalization and the Move to Intentionality Before I turn to exploring the help preachers can expect from leadership literature on change process, I think it is important to say something about the relationship between detraditionalization and intentionality. In The Practicing Congregation Diana Butler Bass sets up a fascinating literary contrast to illustrate the difference between attending congregations with an established identity vs. attending congregations that have become intentional in their practices of forging a new, purposeful identity. She suggests that Established Church identity has become akin to the story of Macon Leary from Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist. Macon is a man scarred by the pointless death of his son Ethan, whose life by his own assessment does not have “much of a point.” In the opening scene, just before she announces that she wants a divorce, his wife tells him, “You just go on your same old way like before. Your little routines and rituals, depressing habits, day after day. No comfort at all.”2 Macon has become the author of a series of guidebooks for businessmen, an “accidental tourist” who details how one can visit surrounding countries and remain insulated from the experience by visiting places that can emulate the comforts of home. For Butler Bass going to church in established congregations has, in many ways, become an accidental way of working out one’s faith in the American landscape. When adults go back to the church of their youth it is often more about the comfort of the familiar than an engagement with the Other. What matters most in this world is loyalty, and even if your wife of many years asks for a divorce, loyalty means that you should not begin a relationship with someone else who is not part of this established world of comforting familiarity and accidental habit.3 Butler Bass asks us to contrast this with Anne Lamont’s Spiritual autobiography, Traveling Mercies. Lamont grew up in California in the second half of the 20th century, a world spinning in too many directions for a young person with no direction. Her story of coming to faith is a way of coping with endless change that has become a norm and a way of responding to the vagaries of life’s disappointments, the deaths of people she loves, and the pointlessness of being anesthetized by drugs, alcohol and meaningless sex. At one point in the narrative she buys a used car for her travels, “something funky and smart, a little rusty, a little banged up, like

2 Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist (New York: Knopf, 1985), 6. 3 I once interviewed a Presbyterian pastor of a flagship congregation on the subject of evangelism. He began with an off the record summary: “Here is what Presbyterians really believe. We need to grow a church large enough to hire staff that can run excellent youth programs to razzle-dazzle our youth with enough faith nuggets, so that after they leave the church in their late teens they will come back when they are married with children. Presbyterians basically believe that evangelism is winning our own children to the church…. Now for the record…” It is important to note that this pastor was not a cynic. His assessment may be rather baldly stated, but it rings true for the Established Churches of most late-Christendom mainline congregations.

me.”4 She ends up with a Volkswagen convertible Cabriolet which promptly comes to a stop on the road, a traveling mercy because the interruption meant that she finally arrived at her destination at the God appointed moment. Such small miracles of meaning remind her of Eugene O’Neill’s line, “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.”5 Faith for Lamont is an intentional pilgrimage of traveling (not by air whenever possible), seeking, and finding small graces in difference and change. Her touchstone on this journey has been a small Presbyterian congregation that embodies Buber’s truth that “All actual life is encounter.” For Butler Bass, Lamont’s story of individual reflexive spirituality participates in a trajectory that is moving toward a communal reflexive spirituality of intentional churchgoing.6 What matters most in this world are practices of engagement that cost something in terms of choice, commitment and involvement with others who may be different but make life matter. Butler Bass joins Jackson Carroll, Robert Wuthnow, Wade Clark Roof and others to identify this trajectory of movement toward detraditionalization being experienced by everyone in our culture as essential to imagining the possibility of becoming a new old church. For example, Carroll summarizes the detraditionalizing occurring in congregations as an acceptance that congregational identity, like individual identity in a post-Christendom era, is increasingly self-authored rather than the inheritance of birth or tradition:

To say that we live in a posttraditional or detraditionalizing society is not to say that traditions are no longer important or operative in our lives. It is rather to say that something important is happening to the way that we relate to traditions, including religious traditions. For an increasing number of people, many traditions no longer carry the authoritative weight they once did. For some they carry no weight at all; they are relics of a dead past.7

Traditional congregations, whether they are liberal 20th century mainlines or conservative, success-driven 20th century evangelicals, share the common value of having become the establishment. Their primary identity still tends to be located, not in a confessional tradition, but in a denominational loyalty and its bounded set understanding of tribal difference from the other congregation down the street. On the other hand, Practice-Centered congregations (Buttler Bass’ term for enlivened mainlines) and Emergent Church congregations (the term for many post-evangelical congregations) share a common commitment to intentionality. And it is this trajectory toward intentionality that Butler Bass and other sociologists consider central to the identity of the emerging practice-oriented spirituality of the 21st century.8 Butler Bass even proposes that intentionally post-mainline (her post-liberal) congregations and intentionally

4 Anne Lamont, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 108. 5 Ibid., 112. 6 In trying to find a way to succinctly summarize these two literary works I did a quick check of Wikipedia’s summaries. They have a useful summary of Tyler’s novel, but Lamont’s novel only shows up as one of three works cited in the reference list relevant to understanding the identity of the Post-Evangelical Mars Hill congregation of Grand Rapids, Michigan; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Hill_Bible_Church . 7 Jackson W. Carroll, Mainline to the Future: Congregations for the 21st Century (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), 15. 8 An example of practice centered concerns for post-mainline congregations can be found in Robert Schnase, Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007). Examples of the practice-centered concerns of post-evangelical congregations can be found in Eddie Gibbs, ChurchNext: Quantum Changes in How We Do Ministry (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000).

post-evangelical congregations are beginning to converge in their mutual interest in the intentional nature of spiritual practice and communities of faith remaking their identity with this same kind of intentionality.9 Robert Wuthnow had already identified a similar trajectory in After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s. He described one pole of contemporary religious practice as a dwelling-oriented spirituality, a perspective that after 1950 had increasingly been displaced by seeking-oriented spirituality.10 Butler Bass draws on Wuthnow’s research at this point to argue for the identity of Established Congregations as a description of faithful Christians who derive their sense of spiritual identity from a religious experience that provides cohesion and makes them feel secure in the familiarity of their ecclesial identity and a sense of sacred space where they worship. Seeking-oriented spirituality, on the other hand, negotiates its identity through the promise of transformation, finding its identity in the search for sacred moments and individual sacred experience.11 Wuthnow identifies a third, emerging orientation of practice-centered spirituality that is primarily characterized by its quest to deepen a relationship with the sacred. He states, “Broadly conceived spiritual practice is a cluster of intentional activities concerned with relating to the sacred…. [through practice that] includes such activities as prayer, meditation, contemplation, and acts of service”12 What characterizes the essence of these practices is that they are embedded in ordinary life. And it is this latter sensibility of congregations looking to a practice-centered spirituality rather than the appeal of the seeker-oriented spirituality that portends, for Butler Bass, the possibility of renewal for intentional corporate faith. She identifies the converging trajectories of the post-mainline and post-evangelical congregations in these matters, choosing to contrast these congregations of intentional practices and missional identity as the alternative to Established Congregations. The congregations that grew in response to Seeking-oriented spirituality since the mid 20th century tend to be experience-oriented, event-centered congregations.13 They remain grounded in the

9 I have substituted the term post-mainline congregations for Butler’s use of the term post-liberal congregations. She locates her use of this term as a trajectory out of the post-liberal theology movement, but such a move would tend to exclude those progressive mainline congregations characterized more by a revisionist theology, a step that seems somewhat narrow unless she has data to suggest that it is only congregations characterized by a post-liberal theology that are experiencing the renewal she describes. The idea of a post-mainline congregation is used here to describe those congregations who once looked to their mainline denomination status for their primary identity, who now have clarified a set of personal spiritual practices and a focus of intentional ministry with others as its corporate missional identity. 10 Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 11 Wuthnow, After Heaven, 3-4. 12 Ibid., 170. In The Four Voices of Preaching I argued that Wuthnow’s conception of a practice-centered faith was typically more oriented toward preaching in a Testifying Voice, preaching that values communal conversation and confessional tradition while also being sensitive to how this communal Christian experience may be considered a way of keeping the question of human understanding open in relationship to the mystery of God; Robert Stephen Reid, The Four Voices of Preaching (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006), 173-74. 13 I would agree with M. Rex Smith that the seeker generation moved away from the congregations that remained rooted to a print era worldview [Established Congregations] in favor of congregations that strove for the big event each week emulating the paradigm shift of the television era. Miller argues for an emerging paradigm of faith-centered communities that draw their worldview from the digital communicative revolution in which truth is viewed as collective and contextual, a convergence-centered approach to corporate faith expression. Miller is a

divisions between liberal (mainline) and conservative (evangelical) which increasingly tends to relegate them to the same cultural status as those individuals characterized by Dwelling-oriented spirituality.

Butler-Bass argues that what she calls Post-liberal (and I call Post-Mainline) Practicing Congregations are finding a new vitality by shifting their sense of identity away from their Dwelling-oriented identity (typically a denominational identity) to an identity focused by specific missional practice relevant to their confessional tradition and social location. She argues that, “Practicing congregations weave together Christian practices—activities drawn from the long Christian tradition—into a pattern of being church that forms an intentional way of life in community.”14 Intentionality in spiritual practices and in corporate missional identity is what defines these post-mainline and post-evangelical congregations. We might even say that it is likely that no one begins to attend post-mainline or post-evangelical congregations in order to become intentional, but quite probably no one stays who doesn’t.

The process of becoming an intentional, missional congregation should only arise after deep research, prayer, and reflection by the leadership of a congregation. But once a vision for how to be a new community has been crafted it is the task of the pastor, more than any other leader in the congregation, to relate this vision to the purposes of God as revealed in the Bible and to preach in ways that the congregation can see how the vision of who they are called to be aligns with a vision of who God calls his people to be in their time and their place. And because these congregations represent a human, corporate system deeply shaped by its prior identity, a pastor needs to be able to understand the role of preaching in leading such a change process. Leadership and Preaching Much could be said about preaching change, but my focus here is to note the relationship between leadership and the pulpit, especially as congregations look to develop a missional identity to help them move from being late-Christendom era Established Congregations to become post-Christendom Intentional Congregations. And it is here that I shift to leadership literature to assay the pastor’s role in preaching change.15

Leadership becomes most apparent in any change process because it is in times of change that resistances will arise and the ability of a leader to influence organization members becomes apparent.16 Definitions of leadership abound, but the best ones tend to focus on the

futurist rather than a sociologist of the church, but his historical argument, grounded in revolutions in communication paradigms and how they have influenced the church has proven to be quite insightful. See M. Rex Miller, The Millenium Matrix: Reclaiming the Past, Reframing the Future of the Church. (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2004); see also the interview with Miller at Homiletics http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/interviews/miller.asp 14 Butler Bass, 3. 15 Even pastors seem to overlook the role of the pulpit in presenting a case for a change in congregational culture. For example, Anthony B. Robinson has chapter length discussions of the implications for church education programs, budget implications, relationship to boards, but mentions preaching only briefly (2 pages) as a social location to inculcate Christian practices in worship. Robinson, Transforming Congregational Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 44-45. 16 I have addressed the issues of the relationship between preaching as vision bearing and responding to resistance in Robert Stephen Reid, “The Vision Bearing Pastor: Leading Parishioners Who Resist Change,” forthcoming in Pastoring and Preaching through Transitions, ed. David N. Mosser (Louisville, MO: Westminster John Knox, 2010).

relationship between the individual’s power, his or her influence, and their ability to facilitate change. W. Warner Burke argues that “Leadership … is the act of making something happen that would otherwise not occur.”17 Notice that change process is at the heart of this definition. It is during a change process that we are able to see how leaders get persons who otherwise resist doing something to do it. This is why James MacGregor Burns, originator of the transformational leader concept, argued that leaders induce “followers to act for certain goals that represent the values and the motivations—the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations—of both leaders and followers.”18 These definitions privilege the ideas of power, influence, and change, but attend less to issues of complexity and commitment. Yet, as Peter Senge notes, “When genuine commitment is needed, hierarchical authority becomes problematic.”19 The latter requires a more inclusive conception of leadership where the task of the leader is one of facilitating direction, alignment, and commitment arising from shared sense-making efforts.

John McClure contends that leadership and preaching that assume an adaptive, collaborative congregational context seeks: 1) to embody face-to-face relationships core to the general relationships in the community, 2) to model participative roles valued by the members of the community in decision-making, and 3) to demonstrate an interactive approach to persuasion expressed from the pulpit central to bringing about change in the community.20 McClure develops these ways of framing the relationship between preaching and leadership in order to propose a collaborative homiletic that includes feed forward groups. For my present purpose, however, I want to consider the application of these principles to a change process in which the pastor must play a vision bearing role as opposed to McClure’s conception of the preacher as host whose normal persuasive efforts are interactively attuned to inviting people to explore faith and communally talk themselves into being Christian.21

I adapt Kurt Lewin’s well accepted conception of the three phases of a change process in what follows to consideration of a change process for re-conceiving a congregation’s missional identity:

Phase One: Involves unfreezing the current missional identity of the organization. In this phase, the organization must finally and fully come to terms with why its previous culture/mission/system is no longer relevant to the current environment and why it must adopt a new vision that is adapted to the complexity of the changed environment. Phase Two: Involves the movement, the work of influencing all parties involved to live into the proposed vision for the organization and conceptually reframing that vision for the parties involved, assisting them in imagining how they can live into this new identity that the change brings.

17 W. Warner Burke, Organization Change: Theory and Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), 228. 18 James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (1978; New York: Harper Perennial, 1982), 19. 19 Peter Senge, “Leading Learning Organizations: The Bold, the Powerful, and the Invisible,” The Leader of the Future, eds., Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, and Richard Beckhard (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1996), 43. 20 John S. McClure, The Roundtable Pulpit: Where Leadership and Preaching Meet (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995) , 20. 21 This language comes from McClure’s forthcoming essay, “The Preacher as Host and Guest” in Slow of Speech and Unclean Lips: Contemporary Images of Preaching, ed. Robert Stephen Reid, (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009); it builds on the ideas he develops in The Roundtable Pulpit, 13-29.

Phase Three: Involves refreezing the new identity which means that once the new infrastructure of the identity is in place, the leader must reinforce and reward those individuals whose engagement in the practices of the new vision help others to adopt and adapt to the new culture. How would McClure’s principles exercising leadership in preaching apply in leading this

kind of process? One way to answer that question is to compare his proposal to Michael Quicke’s 360 Degree leadership. Quicke’s model is an application to preaching of Herrington, Bonem, and Furr’s Leading Congregational Change: A Practical Guide for the Transformational Journey. These three authors are consultants who have helped a variety of congregations, mostly evangelical and mostly located in Texas, to experience a transformational change process. They assume a strong pastor model for congregations operating in a low church tradition, while McClure envisions a collaborative pastoral model more oriented toward middle or high church traditions.

The valued characteristics of a leader in Herrington, Bonem, and Furr’s model draw on the distinction between a leader and a manager made by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus (Leaders 1985), Peter Senge’s five-fold model of the characteristics of a learning organization/a learning leader (The Fifth Discipline 1990), and John Kotter’s eight stage conception of the change process (Leading Change 1996).22 Their stage model is a spiritual adaptation of Kotter’s model, all of which are based on Lewin’s theory of change process. Their first three steps involving the laying the groundwork for change: 1) making personal preparation, 2) creating the urgency, 3) establishing the vision. Their second set of steps involves discerning and communicating the vision of change: 4) discerning the vision and determining the visionpath, and 5) communicating the vision. The final set of steps in their change process involves achieving and maintaining the vision’s widespread impact is: 6) empowering change leaders, 7) implementing the vision and, finally, 8) reinforcing momentum through alignment.23 It would be unfair to suggest that this model is simply hierarchical, but it resonates with Edgar Schein’s basic premise that, “when a manager decides to change the assumptions of a work group . . . that manager is becoming a leader.”24 This is model of leadership most at home in an Adhocracy Culture where the valued leader is an innovator willing to take the risks to help an organization be on the leading edge.25

McClure’s model of leadership reflects the leadership sensibility of Ronald Heifetz Leadership Without Easy Answers, where influence negotiated with authority is the primary factor in doing adaptive work. This approach values “respecting conflict, negotiation, and a diversity of views within a community; increasing community cohesion; developing norms of

22 Jim Herrington, Mike Bonem and James H. Furr, Leading Congregational Change: A Practical Guide for the Transformational Journey (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000). The authors explain how these three books lay at the heart of their formative thought (pp. 4-12) and then propose a congregational transformation model (pp. 12-15) that sets the direction for the remainder of the book. 23 Ibid., 13; cf. Quicke, 150. 24 Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2004), 271. 25 Adhocracy is Henry Mintzberg’s term (The Structure of Organizations) for an entrepreneurial organizational culture. For a useful summary between comparing Adhocracy, Market, Hierarchy, and Clan cultures see Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn, Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2006), 66.

responsibility-taking, learning, and innovation; and keeping social distress within a bearable range”—all of which function as a means of adaptive reality testing for a leader.26 This is more of a systems rather than a transformational theory approach to leadership. It is based on a collaborative model of leadership where the valued characteristics would be shared sense-making, the ability to facilitate connection between people, groups, teams, and the system functions of the organization, as well as the ability to navigate the unpredictable in helping a community maintain its stability during change.27 This is a model of leadership most at home in a Clan Culture where the valued leader is considered to be a mentor and even a parent figure serving in an organization where loyalty and commitment to tradition is high.28

I am less interested in determining which of these two approaches to leadership and preaching is “right” since there is no one right model for organizational culture just as there is no one right way to be a congregation. What should be apparent, however, is that conceptions of leadership, including those of McClure as well as Quicke, come with presuppositions about the nature of leadership. In addition both models serve different theological traditions. One further caveat is to note that McClure’s model may speak of change, but it is not a model of preaching and change process. I have sought to clarify an application of McClure’s principles here by way of Heifetz’ Without Easy Answers language published within a year of McClure’s Roundtable Pulpit.29 In addition I think it would be inappropriate to assume that all Low Church tradition congregations are more likely to prefer the model of Quicke’s pastor as leader over that of McClure or vice-versa. The point is that both models actually serve strong cultures—just different kinds of strong cultures. These cultures can be found in low, middle, and High Church congregations. My interest does not lie in supporting over the other, but in identifying the intersection between the managerial communicative tasks and leadership communicative tasks involved in vision bearing while leading a congregational change process.

Preaching Vision

During a change process preachers must take the people of the congregation on a journey while also attending to the essential management tasks that keep the change process moving forward. This means that good change leadership involves the pastor in managerial

26 Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 26. Heifetz believes that terms life “transformational leadership” lend themselves to grandiose visions of a leader’s power that are in conflict with the harsh realities of real day to day leadership in organizations. For Heifetz leader are tasked with doing the work of “identifying the adaptive challenge, keeping distress within a productive range, directing attention to ripening issues and not diversions, giving the work back to the people, and protecting voices of leadership in the community . . . [all of which must be engaged by] leaders with or without authority” (207). 27 These three criterion are derived from Wilfred H. Drath, “Leading Together: Complex Challenges Require a New Approach,” leadership In Action 23.1 (March/April 2003): 1-7. The essay can be retrieved at http://tppserver.mit.edu/esd801/psds/23_1leadingtogether.pdf. 28 See Cameron and Quinn, 66. 29 I suspect McClure would find Heifetz conception of leadership to resonant with his own views. Cf. Satterlee’s dependence on Heifetz; Craig A. Satterlee, When God Speaks Through You: How Faith Convictions Shape Preaching and Mission (Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 2008).

tasks as well as leadership roles. While leading an organization through a change process the effective leader must engage in three distinct communicative tasks:30

1. They must present the need for change in face-to-face decision making gatherings by identifying previously ineffective ways of doing ministry and presenting a compelling vision of change

2. They must work closely and personally behind the scenes to involve congregational members in the process of planning and continuous implementation of the new vision; and

3. They must provide conceptual frameworks to help all people understand more clearly what is happening to them in the change and how to live into a new identity as the people of Christ in an intentional missional context.

The first communicative task requires that leaders take responsibility for creating the sense of urgency necessary to make the journey of congregational change. The necessity of this task has been made quite clear in John Kotter’s Leading Change. The task in this case is to unfreeze an existing missional identity.31 Employing Lewin’s basic change process model, this communicative task of unfreezing would also include Kotter’s other two change process tasks: creating the guiding coalition and developing a vision and strategy. Of course, the change process is best served if it is arrived at as a result of shared sense-making or at least as a result of elected leaders who have prayed and arrived at the decision to move in this direction after lots of collaborative listening and study.

Though the pulpit may sparingly be used for this task, functionally it is best accomplished in presentations before decision-making bodies of the congregation. Depending on the nature of one’s worship tradition, a leader will likely find it necessary to dedicate a typical service to present a clear vision of the plan of change before a congregation. The pastor may even be only one of several individuals who speak that day. Some traditions would hold such a meeting at a separate time. Either way, basic physics teaches that load-bearing efforts are best served when their force is spread across a supporting beam, or in this case a supporting team. This principle is equally true in communicating the need to re-envision a congregation’s missional identity. The overall nature of the presentation[s] needs to make a clear case for the problems the congregation faces. The vision for the missional future should be presented as a solution that addresses the congregation’s specific problems and helps them understand how living into the change can be understood as a Gospel calling.

The second communicative task—involving organizational members in the process of planning and continuous implementation of change—generally occurs behind the scenes. This is the work of implementing phase two’s movement in Lewin’s change process. John Kotter’s other phases for leading change are relevant here: empowering broad-based action, generating short-term wins, & consolidating gains, producing more change, and anchoring new approaches in the culture. They are all tasks which are best achieved in committee work and one-on-one efforts to listen to people in face-to-face settings. Note that effective leaders understand how

30 Burke, Organization Change, 109-110. In this section I am adapting part of the argument from my forthcoming essay, “The Vision Bearing Pastor: Leading Parishioners Who Resist Change.” 31 John P. Kotter, Leading Change (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996).

to make something happen that would otherwise not occur by a communicative strategy of wooing rather than winning the commitment of others.32

The third communicative task of leadership is the one that most directly implicates the pulpit: the task of providing a conceptual framework to help people understand more clearly what is happening to them during change and how to live into a new identity as the people of Christ. This process stands outside of Kotter’s model, or more accurately, it flows concurrently alongside all of the stages. The pulpit provides pastors with an inherent congregational resource that their secular counterparts lack. The sermon is still central to the process of identity formation for most communities of faith. People look to a pastor to provide wise counsel about how to understand who they are as people of faith and how the changes they are experiencing in their personal life and in their congregational life should be met. In this sense, the pastor is never more of a leader than when she or he is helping the congregation to conceptually reframe who they are as the people of God seeking to live into a new missional identity.33

This work of conceptual reframing is at the heart of preaching’s vision bearing purpose. Gospel truth and Gospel identity represent a timeless identity into which Christians are called to live. But how one lives into this identity in any given time, place, and culture is always different. Preachers are responsible to keep Christian identity from devolving into a tribal identity by focusing on how the people of God must participate both individually and corporately in their communities of faith, by advancing the unfinished life of Jesus in their time and their place. When a vision bearing preacher helps people reframe what is happening in their midst in terms of a Gospel reality of something bigger than they are, that preacher is providing leadership in the most fundamental of human needs—“the need to be important, to make a difference, to feel useful, to be part of a successful and worthwhile enterprise.”34 Preaching is where this task of cognitive restructuring is best realized in the Christian community.

Preaching is also where Kotter’s eighth change mechanism can best be realized by telling the stories before the gathered community of faithfulness by those who are living into the new vision. Preaching that effectively identifies the aspirations of a specific change process with the core congregational identity and gospel purposes of a specific community of faith will help the greatest number of people in that congregation make the transition into the new vision of who and how to be when the change is fully realized. I am aware that some homileticians might disagree with this claim. For example, homileticians committed to David Buttrick’s homiletic might well view this as an inappropriate extension of his negative valuation

32 The metaphor matters. Wooing is a courtship metaphor where one individual aspires to bring about the affection of another such that the two will join their possible futures and fortunes. Winning is a competitive metaphor that always assumes a limited resources worldview even in its best evocation of win-win. See Richard Shell and Mario Moussa, The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to sell Your Ideas (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 2-3. 33 On the role of conceptual reframing as a way of overcoming resistance and helping people to change their minds see Howard Gardner, Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006). 34 Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge, 2nd ed. (New York: CollinsBusiness Essentials, 2005), 85-86.

of personal illustrations, employed here as a kind of collective personal illustration.35 If a congregation is determined to reframe their missional identity, people need to hear stories of personal behaviors and activities embodied by others in the community. They reinforce and reward this new vision of intentionality. It is the tasks of conceptual reframing and sharing the stories of short-term wins that anchor the change of intentionality in the congregational culture. This is a necessary part of refreezing the new culture.

Becoming Intentional in Preaching Is there hope that a change process which leads to becoming an Intentional Congregation can succeed? If we return to the story of The Accidental Tourist we are well served to remember that Macon Leary decided against returning to his established life. He takes charge of his life by choosing to be with Muriel Pritchett—a quirky young woman who seems to be the first cousin of Anne Lamont. When Macon tells his wife Sarah of his choice to be with Muriel she says,

“I suppose you realize what your life is going to be like,” she said. She climbed out of bed. She stood next to him in her nightgown, hugging her bare arms. “You’ll be one of those mismatched couples no one invites to parties. No one will know what to make of you. People will wonder whenever they meet you, ‘My God, what does he see in her? Why choose someone so inappropriate? Its grotesque, how does he put up with her?’ And her friends will no doubt be asking the same about you.” “That’s probably true,” Macon said. He felt a mild stirring of interest; he saw now how such couples evolved. They were not, as he’d always supposed, the result of some ludicrous lack of perception, but had come together for reasons the rest of the world would never guess.36

Macon chooses Annie Lamont? Imagine that. If there’s hope for Macon Leary, maybe there’s also hope for congregations that choose

intentionality over accidental identity. It is hard work. But I end with the claim I began with: Pastoral Leadership is at the heart of becoming an Intentional Congregation and the vision bearing required in leading this kind of culture change finds its greatest expression in the pastor’s pulpit ministry.

35 David Buttrick, Homiletic: Moves and Structures (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 141-43. Buttrick would likely argue that this importation of vision-bearing change theory into preaching is not preaching Gospel as Word of God. I would argue that Buttrick’s model of preaching has an important role to call preachers to realize how supremely important their task is: Word of God is a spoken rather than a written word. But it is also a rigorously lean model in its focus on liberating preaching to achieve this purpose. 36 Tyler, 352.