AdobeStock_634208954

Sermons that Summon

by Will Willimon

VIEW ISSUE 81 FLIPBOOK

Though preaching’s inception is theological—God’s word to humans—preaching’s means are anthropological—human words about God. It is not enough to hear or even to agree to God’s word; God’s word is always an address whereby we are summoned, enlisted, called by God to be other than who we were born to be. Preachers therefore aim not just for our listeners’ assent, but for human embodiment, performance, and practice of the assertions of the sermon. What Christopher Beeley says for a leader applies to preachers as well: “The spiritual condition of the flock is the only real measure of a leader’s success”2—a canon of measurement that sends a chill down my spine as I assess my own congregation. 

Still, my sermons are to be judged by the quality of the disciples my preaching produces.

Jesus’s command was “Follow me!” Reception of the divine gospel demands human enactment of the gospel, discipleship. Salvation is vocation. Jesus means more than “God is love”; Jesus is God’s love in action, God’s love as vocation. His message was a summons: “Come, join up, take part in God’s reclamation of God’s creation.” Whatever Jesus wants done in the world, Jesus elects not to do it alone. The vocative, missional intent of preaching (derived from the nature of the gospel itself) is why, from the first days of Jesus’s earthly ministry, preaching and leadership are inseparable. 

Whatever Jesus wants done in the world, Jesus elects not to do it alone.In preaching, God’s people are moved, that is, led—little by little, or sometimes violently jolted—in the power of the Holy Spirit, Sunday by Sunday, toward new and otherwise unavailable descriptions of reality. Every sermon potentially offers a new heaven and a new earth. The complaint “Your sermon didn’t really speak to my world” overlooks the potentially disruptive, dislocating power of preaching that wants to rock our world. 

A pragmatic, typically American charge against Christian preaching is that Christians fail to “practice what they preach.” Fair criticism, as long as the critic understands that Christians are always amateurs, always on our way, tagging along behind the God who, though always going ahead of us, leading us (Mark 10:32), refuses to leave us be. 

Sermons are summons repeatedly addressed to God’s people on the way. Christian preaching is not merely the skillful description of the world the way it is, but a bold, visionary, and demanding call to move toward a world that is to be. The result of proclamation is performance of the faith, and we are not—in most of our performances—there yet. Christian preachers are heralds who proclaim the true sovereignty of God in territory whose ownership is under dispute. Jesus Christ is Lord, but not in fullness and completion. It’s easy to point to the gap between what Christians profess (“Jesus Christ is Lord”) and how we presently live (“The United States is synonymous with the kingdom of God”). There’s always a gap, a contested space, between our designation as “the body of Christ” and the empirical reality of the poor old church. 

Do not accuse us of hypocrisy when we say more than we are able to live. Our discipleship is aspirational, provisional, constantly under threat. Of course we say more than we are in the faith, that by the grace of God, one day we shall be more than we could have been without the repeated summons to “follow me!” In any age, the church never outgrows its first name, “the Way” (Acts 9:2). 

From our earliest days, it was not enough for preachers to articulate the good news of Jesus Christ; they also had to step up, accept responsibility, and take the initiative to be forerunners in embodiment of the gospel they were preaching. Somebody had to answer the call to lead because the gospel requires more than admiring bystanders or passersby (the religious leaders of the parable of the Good Samaritan). Like the Samaritan who refused to pass by and who risked taking responsibility for someone he didn’t even know, Christian leaders attend to, bind up the wounds of, and make the sacrifices required to empower others not only to accept but also to embody the gospel. 

Because preacher Jesus preached, “You are the salt of the earth. … You are the light of the world. … Let your light shine before people, so they can see the good things you do and praise your Father who is in heaven” (Matt 5:13–16), leadership is required. 

Because Paul preached the radical, “God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ” (2 Cor 5:19), calling us “to the ministry of reconciliation” (5:18), Paul had to roll up his sleeves and learn how to be a church planter. 

It’s not good enough to clearly communicate important religious ideas; not enough for the sermon to ask and answer, “Who is God and what is God up to in the world?” The sermon must also be invitational: “Don’t you want to hitch on to what God is doing?” At some point in sermons, God’s people must hear the summons, “Let’s go!”


Will Willimon is the author of over 70 books. A bishop in the United Methodist Church, Professor Willimon served as the dean of Duke Chapel and professor of Christian ministry at Duke University for 20 years.

This article is excerpted from Leading with the Sermon: Preaching as Leadership (Fortress Press, 2020) by the author’s permission.


2 Christopher A. Beeley, Leading God’s People: Wisdom from the Early Church for Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 14.