Book Review: I Am a Follower by Leonard Sweet

I am grateful that someone has had the guts to write and publish the things said in I Am a Follower by Leonard Sweet. When I saw the title and description, I expected that Sweet would do something along the lines of what I did here, but he goes much further. The book is an unrelenting attack on the ways that the leadership culture around us has seeped into (and even taken over in some cases) our thinking about, practice of, and teaching on the gospel of Christ.

I was somewhat surprised by how strongly Sweet makes his case. He doesn't just make the much-needed point that Christians need to realize the distinction between the current leadership culture and the message of the Scriptures, but he says things like these, which will seem rather outrageous to many:

• "I hope to convince you to quit defining yourself as a leader, stop aspiring after leadership, and instead set your sights on being a 'Jesus follower'..."
• "Leadership is an alien template that we have laid on the Bible, and followership is a key not tried in any lock. Why is our culture so keen on exploring a concept that occurs rarely, if at all, in the Bible and has little to do with the categorical imperatives of the Christian faith?"
• "This is the great tragedy of the church in the last fifty years: We have changed Paul's words, 'Follow me as I follow Christ,' to 'Follow me as I lead for Christ.' Over and over we hear, 'What the church needs is more and better leaders,' or 'Training leaders is job one.' Really?... Jesus said, 'Follow me.' We heard, 'Be a leader.'"
• "What the world defines as leadership is not the way God works through his people in the world."
• "We don't need more larger-than-life leaders who conscript others into following their vision. We need more down-to-earth followers who invite others into a life that opens into one day becoming not leaders in their own right but unflappable, outflankable followers of Jesus."

While I would have been satisfied with what I expected (for Sweet to instruct us to stop presenting the development of yourself into a leader as a part of the gospel), he tells us instead that we can throw the leadership framework out the window. He makes a strong case that it is only in learning to follow Jesus that God does his work in the world, and our obsession with leading often gets in the way of that happening.

The book is divided into four main sections, plus a prologue, introduction and epilogue. In the first main section, Sweet goes straight to the heart leadership culture and our addiction to it, describing why Christians no longer need to live in it. In the remaining three sections, he describes followership as the way, the truth, and the life of following Jesus, respectively.

Anyone familiar with Sweet's writing will know his style. Honestly, I have to have a high degree of interest in the topic to get all of the way through one of his books, but when I do, he leaves his point deep within my thinking gives me things to chew on for years. He has done that again in this book.

For all of my life, I've loved being a follower and felt like I should be a leader, but my attempts to do so haven't turned out very well. Now, with Dr. Sweet's permission given in the book, I feel great freedom in saying, I am a follower.

Disclosure of Material Connection:

I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

If you purchase resources linked to from this blog, I may receive an “affiliate commission.” I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Regardless of whether I receive a commission, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

Book Review: The Blue Parakeet by Scot McKnight

The Blue Parakeet by Scot McKnight is perfect for you if any of the following apply:

• You've ever wanted to let the Bible become a bigger influence on your life, but then when you tried to do so, you found out that the Bible doesn't really cooperate as easily as you'd like it to in telling you what to do.
• You've ever had or liked a bumper sticker that says, "God says it, I believe it, that settles it."
• You've ever been really motivated to read through the Bible, then began and perhaps finished Genesis, but then felt utterly lost and bored by mid-Exodus, or if you were really tough- perhaps you even made it into Leviticus or Deuteronomy.
• You've ever wondered how in the world the Old Testament can actually say some of the stuff it says, like God commanding his people to wipe out other groups- including their women and children.
• You've ever wondered how in the world the New Testament can actually say some of the stuff it says, like saying it's sinful for women to braid their ha and that they will be saved through childbearing.
• You've thought that the Bible may be interesting, but felt unsure of what it's supposed to have to do with your life today.
• You either enjoy or are completely puzzled by these Scripture Plaques You Won't Find at the Christian Bookstore.

In the book, McKnight does a masterful and entertaining job of exploring what the Bible is (and what it isn't), what we should do with it (and what we shouldn't), and how we can benefit from it. By telling his own story, he gently but persuasively makes the point that even the most committed Bible-believing Christians among us don't really believe that they should do everything the Bible says they should do. (For example, I've known a lot of deeply devout Christians, but I still have yet to know anyone who has done what we get on to the rich young ruler for not doing: selling everything we own and giving the money to the poor.)

McKnight helps us to take our blinders off and realize that regardless of what we claim to believe about the Bible, all of us pick and choose from what it says. (Good thing, too, because I don't think stoning is a good punishment today for much of anything.) So, since an honest examination reveals that we do pick and choose even if we don't realize it, we need to pay very good attention to why and how we do so.

A central claim he makes is that the Bible needs to be read as Story. (By this, he doesn't mean to say story=myth, but that the whole thing follows a plot- with a beginning, middle, and end). He contrasts this way of reading the Bible to others, such as reading it as a collection of laws, a collection of blessings and promises, something onto which we can project our own ideas (like a Rohrschach inkblot), or as a giant puzzle that we have to piece together. He claims that by reading the Bible as Story, we are able to see its parts as "wiki-stories" which all contribute to the larger story that begins with humanity's union with God, continues through our separation from God, and points forward to our eventual re-union with God.

In this way, the Story of the Bible can help us to lead more discerning lives. It helps us to consider how God has worked in the past, how God may be working today, and (knowing a bit of where it's all headed) how we can align our actions with what God will be doing in the future.

So what about the blue parakeet? McKnight gives a full metaphor in the book from his bird-watching experience in his own back yard, but in short he says, "Blue parakeet passages are oddities in the Bible that we prefer to cage and silence rather than to permit into our sacred mental gardens." Passages like these (and I think most of these Scripture plaques would qualify as blue parakeets to him) should wake us up to realizing that the Bible is often not what we've thought it to be, and that it can only be what it was intended to be when we let it be what it is. (That's my own convoluted wording- not his.)

Disclosure of Material Connection: If you purchase resources linked to from this blog, I may receive an “affiliate commission.” I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Regardless of whether I receive a commission, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

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Recommended Resource: Pray As You Go Podcast

Several months ago, my spiritual director recommended an online resource which I've found very helpful: The Pray As You Go Podcast. For six days of each week, it provides a recording of reflective music, a contemplative reading of Scripture, and a guided reflection on the passage. It's produced by a group of British Jesuits, and one of the Jesuits' greatest contributions to Christian spirituality is how they help the rest of us enter into the world of Scripture in a way that engages our imaginations and our intentions, rather than simply reading the Bible as if were just a textbook.

Each episode of the podcast is +/- 10 minutes long, and every time that I have listened over the past months, I have been grateful that I did. Carving out 10 minutes somewhere in my day by doing this helps me to keep my mind grounded in Scripture in a very prayerful way.

Since those guiding the reflections are Jesuits (a group within Roman Catholicism) and I'm not, every once in a while there's a mention of something with which I'm unfamiliar (such as a feast day), but for the most part I've found myself right at home with where the podcast is designed to guide us, and you likely would as well.

One quick tip: don't try (as I did when I first started listening) to listen to this while driving and think that doing so will be an equal substitute for actually carving out 10 minutes to be still and listen. Praying while driving is a good thing, but we also need habits of praying while doing nothing else. (And you'd better also be doing other things while you're driving.) The best use will come when you can be still for ten minutes, close your eyes, and listen.

Book Review: The Liturgical Year by Joan Chittister

 

A very meaningful practice in my Christian life over the past several years has been beginning to learn and follow the Christian Year. This can mean varying things in different traditions, but the essence of it is shaping our lives, Scripture readings, and worship around an annual cycle primarily based on the events of Jesus' life. All Christians do this to varying degrees, at the minimum recognizing Christmas and Easter, or on the other end of the spectrum having a calendar full of feast days, fast days, and other things that may seem foreign even to many long-time Christians. Since I'm a United Methodist, we fall in the middle (as we almost always do). So my practice of following the Christian year mainly consists of observing the seasons of Advent, Lent, and Easter, along with the special days included in them, as well as following the readings of the Revised Common Lectionary. Doing so has been very meaningful to me, because it's taken me out of the driver's seat of my own spiritual journey ("So what do I feel like reading today?"), and has given me a very practical way of seeking to immerse the story of my life in the story of the life of Jesus. I've gotten enough of a taste of it that I want to go much further.

That's why I was eager to read [amazon_link id="0849946077" target="_blank" ]The Liturgical Year[/amazon_link] by Joan Chittister. It's part of The Ancient Practices Series, edited by Phyllis Tickle, whose guides for fixed-hour prayer (The Divine Hours series) have been very helpful to me and thousands of others. I'd also already read Scot McKnight's excellent book from the series, Fasting, so I was excited to explore another of the series' titles.

The book is 231 pages, but broken up into 33 very short and readable chapters. Chittister begins with some background information on the Christian Year (or, the Liturgical Year as is her preferred term), which she describes as "the spiraling adventure of the spiritual life." If you're from a tradition closer to the end of the spectrum that doesn't get very involved, for example, in observances of Lent or Advent, and only includes Christmas Day and Easter Day in your annual calendar (and possibly something on Good Friday), it would be enlightening to you to read these first chapters. If you're on the other end of the spectrum, the things you already do will become more meaningful. Chittister weaves historical background of the liturgical observances with her own reflections and provides a convincing case for how following this annual calendar helps us to continue living ever more fully into Jesus' story.

The introductory chapters are followed by a journey through the markers of the Christian year. Beginning with Advent, then going through Christmas and Epiphany, into Lent and Easter, with stretches of "Ordinary Time" in between the seasons, Chittister helps us to understand the origin of each of the observances, along with many of the worship rituals traditionally practiced with each one.

I read this book because I hoped that a greater understanding of each of these markers in our year would add depth to my practice of them, rather than- as I had done for so long- simply going along with the flow in my church and doing things but having no earthly idea why we did them. The book will help me to do so during the rest of my Christian years, and could do so for you as well.

A good example is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Even if you're not from a church that observes it, you've likely noticed people once each year who walk around with ashes on their foreheads. It's something that millions of Christians do, but where in the world did we get such a tradition, and why do millions continue to practice it?

Chittister explains that Ash Wednesday is:

an echo of the Hebrew Testament's ancient call to sackcloth and ashes [and] a continuing cry across the centuries that life is transient, that change is urgent. We don't have enough time to waste on nothingness. We need to repent our dillydallying on the road to God... We need to get back in touch with our souls. "Remember man that you are dust and unto dust you shall return," [we heard] as the ashes trickled down our foreheads. We hear now, as Jesus proclaimed in Galilee, "Turn away from sin and believe the good news" (Mark 1:15). Ash Wednesday confronts us with what we have become and prods us to do better. Indeed, Lent... is about opening our hearts one more time to the Word of God  in the hope that, this time, hearing it anew, we might allow ourselves to become new as a result of it. (118-119)

For every point along the journey, she provides helpful background, reflections, and guidance so that her readers can enter more fully and meaningfully into joining two millennia of other Christians who have followed an annual cycle of remembering and celebrating the life of Jesus.

Being a Roman Catholic, her annual journey has quite a few more markers than mine does, but she helped in adding meaning to the days and seasons that are a part of the customs of my tradition as well as helping me to know the meaning behind practices of my siblings in other branches of our faith.

Click here to view [amazon_link id="0849946077" target="_blank" ]The Liturgical Year[/amazon_link] on Amazon.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

If you purchase resources linked to from this blog, I may receive an “affiliate commission.” I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Regardless of whether I receive a commission, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

Book Review: Renovation of the Church by Kent Carlson and Mike Lueken

This is a book I have been waiting for someone to write for a very long time. When I was preparing for my senior year of college, I was required to spend a summer doing a ministry internship. Although I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to do that as part of a good ministry in a good church, that summer left me disillusioned with ministry. I returned to my senior year at Asbury hungry for a way of doing ministry that led to something more, and that hunger, along with relationships I was fortunate to have with great people at Asbury, guided me into the beginning of my interest in spiritual formation. It was during that year that I first read Dallas Willard, and from then on, my understanding of Christianity and ministry was dramatically changed.

The authors of [amazon_link id="0830835466" target="_blank" ]Renovation of the Church[/amazon_link] had very similar experiences, only theirs occurred more than a decade into a very successful attempt at planting a church. They had a rapidly growing suburban church with a new facility, and had around 1,700 people attending worship every weekend. Then they realized that the way they did ministry was actually working against the likelihood that their followers would ever have their characters become significantly like that of Jesus. They state, "It slowly began to dawn on us that our method of attracting people was forming them in ways contrary to the way of Christ" (35).

The book tells the story of their church, Oak Hills Church of Folsom, CA, from the time that it was planted, through their entry into the seeker church movement and rapid growth, then through the decision to change and the mistakes, consequences, and rewards that have followed. It is very honest, respectful, and obviously took a great deal of courage to publish. (Congratulations to both the authors and InterVarsity Press for doing so.) I've read the stories of other pastors or churches who have gone through similar journeys, but this is by far the best written.

Dallas Willard's foreword is worth the price of the book. He opens the book with a question (also repeated in a later chapter) which the rest of the book tries to unpack and Willard says is "the single most important question in the church culture of North America today": "How do we present the radical message of Christ in a church that has catered to the religious demands of the nominally committed?" (9) Or, as it played out in the story of Oak Hills, the question might be: How can we expect people whom we have attracted with a 'come have all of your preferences and desires met at church' style of ministry to respond well to Jesus' 'deny yourself and give up your life to follow me' gospel? The authors concluded that those two were incompatible.

Personally, one of the greatest strengths of the book was in making connections I had not been able to make before between our consumeristic habits that are so deeply ingrained in us in North American culture and churches' general lack of effectiveness at helping people grow in the character of Christ. As the authors point out, cultural consumerism isn't so much the problem, as is how churches have adopted the consumerism of the culture around us and decided we have to harness it as a strategy for church growth. Ministry becomes an endless cycle of creating attractive ministries to get people to come to our churches, then trying to keep them happy and engaged enough to continue coming rather than dropping out or finding another church. When people come to us on these terms, we cannot be surprised when we discover that they may actually have very little interest in learning to do the things that Jesus taught and arranging their lives as any of his serious students would naturally do.

Along with tackling the "insidious monster" of consumerism, the book also addresses personal ambition in pastors and how it feeds this destructive cycle. We can cover and excuse our selfish ambition in language of wanting to accomplish great things for God's kingdom, but ambition often leads us into ways of living that are destructive to our souls and those of the people following us. As Carlson states,

"The desire to be better than others, the odious nature of comparison, and the lack of contentment with our actual state, is the problem formationally. This whole personal ambition thing is a very messy area... Perhaps ambition is needed more than ever. But it must be ambition directed toward something other than personal and organizational success. We must be ambitious to decrease so that Christ may increase. This is truly something worth giving our lives to " (76, 87).

Amen. Our churches will certainly benefit if this book can launch honest conversations among our leaders.

P.S.: If you're not a pastor, this is still an important book to read, but... If you come away from reading it ticked off at your pastor or your church for not doing things this way, you've entirely misread the book. The authors themselves strongly urge against thinking that would lead to such a reaction, as they state that the best possible result is for you to encounter God in the church where you already are, rather than going looking for another church or pastor who does things the way you like. As I've stated it before personally, the biggest hurdle to great ministry in my church is my own unlikeness to Jesus, not that anyone else has gotten things wrong. In almost every case pastors and church leaders are working very hard and doing the very best they can in an incredibly difficult job. Take it easy on them, and use this book to help you become more like Jesus for them.

Disclosure of Material Connection: If you purchase resources linked to from this blog, I may receive an “affiliate commission.” I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Regardless of whether I receive a commission, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

Looking for Something More?

The following is an adaptation of a letter I sent to a few friends today about a new Apprentice Group that we are starting. Some of you reading this have already been through the experience. If so, please consider leaving a comment below and share your thoughts on Apprentice. If you haven't been in a group, you live in the Midland area, and this sounds like something you'd like to do, email me.

Over the past two years, the best thing I have been involved with in ministry has been participating in and leading others through Apprentice Groups. I've never been a part of anything else that's as effective at helping people grow in their relationship with Christ, regardless of where they are in their spiritual life or how long they've been a Christian.

Some of us who have gone through the experience together so far came into it feeling spiritually stuck; we had been active Christians for decades, but had even become numb to how lifelessness had crept in to the most important relationship in our lives.

Others have come into these groups as a way of taking their first spiritual steps as Christians; regardless of how rough our pasts may have been, or how opposed to Christianity we may have been in the past, some of us have gotten very solid footing for our first Christian steps through these groups. When asked how the experience had changed their relationship with God, one participant simply said, "Now there is one."

Still others have come into these groups already growing spiritually, and have found in our experiences together reliable guidance for how to continue growing and satisfying their desire to know God in a real, practical way, as we learn to actually live as Jesus' disciples (apprentices).

Our experiences in Apprentice Groups are based upon coming to realize that we do not change by simply gritting our teeth and deciding to do better next time. This is true from small things, like trying to lose 10 pounds and keep it off, to larger things such as becoming the kind of person God created us to be and experiencing the fulness of life that Jesus said he came to give us. When we're talking about our lives in Christ with the Holy Spirit involved in the process, there is a way in which change happens naturally, even easily, though it always requires our cooperation. The brief version is that change happens in us when the Holy Spirit works and we tweak these three factors:

• Our thoughts: In Apprentice Groups, we specifically look at this question: Is the way that we think about God aligned with or contrary to the way that Jesus thought about God, and the way that God is revealed in the Scriptures? This makes a huge difference in the course of our lives. Regardless of how long we've been Christians, or how many Bible studies we've done, every one of us in these groups has had our thinking challenged by the way that Scripture instructs us to think about God. A big part of how we seek to modify our thinking in these groups is through memorizing full passages of Scripture together.
• Our habits: Most of the advice we've been given as Christians on how to shape our lives often comes down to two things: pray and read your Bible. While we can't overstate the necessity of those two things, they do not form a life that we actually live as we follow Jesus. Rather, along with many other habits, for apprentices of Jesus they should be part of an overall lifestyle arranged around our desire to learn from him. Therefore, during each week in between each of our Apprentice Group meetings, we have one Soul-Training Exercise to engage in. Some are things we usually associate with our spiritual lives, like specific ways to pray and read the Scriptures, but others are ways to more generally shape our overall lives to cooperate with the Holy Spirit's work in us. (For example, the first week's exercise is sleep!) In other words, the goal of these exercises isn't so much to add things to your already-too-full to-do list, but rather to train us in arranging the lives that we already live around our apprenticeship to Jesus.
• Our relationships: Although we're tempted to think that this is the least important of these three factors, by the end of our previous groups, participants have said that this was the most impacting aspect of the entire experience. One participant summed it up by saying, "I've come to realize that I don't spur myself on to holiness. I need other people to do that for me." To put it another way, we cannot be spiritually healthy Christians apart from spiritually healthy community, and many of us are unknowingly desperate for this kind of community in our lives. This is precisely what John Wesley meant when he said: "There is no holiness without social holiness."

The material for Apprentice Groups comes from three books by James Bryan Smith, with each one emphasizing one of the three factors above:

• The Good and Beautiful God deals primarily with comparing our thoughts about God to those of Jesus and how God is revealed in the Scriptures.
• The Good and Beautiful Life is based on the Sermon on the Mount and deals with the habits that make up our lives, and if arranged according to the teaching of Jesus, can actually lead to us becoming people who live lives free of greed, lying, lust, worry, etc., and who live in ways where we become people who do the things that Jesus taught and did, such as blessing people who curse us.
• The Good and Beautiful Community addresses our relationships and the things we do together in our life with God, such as forgiving, worshipping, serving and living generously. Although each book has its specific emphasis, the group's experience is designed to affect each of the three areas from the beginning of the group until its end.

Some of you reading this have already been in an Apprentice group with me or someone else in our church. The rest of you should! But- I realize that some places where I've had readers in the last month (like Atlanta and Kenya) are legitimately too far to travel to Midland each week to meet with us. So, regardless of whether it's with us or with someone else (or starting your own), here are the normal commitments for Apprentice Groups.

• Make being there a priority. Some groups commit to 25 weeks together, and state right off the bat that none of the participants will miss more than three of the sessions.
• Read one chapter from the book each week. Whether you spend a lot of time in books, or they're a completely new concept to you, you can do this. The chapters are very readable, not too long, and well-written (no pictures, but you do get some good stories).
• Do the Soul-Training Exercise for each week. Like anything else, the more you put into this, the more you'll get out of it. Some require time and planning, others don't.
• Memorize Scripture together. We take nine weeks to memorize Colossians 3:1-17, two verses at a time. Regardless of what you're thinking, you can do this. It's something that I've come to believe God is tremendously in favor of, and therefore helps us to accomplish.

Again, if you're near Midland and this sounds interesting, email me. If you live somewhere else, you can check this partial list of churches with Apprentice Groups, or look into starting one at your own church. If you've already been in an Apprentice group, leave a comment and describe it for yourself.

Book Review: Spirituality for Everyday Living by Brian C. Taylor

Like nearly everyone else I've known who has been raised as an Evangelical Christian in America, for most of my life I've known almost nothing about St. Benedict, and many of us may feel like there's not much reason to invest any of our highly valued time in changing that. Thanks to [amazon_link id="0814617573" target="_blank" ]Spirituality for Everyday Living[/amazon_link] by Brian C. Taylor, both aspects of that can change.

Much of our unfamiliarity with Benedict is due to the fact that he wrote his Rule for 6th century monks, and I have yet to go to church with many people whose lives resemble those of 6th century monks in any significant ways. So it's very helpful to have the ancient Rule of St. Benedict interpreted and adapted for us by Taylor, an Episcopal priest of our own day. He does a good job of showing how Benedict's guidance, which has proven reliable to so many for so long, can be followed by people who desire to arrange their lives around a dedicated pursuit of God yet who live in the context of family and work responsibilities.

Taylor does a remarkably effective job of communicating this in only 70 pages (including the Preface, Introduction, and Appendix!). The three short chapters of the book are arranged around different characteristics of the monastic life prescribed by Benedict: Chapter 1 describes the monk's "commitment to life": stability, conversatio (repentance), and obedience; Chapter 2 is the monk's "life in balance": prayer, study and work; Chapter 3 is the monk's "self in relationship": with God, others, and things.

Each chapter contains Taylor's summary and interpretation of the applicable sections of Benedict's Rule, as well as his own personal examples and suggestions on how people today can apply Benedict's guidance in life outside of the monastery.

I believe that one of the greatest need for Christians today is to have teachers who are effective at reconnecting us with the riches of the voices and guidance available to us from the past. St. Benedict is someone whom we will benefit from knowing and having as a teacher, and Taylor's book is a valuable resource for introducing him to today's Christians.

Disclosure of Material Connection: If you purchase resources linked to from this blog, I may receive an “affiliate commission.” I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Regardless of whether I receive a commission, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.