Lilly Compelling Preaching Initiative—what’s it all about?

In the early 2020s, Lilly Endowment, Inc., fondly and somewhat cheekily known as the Church’s One Foundation, invited a select group to apply for grants in a new initiative they called Compelling Preaching. One of the largest foundations in the United States, Lilly Endowment gives millions in support of “efforts that enhance the vitality of congregations and strengthen the pastoral and lay leadership of Christian communities.” This new initiative grew out of the acknowledgement that we are living through a time of significant change for Christianity in North America.

“At many points in history, Christian preachers have needed to adapt their preaching practices to engage new generations of hearers more effectively,” said Christopher L. Coble, the Endowment’s vice president for religion. “They have taken the gospel message into fields and homes, and used print, radio, television and other new technologies and media to expand the reach of their ministries. Many religious leaders believe that churches may now be at another inflection point when preachers may again need to adapt to changing communication practices and forms of media to ensure that the gospel message is accessible for all audiences. With this new initiative we ask, ‘What needs to be done today?’” Read more about the overall initiative, and the 100+ programs funded as part of it, at compellingpreaching.org.

The Future Church Pilots program articulates and strengthens compelling preaching amidst congregations who already know something about how to reach—and form in faith—the very demographics who seem increasingly absent in traditional mainline protestant congregations across the United States, including the ELCA. Rather than rehearsing features of the church’s decline and proposing approaches to reverse this trend, Future Church Pilots claims that there are new missional communities (NMCs) where preaching practices—and other features of their ecclesial life—already embody features of what is needed to connect with and develop faith in people who are more and more disconnected from traditional religious organizations. While there is no explicit definition for NMCs, they tend to be faith communities planted within the past twenty years, often drawing on early church patterns or experimental modes of gathering and designed explicitly to connect with those who are disconnected from participation in church. Some of our partners, however, are newly reimagined existing congregations trying on a radical redefinition of how they gather as Christian community.

The program aims to find these NMCs across the ELCA, connect them in a network for peer learning, and provide platforms for sharing their learning with the wider church (the ELCA and beyond). To assure wider support and impact in the overall ecology of the ELCA, the program includes connections with synods and their bishops, as well as seminaries and their presidents and faculty members. While change will be slow, from a strategic perspective, a systems approach that learns from and highlights the practices of these experimental congregations has the potential to catalyze change.