I have a love/hate relationship with leadership books. Most of them give all sorts of interesting tips and tricks for doing something that you want to do. Most deal with cosmetic issues. What most leadership books don’t do is to evaluate underlying assumptions and issues that cause us to think about why we do what we do.

That’s why I appreciated the honest evaluation of Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linksy in their book “Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading.”

One of the central claims that Heifetz and Linsky make is that leadership can be a dangerous undertaking when leaders confuse how they need to react to a set of problems. Leaders, they say, face two main kinds of problems. The first are technical problems. These are issues that can be solved by the leader by applying procedures or tools that are readily available. These are issues such as cutting budgets, streamlining processes, firing people, and the like. The second kind are adaptive challenges.

They say:

“Without learning new ways–changing attitudes, values, and behaviors–people cannot make the adaptive leap necessary to thrive in the new environment. The sustainability of change depends on having the people with the problem internalize the change itself” (p. 13).

In other words, they require people to be able to adapt and make changes in themselves in order to address and meet the need of the issue.

Note the danger when leaders try to apply the wrong solutions, though:

“When people look to authorities for easy answers to adaptive challenges, they end up with disfunction. They expect the person in charge to know what to do, and under the weight of that responsibility, those in authority frequently end up faking it or disappointing people, or they get spit out of the system in the belief that a new “leader” will solve the problem” (p. 14).

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You’ve probably heard the word “postmodernism” before, but have probably wondered what it meant. Or perhaps you’ve heard of this thing called the emerging church. Ring a bell? A lot is being written these days about how to reach postmodern people, but are the conclusions actually biblical?

James A.K. Smith, author of Who’s Afraid Of Postmodernism, takes a stab at identifying what postmodernism is actually about, and makes some recommendations for the church.

But first let’s take a step back.

Postmodernism, generally speaking, is a philosophical idea that says that there is no such thing as absolute truth. It’s a reaction to the modern age that was fueled by the philosophies of Rene Descartes in the 1600′s and later in the French revolution, that taught that everything should be examined through the filter of reason. If you can prove it through observation and empirical study, then it exists.

Around the time of the 1960′s or so, some French philosophers began to articulate a new worldview. A worldview that was aversive to this modernistic approach. Specifically, these philosophers were Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Michel Foucault.

Let me take them one at a time to briefly explain what they taught, and then elaborate on what James Smith recommends for the church as a result.

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There are few things as controversial, in many circles, as church organization. It’s because many denominations associate how they’re organized with religious or spiritual principles. And they associate modifying the polity (form of organization) as spiritual heresy.

I was glad John Kaiser took the challenge, though, in this book, “Winning on Purpose: How to Organize Congregations to Succeed in Their Mission.”

Allow me to give you the executive summary of the book.

The problem with many churches and organizations is that they’re organized based upon control rather than trust. For example, in many churches, there is a church board that is comprised of ministry leaders. The pastor usually chairs this board that sometimes meets once a month. If a particular ministry leader wants to do something for his ministry, he brings it to the board, who then votes up or down on it. If a pastor thinks that something needs to be done, he usually brings it to this same board for “approval.” If the board accepts it, it moves forward. If not, the idea dies.

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You may or may not be aware of the discussions taking place related to the book Pagan Christianity. I wrote a blog post a little over a year ago called My Problem With Pagan Christianity. In fact, I recently found out that if you google “Pagan Christianity Book Review,” my blog comes up with the top hit, which explains why I’ve been getting a lot more traffic lately.

Well, Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church, and one of the leading voices in the church world recently decided to take on what they view as being inaccuracies and weaknesses in much of the book.

You can read the whole post here. I’d recommend downloading the pdf here, though, because it includes all the footnotes which can be quite valuable.

Here’s a preview of some of his conclusions, though:

Even with these qualifications and points of agreement this book as a whole is not recommended, and many of its arguments are to be outright rejected. The tone of the book itself is problematic, because the authors are so sure of themselves. When one finds that their biblical and historical claims, which were carried with such confidence, are not all historically and biblically viable, their certainties become almost comical. Suddenly the authors warning at the beginning of the book (“If you are unwilling to have your Christianity seriously examined, do not read beyond this page”) doesn’t sound so ominous anymore.

I encourage you to make up your mind for yourself, though.


[image by bkingr]

So in this last post on my coaching process, I wanted to outline the books that we covered in our second year.

A few days ago I finished reading Zero to Sixty, the latest book by Pastor Bob Franquiz. The subtitle tells what the book is about: 60 principles and practices for leading a growing church.

This book is above all, practical. It has sixty bite-sized chapters that are usually about two pages in length. This is useful because you can quickly jump in and out and get something out of it.

He divides the book into four main sections:

I. Leadership Strategies
II. Staffing Strategies
III. Ministry Strategies
IV. Personal Development Strategies

The most useful section for me was the leadership strategies section. I thought the other chapters had useful information, but I felt as if it’s information that I’ve heard before in other areas. It’s greatest usefulness is that it puts all these principles together in one book. If you’re familiar with Nelson Searcy and his books and resources, you’ll notice some similarities. That didn’t come as a surprise, though. Bob Franquiz has been a coaching student of Nelson Searcy. If you’re not familiar with Nelson Searcy, than this is a good primer for putting all these principles together and walking you through how to implement them.

Overall, I thought it was a useful read on dealing with the practical sides of ministry.

I’ve noticed an interesting trend in the last several years: ministries and organizations becoming much more open with their resources. This is in contrast, of course, to how things used to be.

For example, Pastor Rick Warren has always sold his sermons online. In fact, you could go to his website right now, Saddleback Resources, and you could buy sermons from almost twenty years ago. I’m not saying it’s an evil practice. Tons of pastors have been helped because they’ve been able to have access to quality sermons.

But a few years ago I noticed a few organizations doing things differently. Lifechurch.tv, one of the largest churches in North America began giving away their resources. For free. All of their resources through LifeChurch.tv Open. So you could go to their website right now and download, not just the manuscripts to the sermons, but also the intro videos, corresponding small group studies. Everything they have, they’re making it available. They even have materials for the children’s programs and other stuff that they’ve made available. Quite impressive.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that Pastor Steven Furtick of Elevation Church began doing the same thing. They’re opening all of their resources up.

Why are they doing this?

Well, it seems like there’s been a different current and change of mindset happening. They say they’re doing it for one main reason: because they want to bless the kingdom. God has blessed them, so they’re giving it all away.

Wow.

Here’s the text from the resources page at Elevation Church: