Write the Vision, Make It Plain

IF I LEARNED one thing from my decade-and-a-half in the pulpit, it’s that preaching ain’t easy. 

In any given church service, a sea of faces stares back at you with a mix of expectation and distraction. Bulletins are folded, throats cleared, bodies settled. From the pulpit, you can see almost everything: The longtime member nodding off; the man checking scores on his phone; the family holding it together by a thread financially; the empty spot where a couple who hasn’t returned since the last election used to sit.

You know whatever you say will land in entirely different ways around the room. So you write and rewrite a sermon, softening one phrase and sharpening another, wondering who will hear a summons to justice and who will hear an accusation. Sometimes you feel the call to speak truth in love, even at the risk of losing the very people you shepherd. Other times, you hold back, knowing silence, too, has consequences.

In talking to pastors across the United States as this year’s midterm elections approached, I found few asking whether politics belongs in the pulpit; like it or not, politics is already there. Instead pastors told me about their struggle to speak faithfully, clearly, and without further fracturing the communities they serve.

“It is my job as clergy to preach, teach, and write God’s vision for a healed and whole world in a plain and accessible way,” said Jacqueline J. Lewis, senior minister at Middle Church in New York City. Citing the prophet Habakkuk, she said the preacher’s task requires discernment, courage, and a willingness to risk being misunderstood. “Write the vision and make it plain,” she said, “so when a herald runs through the street with it, people will get it.”

But one preacher’s clarity can be another’s confusion. Today’s pastors navigate a landscape shaped by ideological sorting, the ups and downs of church attendance, and heightened sensitivities around issues like immigration, voting rights, economic inequality, environmental justice, or LGBTQ+ inclusion. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, most Americans who attend religious services say “they’ve recently heard from their clergy about at least one political or social issue.” But what is delivered—and what is heard—can be a mixed bag.

The partisanship of love

ADDRESSING PUBLIC LIFE from the pulpit is not optional for Lewis. It is core to the vocation of preaching itself. And for her, it comes down to a single question: “What would love have us do?”

“If love of God and neighbor as self is the command from Jesus,” she said, “how does an ethic of love guide our politics—where we live, what we spend money on, how we vote, who we welcome?” For Lewis and her congregation, there is no distinction between spiritual and political life; whether protesting at New York City Hall, marching in a “No Kings” rally, sitting in the hospital with a suffering congregant, or going on NPR to address political issues, Lewis said all of it is proclamation of the good news and God’s intention for a just society.

But not every pastor operates in a setting where that level of directness is expected or necessarily sustainable. “Context is everything,” said Vincent Bacote, theologian and director of the Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College in Illinois. “Christians need to be thoughtfully engaged in politics, but you can’t talk about preaching and politics in the abstract,” he told Sojourners. “You’re always speaking to a particular people, in a particular place, with a particular set of histories and assumptions.”

“You can’t talk about preaching and politics in the abstract.” 

For Bacote, one central challenge is helping congregations see that faith already carries public implications, without reducing Christianity to a political program. “We have to understand the significance of politics without turning it into an idol,” he said, “without letting politics become the centrality of the church’s purpose and meaning.”

Referencing the high likelihood that preachers are going to talk about politics from the pulpit—a study published in 2020 found political content in a third of religious sermons and that seven in 10 pastors discuss political topics such as the economy, war, LGBTQ+ matters, or social welfare at some point—Bacote said Christians have to give politics significance but not ultimacy. Instead, he argues for a more theologically grounded approach that equips congregants to think Christianly about public life rather than telling them what conclusions to reach or boxes to check come voting day.

“The goal isn’t to produce uniformity,” Bacote said. “It’s to cultivate discernment.” He encouraged preachers to think beyond particular elections, parties, or political flashpoints and instead think about how their congregation might love their neighbors well before, within, after, and beyond this election. He said this requires asking a series of critical questions before stepping into the pulpit—or, for that matter, being interviewed for a podcast or heading to a protest: “What is our disposition toward people generally? To what extent am I helping people think about love of neighbor and not just how I am getting mine as an American?”

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From the streets to the pulpit

FOR TANYA LOPEZ, the urgency of political preaching is rooted in direct experience. In June 2025, politics did not unfold in some distant public square, but in her church’s parking lot. Lopez stepped outside as masked agents were detaining a man on the grounds of her congregation in Downey, Calif.

As Lopez approached, asking questions and identifying herself as a pastor, one of the agents raised a weapon, even as she insisted she was there nonviolently and simply wanted to understand what was happening. The man was taken away anyway. But what lingered for Lopez was how the agents operated with impunity on church property, unmoved by pastoral presence, projecting brute authority with weaponized force when confronted with spiritual authority.

In the aftermath, she described the moment as “domestic terror” to Religion News Service’s Jack Jenkins. Lopez said it left her shaken but resolute, as she returned to lead worship the following Sunday even as a palpable fear coursed through the congregation.

While Lopez had always been very vocal about social justice issues, she said everything shifted after experiencing firsthand the realities of racial profiling and the excessive use of force to snatch people away. “Now, I feel more compelled to call out these abuses of power and to remind the members of my congregation that these are precisely the types of things Jesus opposed,” she told Sojourners. “I now have a very real and personal example of what it’s like to witness cruelty and injustice taking place before you and to choose to act and not look away.”

Rather than framing issues through partisan language, which would be the easy route to take, Lopez emphasizes the power of storytelling to bring the realities of such policy into human focus. “People need to hear from those living these realities,” Lopez said, “not from those speaking from a specific partisan perspective.”

Crystal Silva-McCormick, a United Church of Christ minister and community leader in Austin, Texas, takes a similar approach but frames it through relational accountability and a broader critique of empire—regardless of who’s in power. “I come from an immigrant community and an immigrant family and have recognized that politicians from both political parties in the U.S. have used immigrants as pawns and as talking points,” she said.

This experience taught her that Christians need to hold politicians accountable and demand better, regardless of party or affiliation. The politicians’ “role entails implementing the rules of the empire,” McCormick explained, “and it is the Christian faith that needs to be critical of the empire, not align with it.”

McCormick said attempts by pastors, preachers, and lay leaders to remain neutral to supposedly maintain the peace or avoid offending congregants has created a multidecade dynamic where congregations are not prepared to have difficult conversations, pastors feel they must censor themselves, and communities ignore vital prophetic voices in their midst.

“Preaching is never just about what you say—it’s about who you’re responsible to,” she said. “If people in your congregation are directly impacted by policies, silence isn’t neutral. It communicates something.”

Clarity, cohesion, and community

THE LINE BETWEEN clarity and cohesion came up frequently in conversations with pastors in different locations around the nation.

When, on a typically humid Sunday morning in Jacksonville, Fla., Matt Hartley steps into the pulpit, he knows what he says could resonate in radically different ways depending upon which pews he’s looking out on. Some in the congregations he speaks to want clear direction on issues like immigration, voting rights, and economic justice—topics they see as directly addressed by the gospel. Others are more wary, perhaps even fatigued, by what they perceive as the encroachment of politics into sacred space.

“I’m not going to endorse a candidate,” said Hartley, who preaches in several congregations in Jacksonville, including Presbyterian Church (USA), Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and Disciples of Christ communities. No matter which pulpit he is filling, Hartley has learned not to begin with policy, but with people.

Echoing Lopez, Hartley said, “Before I ever name an issue, I root the sermon in human experience—stories that remind us what’s at stake.” Only then does he widen the frame, drawing connections between scripture and the moral questions shaping public life. It’s a deliberate strategy, one that reflects a broader shift among clergy navigating an increasingly polarized political landscape: If you’re going to preach on politics, start somewhere deeper than partisanship.

“Before I ever name an issue, I root the sermon in human experience—stories that remind us what’s at stake.” 

Still, responses vary widely depending on the congregation. In one church, Hartley is careful about political content after people left over what was seen as a partisan sermon. In another, congregants are more receptive, so long as the message feels rooted in scripture rather than ideology. Even then, disagreement doesn’t always lead to departure. Hartley described one conservative congregant who continues to attend, despite their differences. “Even though she is conservative, she will not sort herself out,” he said. The community and the conversation, he said, are more important than political affiliation.

For Bacote, this raises the question of what makes people stay in communities where they may not fully agree. Part of the answer, he said, lies in how pastors frame the purpose of preaching. “If the sermon is understood as a space for formation rather than argument,” Bacote said, “people may be more willing to engage, even when they’re uncomfortable.” The aim, he said, should not be a single political victory—whether in elections, at protests, or in conversations across the dinner table—but to see Christians’ prophetic voices in the public square as part of a longer process of formation.

“The goal isn’t to win an argument,” Bacote said. “It’s to help people develop the kind of moral and theological imagination that can engage the world faithfully.” That shift can change how pastors measure success. “I’m not trying to hit a home run every week,” Hartley said. “Singles and doubles are fine.”

And for Lewis, the measure is even simpler. “Love God, love neighbor, love self,” she said. “Love. Period. Everything else is commentary.”

What preaching demands these days

AS ANOTHER ELECTION season approaches, the pressures facing pastors are unlikely to ease. If anything, they will intensify. Congregations are more ideologically diverse, more digitally saturated, and often more fragile than in previous generations. Trust can prove harder to build and easier to lose. In that environment, preaching about politics requires more than conviction, but a broader redefinition of, or return to, what faithful preaching looks like now, said Bacote.

Bacote offers a bit of perspective for those preparing to preach in advance of November’s midterms—and in the many “Novembers” yet to come: “It’s really important to understand that whatever happens politically it is not the apocalypse,” he said. “The tendency of polarizing times, and particularly in a lot of political rhetoric we experience these days, can easily pull one into making too much of politics.” Think about where politics were 30 years ago, he said, and how people believed that if one politician was elected the end of the world would be nigh. “Whichever said such and such would happen,” Bacote said, “we are still here, despite the imperfections.”

That should galvanize rather than create any sense of cynicism, Bacote said, because in the U.S., we are still part of a country where we have agency. “The fact of the matter is that we have more political capacity than most people have had across world history,” he said.

Bacote says this with full knowledge that voting rights are under threat in the U.S. right now: As court rulings and state laws continue to narrow access to the ballot through stricter voter ID requirements, reduced early voting, and the weakening of protections once guaranteed under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, pastors face growing pressure to respond—something Bacote thinks pastors should do. The starting point, he said, should not be partisan alignment but theological clarity.

“Start with what’s on the books for your church, the thing every church has on its website: ‘what we say we believe.’” For many congregations, especially those in majority-white contexts, he framed voting rights as a test of whether professed commitments to justice and the dignity of all people extend beyond words. “If we say as a church we care about all people,” he said, “here’s a great time to show that we do.” That, for Bacote, means asking how “nondiscrimination works out in practice,” particularly when disparities in representation persist. Rather than parroting political rhetoric, pastors can invite congregants to wrestle with their own confessions, whether that be through sermons, structured conversations or personal prompts that he said, “press the question: ‘Do we really believe this? If so, how do we live it out?’”

From that perspective, Bacote said, addressing voting rights becomes less about endorsing policies and more about shepherding people whose civic participation reflects a lived concern for neighbors—especially neighbors whose access to the democratic process remains unequal. Whether voting, attending a town hall meeting, writing your local senator, or preaching on human rights, Bacote said Christians must remind themselves of the power they have, even if it will not make the world right. “In other words, engage without making that engagement everything,” he said.

And that process of engagement begins, week in and week out, with the same challenge for preachers: to speak truthfully in a way that invites people not just to listen—but to reflect, to question, to wrestle with the issues of the age, and, perhaps, to become the herald running through the streets with the message of change.