Jim Collins offers some interesting insights in his executive bestseller Good to Great — Why some Companies Make the Leap — and Others Don’t. But the principle that I would like to extract and apply to the preaching arena is known as the hedgehog concept. As I studied the presentation by Collins, I was struck with the similarity to the “Big Idea” focus of Haddon Robinson’s approach to expositional preaching in his seminary textbook Biblical Preaching (long a favorite of mine).

The contrast between the hedgehog and the fox has been dissected for many years. Isaiah Berlin has been credited with highlighting the initial quote on the subject from the Greek poet Archilochus:

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Berlin goes on to explain:

Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defense. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel-a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance-and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle . . .

Jim Collins unfolds this hedgehog concept in the business arena:

The pivot point in Good to Great is the Hedgehog Concept. The essence of a Hedgehog Concept is to attain piercing clarity about how to produce the best long-term results, and then exercising the relentless discipline to say, “No thank you” to opportunities that fail the hedgehog test. When we examined the Hedgehog Concepts of the good-to-great companies, we found they reflected deep understanding of three intersecting circles: 1) what you are deeply passionate about, 2) what you can be the best in the world at, and 3) what best drives your economic engine.

Collins demands that business leaders be rigorous and disciplined in both defining and sticking to their area of core competency. Every business needs to have clarity on what it can do better than any other company in the world. It is not enough to try to be Good in many different objectives. You need to put the blinders on and not be distracted from the Hedgehog concepts that will be your path to Greatness.

I guess it should not be surprising that the classic difference between the hedgehog and the fox bears equal application in the realm of expository preaching. You can take a text of Scripture and make many valid observations and teach much practical truth without ever nailing that one Big Idea concept that should be most impactful. The hedgehog preacher grabs hold of that thesis statement and hammers away at it consistently with clarity and force so that one can see how all of the subordinate ideas support that focused idea. Each paragraph (or preaching entity) can be reduced to one single statement of the core competency of truth that God is seeking to reveal. There will be a variety of ways to unfold that central idea and support it and illustrate it . . . but as Robinson explains:

A sermon should be a bullet and not buckshot. Ideally each sermon is the explanation, interpretation, or application of a single dominant idea supported by other ideas, all drawn from one passage or several passages of Scripture.

He goes on to quote from J. H. Jowett in his Yale lectures on preaching:

I have a conviction that no sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as a crystal. I find the getting of that sentence is the hardest, the most exacting, and the most fruitful labour in my study. To compel oneself to fashion that sentence, to dismiss every word that is vague, ragged, ambiguous, to think oneself through to a form of words which defines the theme with scrupulous exactness — this is surely one of the most vital and essential factors in the making of a sermon: and I do not think any sermon ought to be preached or even written, until that sentence has emerged, clear and lucid as a cloudless moon.

That strikes me as the hedgehog concept in a nutshell!

Related posts:

1. Praise the Lord for His Great Works – Psalm 111
2. Great Commission Mandate — Acts 1:4-11