Books @ Leadership Network

Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership

During the long, hot summers in Texas, I often need the refreshment of a big glass of cold water. And that’s exactly what Ruth Haley Barton’s Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership offers to the leader who needs to be recharged. (Even if you don’t think you do, keep reading!)

“Strengthening the soul of our leadership is an invitation that begins, continues and ends with seeking God in the crucible of ministry.” These words from the final chapter summarize the central theme of the book. The chapters leading up to it paint a compelling picture of the fruitfulness and joy of leading from a healthy soul that is focused on God, and the risks of soul-less leadership in ministry.

Barton follows the story of Moses through chapters with titles such as “When Leaders Lose Their Souls,” “The Practice of Paying Attention,” “Living Within Limits,” “The Loneliness of Leadership,” and “Finding God’s Will Together.” She talks about her own journey, including struggles and victories. At times she challenges the reader to take stock and at other times she offers practical advice for refilling our souls. And at the end of each chapter, she offers a “practice” that will help readers to reflect on and apply the teaching they’ve just read.

I’m not one to read with a highlighter in hand, but within the first few pages I found myself thinking, “Oh, that’s good,” and marking a couple of sentences for future references. I kept going back to the highlighter as Barton kept taking me to places deep in my spirit with quotes such as:

There is real tension between what the human soul needs in order to be truly well and what life in leadership encourages and even requires.

If spiritual leadership is anything, it is the capacity to see the bush burning in the middle of our own life and having enough sense to turn aside, take off our shoes and pay attention!

Being this reliant on God for the actual outcome of things is a very edgy way to lead. We are much more accustomed to relying partly on God and partly on our own plans and thoughts if the issues at hand are really important.

As satisfying as teamwork can be, spiritual people who come together to lead churches or organizations with a spiritual purpose have a deeper calling – we are called to move beyond teamwork to spiritual community and to have our leadership emerge from that place.

At times Barton’s words were a needed wake-up call and at other times they were a source of refreshment. I’m thankful for both, and I’m sure that you will be as well if you read Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership.

Mike Bonem
www.SecondChairLeaders.com

Using Pictures to Teach, Create, Innovate, Preach and More...

A few months ago I noticed the book The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam appearing over and over again at Amazon in the section "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought."  It was alongside a lot of my favorite books so I figured I should give it a read.

The subtitle of the book is "Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures" which is something that intrigued me as possibly being a very effective tool in ministry, leadership, counseling, business, social media, etc.  I figured that it must be an effective means of communication if the idea for Southwest Airlines was diagramed on the back of a napkin (see image at bottom).

Diagramming on a whiteboard also seems to be one the teaching methods of Rob Bell, especially on his Everything is Spiritual tour, or the method of teaching for influential leaders. I think this is a very important book especially in our technological driven culture.  It's almost unheard of that we should be unplugged or unwired and communicate in a means that doesn't involve technology.  Teachers, pastors and leaders have been communicating important truths forever through the use of pictures, whether it be on a whiteboard, or flannelgraph if you want to go way back to our early Sunday school days.

What if there was a way to more quickly look at problems, more intuitively understand them, more confidently address them, and more rapidly convey to others what we've discovered?  What if there was a way to make business problem solving more efficient, more effective, and--as much as I hate to say it--perhaps even a bit more fun?  There is. It's called visual thinking, and it's what this book is all about: solving problems with pictures.

I think in our fast pace, high tech culture, it's nice to sit down with people in small or large gathering and walk people through your thinking.  One of the advantages of drawing pictures is that you give people a visual where they can follow your thinking.  For example, instead of just handing over a picture for them to see, you can actually walk them through the process of how you arrived at your idea, thought, etc.  The power of this process really empowers those that you teach to better understand your ideas, clarify your thinking, and receive feedback for possible flaws or better avenues to innovation and creation.

About two weeks ago I walked out of the ECHO Conference after hearing Donald Miller speak on the idea of "story."  I was talking with Tony Steward afterwards about the talk when he opened up his Moleskine and showed me the visual map or picture diagram of the talk Miller just gave.  It was amazing to see the talk laid out visually on paper and it made more sense to see it visually then it would to have just written the talk down by bullet points and only with words. 

Reading this book, talking with Tony Steward, and realizing that pictures can often explain and clarify what words cannot has turned me into a believer of this practice.

Therefore, I have a few recommendations:

1. Buy and read the book, The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam.
2. Start reading Tony Steward's blog.  It's great in this area of technology, social media, visual thinking, etc.
3. Start practicing your ideas, sermons, lectures, business ideas, etc. by drawing them up on pictures on some paper.
4. If you want to move from paper to computer, then check out Mind Meister. (HT: Tony Steward)

What I like about The Shack

Seems that The Shack, by William P. Young, has gotten a lot of bad press lately. I’ve read reviews about it that run the gamut from the book being a great outreach tool to non-believers to references to it as outright heresy. Descriptors like New Age-y, universalism, weird, the author needs help, what was he smoking, and what a load of crap, are also floating around out there on blogs and in weekend messages. After reading such varied opinions about the book, I decided to pick up a copy and read it myself. I did and I have to say that I liked it. And here’s why –

For me, the underlying theme of The Shack is God’s unconditional love, forgiveness and grace. Because of these attributes, lives can be profoundly transformed. Not exactly new information for those who trust and believe in God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Where folks seem to get stuck, and then camp out, are on the three characters the author uses in the book to represent God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Well that’s not the only place in the book that folks tend to criticize but I won’t run down the list of others.

“How can you ignore all of that stuff about God being represented as a black woman and the Holy Spirit represented as some holographic female apparition along with all of that other weirdness?” I was asked. I can’t deny that as I read it and took it at face value, it did seem rather “out there.” The author claims he was simply relating the main character’s encounter with God as it was told to him. Again, I’m not going to argue one way or the other on that point. What I will argue for is that the book’s central message of God’s unconditional love, God’s total forgiveness, and God’s unending grace came home to me in a new way. I was reminded, in a powerful way, just how much I am loved, forgiven and set free to live a new life – a transformed life. I came away from that reading with a renewed thankfulness for the grace that I’ve been given. For me, reading The Shack was a positive thing, an uplifting thing, and an experience that pointed me right back to God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

Here’s a quote from the book – “A bird’s not defined by being grounded but by his ability to fly. Remember this, humans are not defined by their limitations, but by the intentions that I have for them; not by what they seem to be, but by everything it means to be created in my image.” 

So before you throw too many rocks at The Shack, give it read and consider the central message of the book.

Linda Stanley serves as Director of Life Stage Leadership Communities and provides leadership for the Next Generation Pastors Leadership Community groups. Additional information about the Next Generation Pastors Leadership Community is posted on our website - www.leadnet.org, linda.stanley@leadnet.org.

Branding Faith

Phil Cooke has done ministry leaders a great favor by compiling helpful insights and exploring the relevance of branding from a church perspective. The subtitle of this book released early this year is “Why Some Churches and Nonprofits Impact Culture and Others Don’t.” The leading question of the book is “What do people think of when they think of your ministry?” Phil’s emphasis in the brand discussion is helpfully flavored by a ministry-friendly definition: “At it's core, branding is simply the art of surrounding a product, organization or person with a powerful and compelling story.” There are not many books in this category as few books dare to fuse faith and marketing. One thing I particularly appreciated is that Phil brings some needed insights in favor of branding the church while acknowledging the downsides of “chasing relevance” to an extreme.

The strength of the book is twofold: first is Phil’s authentic passion for the kingdom forged with a solid track record of brand-building for ministries. Second, is Phil’s distillation of principles, practices and proverbs from the business world filtered through ministry values.

The limitation of the book, albeit minor, is double-barreled. The first thing is that Phil is not weaving a coherent argument through the book, but rather, provides a patchwork of observations and insights. The second limitation is that Phil’s experience with ministry dominated by strong personalities of charismatic flavor. This tends to skew insights on branding more toward the individual and not the organization. Nevertheless, these minor points do not eclipse this solid contribution and valuable resource for a rarely treated topic.

I highly recommend this book for any church leader, and it is a must-have resource for any church communications professional. The thousands of designers working every-day to keep our churches communication savvy will appreciate one of my favorite quotes from the book: Better design isn’t just decoration; its connection. See some selected quotes.

Will Mancini, founder of Auxano, author of Church Unique

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian

OK. I don’t really expect any of you to read Wallace Stegner’s 1950-something classic with the subtitle, “John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West.” But maybe you’ll at least read this blog as a challenge to pick up something outside of your normal reading bandwidth in the next few weeks.

When my uncle offered to take me and my 14-year old son on a weeklong rafting adventure through the Grand Canyon, he said that this was the book I needed to read before the trip. I ordered the book out of obligation, and began reading out of a desire to understand what it was like for Powell and company to make that first treacherous trip into the unknown.

Little did I know how much I would learn and how it could even apply to church leadership. Even though the American West was largely an unknown territory in the 1870’s, government leaders had many pre-conceived ideas that were shaping national policy. Ideas such as that the arid regions would suddenly become fertile without irrigation, and could therefore be settled with practices that had worked in the east. It took a persistent, visionary leader like John Wesley Powell to challenge the bureaucracy and begin to reshape some of the laws. I guess we’d never have these kinds of problems in a church, right?

Not only did I find some interesting lessons in the book, I rediscovered a lost personal enjoyment of history. So rather than reading your tenth book on leadership or theology or whatever is your pattern, have some fun with a different kind of reading this summer.

Mike Bonem
www.SecondChairLeaders.com