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Leading from behind: Servants and Fools by Arthur Boers

Leading from behind: Servants and Fools by Arthur Boers

Last updated on: October 1, 2015 at 11:29 am by Byron Borger

Leading from behind: Servants and Fools by Arthur Boers 2015-10-01T11:29:28-05:00 Byron Borger

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Wisdom In Leadership: The How and Why of Leading the People You Serve Craig Hamilton (Matthias Media) $24.99 In our effort to curate a selection here that brings fresh and sometimes harder-to-find books to the shelves, we discovered this new work from an evangelical Australian publisher. We have appreciated their clarity about outreach and creating fun resources that are contemporary and doctrinally solid. As a publishing venture they are all about the first things of the gospel, and, if I might, could call them a “gospel-centered” ministry. Their practical books are intense with a robust blend of usable guidance while pointing readers to the cross of Calvary and the finished work Christ accomplished in his death and resurrection. So I was eager to see what kind of a book they’d create.

I have not worked much with this yet, but I’ll say this much: although it is almost 500 pages, the type is not small, so it is nicely usable, and maybe not as daunting as it appears.

Secondly, it does not engage – positively or negatively – with much contemporary leadership scholarship. It cites Patrick Lencioni and Bill Hybells and John Kotter’s Leading Change a time or two, but it simply isn’t that kind of a book. Wisdom in Leadership covers tons of topics and much ground — there are 78 short chapters! A handful of the chapters (maybe a fifth of them) will be of particular interest to those who are tasked with leading teams. It is clearly written for folks in the church.

And I mostly like this promo paragraph, which drew me to it in the beginning:

It often seems like there’s a choice to be made for those engaged in Christian ministry: to be a Bible-and-theology person or a leadership and management person. You either read books by John Stott or you read books by John Maxwell. Craig Hamilton definitely saw himself as a Bible and theology person. In fact, he still does.

But he also noticed that when groups of people get together in God’s world they function in certain predictable ways that he could learn from and harness for their benefit and for the flourishing of the world around.

Hamilton does seem to have a discerning and working knowledge of the sociology of people, how change and transformation happens, and how secular management principles can be redeemed from their “godless, faithless pragmatism.” He has obviously considered this carefully and with a desire to be faithful. In Wisdom in Leadership he seems to apply these learnings to doing ministry in the church or para-church, whether one is a pastor, paid staff member, or volunteer. It looks sane and practical and wise. It is theologically-inspired, conventionally evangelical and tilting Reformed, I gather. I know some of our readers will appreciate it a lot.

The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations Through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus Zack Eswine (Crossway) $16.99 This brand book on being a pastor just came yesterday and while it is not about leadership, generally, it certainly seems to fit this little list now, so I have to announce it. Heck, I don’t think it would matter what this list was, I’d want to name this now: he is a really, really good writer, and we should read whatever he has to say.

You may recall his last big book called Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry as a Human Being which Jerram Barrs said “is one of the finest books on being a pastor written in this generation.”

I liked Ray Ortlund’s lovely endorsement, that goes like this:

C.S. Lewis wrote that friendship is born when one man says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…’ Many pastors will find a new friend in this remarkable book. To everyone who wants to serve the Lord with a heart set free from pretense, I commend Sensing Jesus.

Well, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations… which examines not just our humanness, but our brokenness — “limitations” as the subtitle discreetly puts it — seems almost like a sequel. What he starts in Sensing he brings to fuller flower in Imperfect. My, my, this is good, rich, honest stuff.

Ken Shigematsu (who wrote the fabulous spiritual formation book God in My Everything) says “This is simply the best book on pastoral ministry I have ever read.”

Mark Galli, Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today says of Eswine,

No one today shows more insight into the perils and joys of everyday ministry in the local church — a refreshingly honest and beautifully written meditation.

One of the best books of cultural criticism I’ve seen this year is A Wilderness of Mirrors: Trusting Again in a Cynical World (which I raved about a few months ago, noting that it is mostly about cynicism in our “whatever” culture.) He writes,

I wish I’d read this book twenty-five years ago when I first began to consider pastoral ministry. The ground Zack covers is vital for novices and senior pastors alike.

I am not a pastor and I am not even sure I can be called a typical leader; I don’t really do ministry as I am a shop keeper and businessman. But I intend to read this and I am sure I will savor it. It invites us to a deeper walk with Jesus, to a realization of our needs and limits, and a desire to allow Christ to apprentice us into His ways, even though difficulties.

Wendy Der says his personal stories of his own ups and downs will “challenge and encourage anyone who seeks to minister in the name of Jesus.”

By the way, you gotta love a book that alongside Mary Oliver and Gerard Manley Hopkins cites Charles Spurgeon and Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry and Richard Baxter, Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris and No Little People by Francis Schaeffer. Kudos, Zack for not only bringing an honest, human and humane approach to pastoral leadership, but for making it so darn interesting.

cowboy year.jpg The Cowboy Year Ethan D. Bryan (Electio Publishing) $16.99 I mentioned something about curating an interesting selection here at our bookstore? Well, I wanted to offer a bit of a curve-ball here in this list, a surprising one. This father-and-son memoir is not, at first blush, about leadership. Or is it?

You may know Ethan Bryan’s books as I have touted them here before. I adored his Run Home and Take a Bow about going to a season’s worth of Kansas City Royals baseball games, often with his young daughters. His Catch and Release is a well told story about playing games of catch (sometimes with the famous, sometimes with the hapless — he almost came here to have a game of catch in a bookstore! ) in order to raise money to release captives of child slavery and sexual trafficking, giving funds to the abolitionist organization Not for Sale. He is a sports fan, a wholesome family man, a musician and creative worship leader and one who practices his craft of writing, doing his art, telling his stories, giving his life away to others. He got himself fired from at least one church job, so I don’t know if he’s much of a leader.

He did travel around doing free concerts for social justice and got people to sign his guitar, and wrote a book about it, a lovely, inspiring, low-key Tales of the Taylor. Who does stuff like that but one who has some curious leadership DNA coursing through his veins? Maybe what Professor Boers would call a “servant and a fool” perhaps? Indeed.

And a Biblical fool testifies, creatively, and in so doing, invites people — as Donald Miller and Bob Goff have famously put it — “to tell a better story.” And in storytelling, conjuring up episodes of his own life and putting them on paper, Ethan Bryan gets readers inspired to make something different of their own lives. If that isn’t a form of culture-making, of servant leadership, I don’t know what is.

And so, this newish book, a book I announced a while ago, but never really promoted adequately.

You see, Ethan never shot a gun more than a time or two in his life. He’s a progressive sort of Baptist, earnest, peaceful, kind. And his dad, who in this book he calls J-Bar, is a multi-state cowboy action shooting champion.

What is a multi-state cowboy action champion, you ask?

Well, Ethan, too, wants to find that out. He felt compelled to take a risk and try something completely new (as he puts it) and joined his father in this thing — apparently it is a thing, at least out West — of competing in a cowboy re-enacting contest which, yes, involved shooting. And buying Stetson hats.

Bryan writes, “Competing under the alias “Fret Maverick,” I was introduced to a slice of Americana I would have never known otherwise. The Cowboy Year is a quirky and beautiful, Midwest-set, father-and-son memoir.”

But ultimately, he tells us, “The Cowboy Year is a story about having the courage to tell new stories.”

Ethan is widely read and uses a lot of good quotes to lead off his chapters. One, called “changing lead dogs” (there’s a leadership principle in there somewhere, I’m sure) he quotes the famous Gary Paulsen and his beloved book about the “fine madness of running the Iditarod” who wrote “I do not hold the record for the person coming to disaster soonest in the Iditarod. But I rank close.”

Things do go wrong in this book, in these games, and in these new sorts of conversations he is having with his father and his cowboy subculture. It isn’t easy, always, and it isn’t all sweet kinship. There are conversations about handguns and domestic violence and global injustice. It is funny and serious and ends up being quite a stirring narration. It is about facing fears, about making new friends (which, Ethan says, wisely, “matters immensely.”) It is about forming relationships as a way of getting around sticky political differences.

In one moving scene, Bryan recounts hearing the mother of one of the children killed in a now famous mass shooting tragedy. He recalls the beauty of her transcending culture wars rhetoric and “sides” of the gun control debate by inviting people to be in real relationship with friends, neighbors, strangers, children. It was deeply moving, jarring, even, in a book about different kind of firearms, making old fashioned ammunition, and doing dude ranch kinds of cowpoke things. You see, Ethan is a justice activist and a baseball fanatic, but dressing up in cowboy gear and shooting wasn’t his culture, wasn’t his comfort zone. But he forged into new arenas, and made new friends, and realized the power of risk, the power of relationship, the power of story.

That, too, is a good part of leadership. Who knew?

Originally published at Booknotes.

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