Preaching conference emphasizes “doing church” for the sake of the world
::
05/08/12
Pastors and church leaders gathered on Fuller’s Pasadena
campus for a preaching and leadership conference from May 3 through May 5. The
three-day conference, hosted by Fuller’s Lloyd John Ogilvie Institute of
Preaching, focused on the theme “Inside-Out Church: Preaching, Leadership, and
Community for the Sake of the World”—looking at what it means to reconceive those
three aspects of church life so as to focus on our neighbors outside the church.
Participants attended plenary sessions, seminars, and
discussion groups throughout the conference. Plenary session speakers included
experts in church growth, sociology, New Testament, and Christian leadership,
giving talks such as “The Inside-Out Power of Lament” and “Beyond Personal
Salvation.” In the seminars, the keynote speakers took the opportunity to go
deeper into their respective topics.
Tod Bolsinger, for example, who is senior pastor of San
Clemente Presbyterian Church in San Clemente, California, gave a talk for
Friday morning’s plenary session entitled “Beyond the Pulpit (Kingdom
Leadership).”
“We in the church are so good at talking about problems that
after a while, we think we have actually done something about them,” Bolsinger
said. He pointed out the connection between preaching and leading, noting that
the greatest leaders of the past tended to be the greatest orators—Abraham
Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr. “In the Christendom world,
where faith was the center of the culture, perhaps preaching was enough for
leadership,” commented Bolsinger. But today, as Christianity moves into the
margins, “we must learn to lead beyond the pulpit.”
Defining leadership as “energizing a community of people
toward their own transformation to meet their greatest challenges,” Bolsinger
identified key principles to apply in order to be adaptive leaders in today’s
changing context. First, pastors and church leaders must give the “solution
work” back to those who experience the problem most greatly. The way we do
church must create an environment for people to wrestle with the problems in
their wider community.
Second, “the most powerful thing a preacher can do is to
create a condition of trust,” said Bolsinger, “by being a person of technical
competence and personal congruence.” Competence builds credibility, and
personal congruence means transparency—being clear about one’s identity as a
pastor—and also boundaries, so that congregants do not view the pastor as the
expert on or answer to all of their problems. This way, the church’s ministry
moves from being the pastor’s project to the congregation’s, saying, “We have work to
do.
“Adaptive leadership goes beyond the pulpit by giving back
the work to the people,” he said. “Your people need you to lead them, even more
than they need you to preach to them.”
The vision of the Lloyd John Ogilvie Institute is to proclaim Jesus Christ
and to catalyze a movement of empowered, wise preachers who seek justice, love
mercy, and walk humbly with God, leading others to join God’s mission in the
world. In addition to biannual preaching conferences, the Institute facilitates
a network of Micah Groups, small preacher-formation groups that nurture the
integration of worship, preaching, and justice in the lives of preachers and
their congregations. For more information, click here.