Here’s why I’m liking the book so much: it doesn’t assume that you know how to do something. Most leadership-type books out there assume way too much. They give lots of general principles of things that you should be doing, but they don’t teach you specific ways on how to do them. That’s a really important distinction.

In chapter 5, for example, he gives some questions they use to debrief after a church service, but that I think can just as easily apply to any kind of event.

1. What went right?

2. What went wrong?

3. What was missing?

4. What was confusing?

He says,

“We praise God for what went right. We send thank-you cards to show appreciation to volunteers who went beyond the call of duty. We encourage one another for a message well preached, a song well sung, or a video produced. We all need encouragement. This created an opportunity to build up staff and servants who are working very hard. Then we discuss the other three questions at the same time. This allows us to be specific about problems that took place on Sunday and how they can be remedied. Lastly, we assign the task of fixing the problem to a specific staff member. The solution may be as simple as buying duct tape…or cutting ten minutes off a future message…” (p. 38).

I think there’s two important factors here that we shouldn’t miss. For one, they’re willing to do the painful work of a thorough debriefing. I’m sure this isn’t always the most comfortable thing to do, especially if you’ve messed up in something. But it’s important to learn from it so that the mistake doesn’t happen again. Secondly, they do this every single week on monday. Everything is still fresh on their minds from how the worship experience went. I know most churches (mine included) do not currently debrief this often. But I think it’s the best way, and I will be transitioning to do this very soon.

Allow me to explain.

Leadership Gold is one of his latest on the topic of leadership, as are many of his books. This book reminded me of another that I read from him several years ago called The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. In this one, though, he brings together his best leadership lessons and maxims from his past books and puts them into one. If he were a musician, you could call this one of his “greatest hits” albums.

As with all of his books, he has tons of stories, illustrations, and subpoints. And that is what gets a little tiresome for me: all his subpoints. There are a billion of them. You get lost in them. Let me give you an example.

Chapter three is called “Defining Moments Define Your Leadership.” Sounds pretty good, and yet general enough for him to be able to talk about anything. Here’s why defining moments are important according to him:

1. Defining moments shows us who we really are

2. Defining moments declare to others who we are

3. Defining moments determine who we will become

So that’s one section within one chapter. He then gets into another section called “Moments That Defined Me.” Under this section he has further points:

1. Some defining moments were ground breakers

2. Some defining moments were heartbreakers

3. Some defining moments were cloud breakers

4. Some defining moments were chart breakers

You would think that that would be enough for one chapter. But you’d be wrong. He then goes into another section called “Defining Your Moments.”

Here are his points:

1. Reflect on defining moments from the past

2. Prepare for defining moments in the future

3. Make the most of defining moments in the present

Are you seeing my point? What’s the point in all these points? I really don’t know. I feel like most of them are just fillers: empty space to fill up a chapter. So this kind of writing is just beginning to tire me out. All you super left-brain thinkers out there must erupt in the hallelujah chorus when you read stuff like this and see all these outlines. For me, it just tires me out. You get to the end of a chapter and have had so much information that you don’t even know what you just read.

So I know it sounds like I’m resoundingly bashing this book. I’m not. There was some good stuff that made it worth the price of admission.

Here are two profound chapters that were worth it for me:

This paragraph neatly summarizes the chapter:

“As leaders, we’d like to think that when people leave, it has little to do with us. But the reality is that we are often the reason. Some sources estimate that as many as 65 percent of people leave companies do so because of their managers. We may say that people quit their job or their company, but the reality is that they usually quit their leaders. The “company” doesn’t do anything negative to them. People do. Sometimes coworkers cause the problems that prompt people to leave. But often the people who alienate employees are their direct supervisors.”

This is significant stuff, here. He then gives some tips on how to avoid that from happening.

“I have finally come to accept that it’s okay for people to leave. People have left my teams for various reasons. I outgrew some. Some outgrew me. A few changed and wanted to go in a new direction. Some refused to change and the train had to leave them behind. This is one of the hard truths of leadership. Times change and people have to learn to move on.”

This is a good book, but I think I’m going to explore some other authors more. If you prefer learning by example and through more narrative teaching, you may want to check out some books by Patrick Lencioni. He writes “leadership parables.” He simply writes one big story/narrative and by the end of it you end up learning a lot without really trying to learn it.

Allow me to give a little disclaimer as I begin, though: I am no expert. I’ve been using it now for about three months. I’ve been more into Facebook, but since everyone talked about it so much, I decided I had to jump in and see what the fuss was about.

In my research into Twitter, I came across an ebook called The Reason Your Church Must Twitter. Not wanting to get left behind, I decided to see if the book could give me some really good reasons of why I should Twitter. It gave a few.

I’ll give a blow-by-blow on some of the chapters.

In this chapter he describes the utility of the text messaging feature. I can create a Twitter account for my church, and send all those that are “following” a message (tweet) that they can receive via text message on their phones. So this becomes a quick and easy way to send out announcements or really important messages since most people have cell phones. He takes it a step further, though, to say that different ministries in the church can create their own accounts, and have people sign up specifically for the ministry that they’re interested in hearing from.

Here are some examples of tweets you might send to those following your particular ministry or team:

Written by Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church, he begins by presenting a theology of purity. Just having all these Scriptures together in one place is of great value. But then he goes on to address just about any kind of question related to pornography and sexuality that you can think of. And I do mean every kind of question.

He ends the whole document by having an excerpt of an interview between Ted Bundy, the serial killer, and Christian leader James Dobson. The interview took place hours before Ted Bundy was to be executed, and delineated Ted Bundy’s early obsession with pornography and how that led him down the slippery slope of experimentation, and eventually rape and murder.

Suffice it to say that this blog post is not a peppy talk. I actually feel kind of dirty just having read that thing.

But I do believe that this is a topic that needs to be addressed more. Our churches, ministries, and friends are dealing with it, so why not have a frank discussion sometime on this topic?

The truth is that it wasn’t that good for me. I know that by saying that I’m in the extreme minority, as most people on Amazon.com gave it 4-5 stars. But it’s true. It was dense.

In an effort to give it’s main points credibility and concreteness, they ended putting out way too much information for each point, which for me, ended up diluting it’s impact. It’s as if I got bored with each chapter after a page or two of grasping the point.

So what does it take for an idea to be “sticky”? The Heath brothers give the parameters:

• Simplicity
• Unexpectedness
• Concreteness
• Credibility
• Emotions
• Stories

Here’s the question: Out of all the messages, speeches, and sermons you’ve heard in your lifetime, how many do you still remember many years later?

Perhaps you remember a phrase or a visual, but for the most part, we forget the content of these messages. Andy Stanley, in his book Communicating for a Change, let’s us know why.

Andy Stanley presents what has been called the “one point message.” So the entire message is built around that one point. He says, “With this approach, every message should have one central idea, application, insight, or principle that serves as the glue to hold the other parts together” (p. 103). If this sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because Haddon Robinson, in his classic preaching book, Biblical Preaching, first introduced this basic method.

What’s an example of one of those main points? Here are a few from the book:

• Your friends determine the direction and quality of your life
• Purity paves the way to intimacy
• When you see as God sees, you will do as God says
• Maximum freedom is found under God’s authority
• God takes full responsibility for the life fully devoted to him

I’ve really resonated with this book. I’ve thought back on a lot of the sermons that I’ve done, and I have to admit that many of them are this “three points and a poem” type message that I, myself, have forgotten after I’ve preached them. I’m looking forward to re-routing and re-tooling to a method that is easier to preach without notes and is much more memorable in the outcome.