Books @ Leadership Network

How to re-imagine the world

I just finished Anthony Weston's "How to re-imagine the world", a wild little book about reawakening radical imagination for social transformation.

Weston's strengths are definitely in the realm of futuristic/ideation which completely jives with me. 

He pitches a few ideas that are aching to be implemented like sports for the homeless, turning military bases into retreat centers, cutting the work week in half, preemptive peace, sun-baked roads that generate electricity, and creating floating cities to name a few.

Some quotes I highlighted from the book

Radical imagination begins with a move beyond complaint and resistance, beyond reactive tinkering or hunkering down or cynical accommodation.  The first big move is to an alternative picture of how things could be instead.

Truly generative, inventive, new thinking requires risk-taking and is itself a discipline.  Mental stretching and twisting, conceptual self-provocations, going two steps too far - we need techniques, in short, to shock or seduce our ideas into unexpected and suggestive re-arrangements, freezing up space and generating raw material for the constructive imagination.

How can we make life more ecstatic?

Along with battling poverty we need to ask why we tolerate radical inequality at all.  In many African tribal societies, even a single homeless person is felt as a disgrace by all.  How did we get where we are? We know too little of the natural world to come to love it.

Who would Jesus bomb?

A couple sites Weston recommends worldchanging.com and globalideasbank.org

By Lon Wong / http://solarcrash.com

Why "You All" Should Be On Facebook

Facebook for Pastors: How To Build Relationships And Connect With People Using The Most Popular Social Network On The Internet by Chris Forbes.

So since my wife and I are moving to Dallas this summer I figured I would start with the phrase "you all" to get more familiar to our soon to be new surroundings.  That aside, "you all" should be on Facebook...and a lot of you already are.  This is a much needed book, and it looks like it beat to the market what is sure to be an onslaught of books on Facebook in the coming year.  Lots and lots of ministries and pastors have already discovered this poweful social networking tool, but not all know exactly how to most effectively use it.  And many are still wondering if they should even be on it, or if there are too many downsides to social networking since one cannot control a lot of the content, but it is rather organized and run by the leaderless community.

Let me begin with some reaons why everyone should pick up this book and read it:

1. It's free.
2. It's an easy to access e-book form.
3. You can read it in an hour.
4. If you desire, you can donate $10 for the book to Hearts and Hands International.
5. In the foreward, Greg Atkinson makes a "bold" and unapologetic claim for why you pastors need to be on Facebook.  And it is good.
6. Chris does a great job of laying out a simple and easy to use roadmap for using Facebook effectively.

I have been on Facebook for almost three years.  It was not by my doing either. One of my student leaders came to college group one night and announced to the rest of the group that he created a Facebook group for us and would be posting information for the ministry.  Within a matter of days our group grew to over 100 students and they were planning events, working collaboratively and exchanging information. Despite my initial objections, I was later won over and have been an "evangelist" for Facebook ever since.

Let me leave you with a few quotes from Chris Forbes:

We can't say if Jesus would or not, but Facebook is where people are.  I have spent the last few months thinking about social media and how it can be used in ministry.  I have come to the conclusion that many pastors could benefit their ministry if they would begin to use social media, and a good place to start your "Church 2.0" ministry is Facebook.

Social media (like Facebook) are not going away any time soon.  A new approach to communications has been opened up in the new media.  The question is will your ministry take advantage of the opportunity for communicating the gospel?  The biggest objections pastors offer for not being involved in social media is that it takes too much time.  Pastor's can't afford to simply "spend" time on something; the nature of their work demands that they "invest" it.  Just like any other investment, it must be weighed against the potential return.  In the past, the areas of highest return on investment of time and effort were found in technologies like the telephone and practices such as door-to-door visitation, but those days are gone, probably forever.  As time and technology have marched on, we have moved into a "Web 2.0" world where many of the old rules no longer apply and strategies that used to work no longer yield the results they once did.

Book Review: The Blessed Life

Absolutely fantastic! That's my review of Robert Morris' book, "The Blessed Life". I couldn't put it down. It is one of the best books I've ever read on the subject of stewardship. I was totally challenged in reading it. I was inspired to trust God more. I was grateful for how God has blessed my life.

There are so many quotes that rocked my world. Here's a few:

"No one is a natural born giver. We are all born takers."

"The days of the blessed person are filled with divine "coincidences" and heavenly meaning."

"God doesn't need you to give - you need to be blessed."

"True tithing comes from the heart - not from a legalistic mindset."

"The only people who get offended when you preach on money are those who don't give!"

"People who have the gift of giving respond to a strong vision with clear objectives."

"God is not going to give us more money if we can't even be faithful with the money He has already given."

"Jesus is into rewarding stewardship!"

There's probably 200 more gems that I underlined. But hopefully this will be enough to cause you to pick up the book. I'm going to buy several copies of this book and give them out! You'll want to do the same! Buy it!

by Bob Franquiz

Launching the Church Out Into Deep Water is . . .

. . . the only prophetic way for The Church of the Perfect Storm to effectively address one of the greatest Culturestorms in history. At least that is according to Leonard Sweet and the voices of multiple writers in a new book he edited and Abingdon Press released two months ago.

This book provides a dramatic image of the conflict and challenge facing Christianity if it is to successfully navigate the waters of post-Christendom. The reward is not in the harbor. The reward is in the midst of the storm. The reward is in the deep water. The reward may follow the storm as God displays a special rainbow.

The church cannot stay in the harbor just as the early church could not stay in Jerusalem. But once again it might take persecution to get the church to leave the harbor and to see the opportunities of God in the midst of the perfect storm.

It has been 500 years since the last perfect storm for Christianity. We called it the Reformation. The forces of the Counter-Reformation sought to undermine it, but it could not. The Church of the Perfect Storm paints a clear picture of the challenges that most be faced in the current post-Christendom storm.

At a time such as this some of the Israelites wanted to return to Egypt rather than cross the Red Sea. In the same way many modern Christians are afraid to face the perfect storm present in the midst of post-modernity. They prefer the harbor or, as Stephen Joubert says on page 50, the religious aquarium which some know as churches.

As I shared when I formally endorsed this book for Len and Abingdon Press: "Just as during a hurricane the safest place for ships is not the harbor, but the deep water, so Christianity in a post-modern era must launch out into deep water and face head-on the perfect storm created by the convergence of post-modernity, religious pluralism, institutionalized Christianity, and militant atheism."

Go forth and become storm chasers. Join The Church of the Perfect Storm as shown to us in this book by writers Len Sweet, Greg Glatz, Stephan Joubert, Alan Jamieson, Dries Lombaard, Younglae Kim, Earl Pierce, Bill Easum, Michael Blewett, Mark Batterson, Tom Bandy, and Peter Walker.

--provided by George Bullard at www.BullardJournal.org

The Flow of the Spirit

We all know that the term "spirituality" is more seeker sensitive than terms like "religion" or "denomination". I’ve been reading The Story of Christian Spirituality: Two Thousand Years from East to West (Fortress Press, 2001). It is a large, illustrated, hard cover book unsuitable for my travels. One of the things I enjoy most in life is eating breakfast with the rising sun reflecting through the many prisms we have in our dining room, reading the writings of great Christians. This book has been my focus those rare moments at home from Christmas through Easter. I just finished. Although I often skip ahead, I recommend reading this book from start to finish. It begins with Jesus and the origins of Christian spirituality and ends in 1994 with the release of Nelson Mandela, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Toronto Blessing, and Matthew Fox expelled from the Dominicans. If any readers out there have failed to take notice of these significant events in Christian spirituality, I hope you lift your heads from the sand very soon!

There is something awesome following the flow of the Spirit from earliest times to the present … and realizing that although the book ends in 1994 the Spirit has still been working in ways unpredicted by the authors of each section. Each section is written by a notable scholar and spiritual leader. This is not a book about theology. Aquinas, Kierkegaard, and Calvin get a paragraph at best. This is a book about spiritual habits, spiritual life, and the day-to-day quest of Christians for hope. The sections describe the early church Fathers; Celtic spirituality; saints and mystics; Eastern and Russian spiritual practices; Protestant innovations and Catholic reformers. It ends with a summary of spiritualities emerging in the 20th century.

This last section is the weakest and strongest section in the book. It is weak, because it seems so fragmented. It describes various movements … some seemingly contradictory to each other … clearly reflecting the dissolution of Christendom and the fragmentation of Christianity. Yet that is also its strength. I realized again how extraordinary is the time in which we live. We are truly at a turning point in Christian faith the like of which has not been seen since the 3rd century. There are many voices crying out for a new Reformation. But there have been several "reformations" in Christian spirituality! The future is as pregnant with possibility as it was in earliest times. What will God’s Spirit elicit from this generation and the next?

Yet the most important strength of this book is that it provides Christian leaders today with very practical, insightful, and powerful advice for the living of these days. This is really not a book about history, but about today. How do ordinary Christians live today? How do they practice faith at home, work, and play? How do they face natural, political, economic, and military disasters? How do they have hope for tomorrow? What do real Christians really do? The story here is really quite incredible. Sometimes I think: "Surely real, ordinary Christian people would not risk so much, do so much, sacrifice so much, or love so much, jeopardizing everything comfortable and secure?" Yet it is true. Real Christians do incredible things, only because Christ infuses them .