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Time to give a nod to another book that, from where I’m sitting, looks can’t-miss.

Ever since reading a blurb about a new title by Derek Tidball, I was interested in cracking this book and exploring his premise. From the intro of the disarmingly titled Ministry by the Book:

This book seeks to open the imagination about ministry, not to close a discussion down. It seeks to sketch several models of ministry, all of which have their origins in the New Testament, and challenge the stunted understanding of ministry that so often characterizes our churches today. I hope it provides a number of “models of permission” that enable a freer approach to ministry and the way it is conducted, and provides encouragement for those who don’t fit the “McDonaldized” version of ministry so common today.

It became obvious fairly early in my life that I wasn’t going to grow into one of the soft-spoken, bleeding-heart pastor-counselors I saw in churches around me. I wished I could, and speculated about whether I could pump up enough tender, gentle qualities to qualify for ministry.

When I entered seminary, I once again felt the bite of square peg/round hole syndrome, as I struggled through classes that tried to groom me for a suit-and-tie-wearing, Sunday school-class organizing, business meeting-driven model of church leadership. This also was not happening, and at times it made me wonder what the heck I was doing.

During these years, I began to realize that leadership and ministry was not homogeneous in the New Testament, shouldn’t be homogeneous today, and that I didn’t need to fit myself into various homogeneous existing models of ministry. So I stopped trying, continued to read the Bible carefully, and did my best to figure out Jesus’ vision for my gifts and ministry instead of taking my cues from various church cultures.

Now, as I start through Derek Tidball’s Ministry by the Book, I’m thinking, This one would have saved me a lot of angst, confusion, and wasted time if it had existed 5 years sooner and, say, been required reading at my seminary. Hopefully it will prove as eye-opening and liberating for readers today as it would have for me back when I was trying to change myself into a soft-spoken, tie-wearing, pastor-counselor. (Who I’m not, but who of course have a place in the church.)

I’ve been making my way through Dan Allender’s Leading with a Limp. The book’s value has been upped by a series of small group discussion times I was invited to participate in, but even without the benefit of real-time, transparent conversations, this one is a must-read.

Here are a couple quotes I’ve been chewing on.

Being busy seems like the polar opposite of laziness, but a busy person is not so much active as lost. A lazy person does little to nothing while a busy person does almost everything, but the similarity is that both refuse to be intentional. Busyness is the moral equivalent of laziness.

I spend a lot of time rushing from place to place while multi-tasking and trying not to spill coffee on myself, so those words strike home. Deliberate action, not constant activity, is the goal. More goodness:

Our frenetic pace will, in the fullness of time, reveal our threadbare souls. The revelation is not merely that we are exhausted and need a break. It isn’t even that we are overextended and need more balanced lives. As true as those things may be, the truest revelation is that we have lost sight of our callings and, far more, of the One who calls.

Seeing exhaustion as a road sign back to Jesus is exactly what I need to cultivate. “Retirement” is something to aim for daily, not something that happens after you put in your 60+ years.

One exciting aspect of church planting is taking a big picture vision and adding detail and color so that it begins to take shape for other people. Case in point: Now you can download a Prospectus for Crossroads Church (working title).

This file, which reads somewhat like an adventure story, gives background on our purpose, our plan, our passion, and our partners. (How do you like that alliteration?) The file is a little large (11 MB) since we couldn’t resist adding pictures, but no one uses dial-up anymore, right?

If you want to know more about what we’re doing, grab this PDF, scan it, and shoot us your thoughts or questions. We’re talking with as many potential partners in person as we can–if something on the “partners” page grabs you, be sure and let us know.

After the repeated mention Spiritual Leadership got on Steve McCoy’s blog, I decided I’d better give Oswald Sanders‘ book a shot. I’m happy I did. Stuffed with references to heroic missionaries and Christian leaders of the 20^th century, the book is a shotgun approach to the topic of leadership that does a good job showing as well as telling. Originally a series of talks, Spiritual Leadership is not a systematic book, but Sanders is thorough enough in his approach that you don’t feel there are gaps in what he says.

Highlights of Spiritual Leadership include chapters on the leadership paradigms of Paul and Peter, as well as Christ, and two catch-all chapters (“Essential Qualities of Leadership”) that are surprisingly hard-hitting for a list approach. In addition, I like the way Sanders repeatedly hits the nature of Christian leadership as a counter-intuitive servant profession shaped by self-sacrifice.

At the same time, Sanders definitely avoided any tendency to come across as overly grim and dogmatic, including “Humor” in his list of essential qualities. Leaders should “control and cultivate” humor, “a great asset and invaluable lubricant” in missional living (65, 66). He scored big points with me there, as at this fairly amateur stage of my life, I’ve already met way too many Christians who at some point forgot how to laugh at themselves.

If there’s any criticism I could level at this book, it would come in the form of what’s essentially a small side note. Occasionally, Sanders will make a pronouncement that would have benefited from more nuance, like when he says, “Some workers prefer to administer; others want to love people. Only the latter are leaders” (113). In reality, the typical servant-leader needs to both love people and administer-am I right? But in a book that was transcribed from live talks, stuff like this is minor.

Originally published in 1967, Spiritual Leadership is a refreshing and challenging book that has the added benefit of being written from a mid-20^th-century perspective that doesn’t align perfectly with ours. You won’t hear many of the current buzzwords, and some of Sanders’ exhortations come across as counter-cultural, which, in my opinion, is a nice change-up.

*** Three of three stars, highly recommended.

Here’s the next installment in the Church Planting w/ Small Groups series.

________See also Intro, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 & Part 4, & Part 5_______

Multiply leaders and small groups regularly.

If a weakness of small groups is their tendency to become inward-focused, the contrasting strength is the potential to give participants numerous opportunities for discipleship and growth. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of leadership development, where the very nature of multiplying small groups promotes the rapid development of new church leaders.

Not everyone can effectively lead a small group, but believers with leadership gifts should be identified and empowered, intentionally given authority within specified boundaries while an established leader maintains responsibility for the ministry.[1] Small groups provide an ideal workshop for the development of emerging leaders-which has been identified as a vital contributing element in the survival of church plants. A study conducted by the North American Mission Board discovered that, “Of those church planters that provided leadership training to church members, 79 percent of their churches survived compared to only 59 percent of church plants survived among those who did not provide leadership.”[2]

While this factor isn’t exclusive to the small group context, small groups certainly do provide opportunities for hands-on involvement in an array of leadership roles: Teaching, mentoring, facilitation, discipleship, prayer–there are few aspects of ministry that don’t surface in the small group microcosm.

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[1] Aubrey Malphurs and Will Mancini, Building Leaders (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 40.

[2] Research Reflection: How Many Church Plants Really Survive-and Why?, 3.