There are a lot of books on expositional preaching and there are a lot of books on leadership, but few that blend the two. Expositional Leadership: Shepherding God’s People from the Pulpit joins together what no pastor should separate.

I have often wrestled with the nature of my role as a pastor. Does the task of shepherding mean showing relational care and providing counsel? Does it mean leading God’s people in a particular direction organizationally and institutionally? Does it mean feeding the sheep through sound teaching? The answer is yes, yes, and yes. But all that can be overwhelming especially if you divide up those tasks into silos rather than overlapping responsibilities. Expositional Leadership helps the preacher understand his preaching as more than just weekly exposition of a particular text. It is that, but it is more than that. The preaching moment is itself an act of leading, shepherding, example setting, and oversight.

The authors define expositional leadership in this way:

Expositional leadership is the pastoral process of shepherding God’s people through the faithful exposition of his word to conform them to the image of his Son by the power of his Spirit (138).

In other words, we lead through exposition. Our sermons manuscripts should not read like running commentaries. We are not merely text explainers. We are text explainers and we are text appliers to particular people in a particular moment in real time and space. We are leading a people to both understand the word and live in light of that word in God’s world for such a time as this.

Leading God’s people through preaching is an incredible privilege, but it is not necessarily formulaic. We need wisdom to know how to lead through preaching. This book provides such wisdom. It reads like that of an experienced preacher pulling up a chair next to a young man in ministry with a few principles to instill. If you have ever questioned how to lead your church through preaching when its time to make strategic decisions or in the unique moment when tragedy strikes, this book won’t answer all your questions, or tell your which text to preach, but it will provide some guide rails, some principles to stand by, and some encouragement for the weighty task of expositional leadership.

Here are just a few nuggets of wisdom from my underlines in the book:

“The reason many pastors fail at being leaders is that they want to be leaders….The way to be a good leader is to be a good servant” (Expositional Leadership, 21).

“Spirit-empowered delivery occurs when we preach with the inspired passion expressed in the passage” (Expositional Leadership, 49).

“Pastoral sermons – grounded in and driven by the authoritative meaning of the divine author as expressed through the biblical writers – can and should be developed and directed to those specific situations, connected to particular people, and pastorally applied to certain churches” (Expostional Leadership, 63).

“People can spot a man who’s tarried in God’s presence from a mile away. When you have been long with the Lord, your words and your direction will be a calming, soothing balm for your people in the midst of their turmoil” (Expositional Leadership, 112).