arieljvan.com

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.

I read On the Old Testament earlier, and that was my intro to Mark Driscoll’s new series of Re:Lit “Books you’ll actually read.” Like the OT book, On Church Leadership runs about a hundred pages and can be read in about an hour.

A quick look at LibraryThing statistics revealed that, as I suspected, the Leadership book, which deals with the biblical perspective on “elders,” “deacons,” and “pastors,” as well as women leading in the church, is the most widely-owned book in the imprint to date. Makes perfect sense, since this is one of the most widely-debated issues in the church today.

I’ll come right out and say I’m a fan of the Complementarian Driscoll champions, which has strong biblical warrant. Aside from helpful clarity on the women in ministry question—”This chapter should include a wick because it is connected to a powder keg of controversial theological debates”—Driscoll also deals with stuff like elder qualifications, the roles of elders vs. deacons, leadership teams, and something you don’t see in most books on leadership: the essential role of church members as leaders in their spheres.

On Church Leadership features Mark Driscoll’s trademark directness dosed with more stand-up moments than I found in On the Old Testament. (“When the Bible tells us not to kill innocent people it does not mean that God wants us to kill innocent people, even if a “scholar” has more degrees than Fahrenheit, know Greek, and published a book explaining it based upon drawings on the wall of a cave in upper Mesopotamia.”)

I’m not someone who feels ripped off if I smile while reading a theology book, so I enjoyed this one thoroughly and definitely recommend it.

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.

---

[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.

N.T. Wright makes the point that all God’s people are called to pray but apostolic leaders more so than the rest. He derives this from the passage in Acts where Peter, James, John, etc., appointed new leaders so that they, the apostles, could devote themselves to prayer and the teaching of God’s word.

This makes perfect sense. It’s an almost glaringly obvious assumption, like connecting two dots when they are the only ones on the page, they are gigantic, and they and are framed by flashing neon arrows. Blink, blink, blink: Apostles devote themselves to prayer -> That means prayer is a huge priority.

These days, church planters are often described in apostolic terms, as the dudes who will start new movements of people toward Jesus by preaching (and praying) in regions where the gospel previously made as much sense as a Burger King breakfast commercial.

This is sort of disquieting for a guy whose best prayer often seems to be, “GOD HELP US!”

Nevertheless, I am trying to work prayer into my life more, similar to the way you work chalk into your palms to get a better grip on your climbing surface, or spray Stickum Grip Spray on your hands so that you can throw down a really sick dunk. Prayer has a great deal to do with our ability to navigate reality accurately and find traction–conversing with God has this calming, gracious, strengthening effect.

Not to mention that, should he want to, God can answer our petitions with dramatic and immediate results, such as when he allowed KU to win the national championship.

So when I hit a patch of silence, I let it be for awhile and pray, rather than immediately blasting Shai Linne or Josh Ritter. Lindsay and I are taking a running start at praying together every night, and while we don’t have an unbroken record by any means, praying together has been immediately healthy and good. I also think it increases the likelihood that we’ll make out.

Ultimately, I’m trying to become a man who is open and sensitive to God’s spirit, aware of what’s going on in my heart–as opposed to an ignorant and cocky dude. For anyone called to plant a church, this seems like a biblical mandate.