God brought me on a journey so I could meet Joe Humrichous (pronounced: HUM rick house). The physical journey was an uneventful trip to northeast Indiana. The spiritual journey was more exciting. I had just finished writing, A Really Great Church! in which I sought to point my readers to the sufficiency of Christ for […]
Book Review: Pastor Unique – Becoming Turnaround Leaders
Pastor Unique is not just another indictment of the American Church or American pastors. Authors Lavern Brown, Gordon Penfold and Gary Westra have given us a roadmap for real change and it is practical and doable. One clarification: PASTOR UNIQUE is about turnaround pastors in the sense of long-term (not transitional or interim) pastors, who seek to lead […]
Book Review: The Nuts and Bolts of Leadership: Getting the Job done
This is a different kind of leadership book. It’s not about theory and it does not purport to be about Christian leadership. This new volume by my old friend, Jim Bohn, a veteran of several decades with a Fortune 100 company and a number of years of consulting in the business and academic communities, is […]
Book Review: Permission To Speak Freely
Doug Crandall and Matt Kincaid’s secular, business world-oriented book, Permission To Speak Freely, makes a great, challenging read for Christian leaders. Here’s the bottom line premise of the book, from page ix of the Foreword (by Shann Ray Ferch): “By not only listening deeply, but encouraging those around us to speak freely, leaders can create […]
Book Review: Hit The Bullseye
It’s not every day that I would review a fifteen year old book, but Paul Borden’s Hit The Bullseye: How Denominations Can Aim The Congregation At The Mission Field, is as timely, or even more timely, than when the author penned it. The former Executive Minister of the American Baptist Churches of the West, renamed […]
Book Review: The Unstuck Church
As a new pastor I was given a big set of cassette tapes which told me exactly what I wanted to hear. As a gifted teacher it was music to my ears to hear from a superstar pastor that all I needed to do was to study the Bible all week, pausing a few times […]
Book Review: Designed To Lead
What? Another book on leadership? Yes it is, but Designed to Lead (The Church and Leadership Development) has a different take on the subject. As the subtitle suggests, Eric Geiger and Kevin Peck’s 2016 book focuses on the place of the local church in developing leaders for the whole wide world. Their thesis is that […]
Book Review: Working With Emotional Intelligence
We shouldn’t need this book, but we do. As evangelical Christian leaders, we should have already cornered the market on emotional intelligence. We should be the experts, the icons, the poster children for this important quality. Before going any further, let’s return to author Daniel Goleman’s definition of emotional intelligence – known since the author’s […]
Book Review: I Once Was Lost
Delightful. That’s my one word review of the book by Presbyterian pastor Don Everts and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship coordinator, Doug Schaupp (IVP Books). The two have extensive experience in leading college-age postmodern skeptics to faith in Christ; more than two thousand of them, in fact. Their book is based on a great deal of listening […]
The Two Best Things I Never Knew About The Holy Spirit
I could not more highly recommend Fred Sander’s, The Deep Things of God (How the Trinity changes everything). This is theology at its best: Biblical, thought-provoking and heart-warming. It has changed my thinking and my worship. It has shown me that the gospel and the God I cherish are even better than I thought they […]
The Three Best Things I Never Knew About The Trinity
This is not a book review but I have to give credit where it’s due: Fred Sanders’ The Deep Things of God (How The Trinity Changes Everything) was an eye-opening, heart-warming, worship-inspiring experience for me, and continues to influence my life and work. Like all evangelical pastors, I believed in and taught the doctrine of […]
What’s the Church for anyway?
About twenty years ago I thought we finally had it right. My own enlightenment came through Sonlife Ministy’s Dann Spader: The church is for making disciples out of the raw material of lost people. This involves winning the lost, building up the believer and equipping the worker. Refreshing. Challenging. Simple. Biblical. Unarguable. Or so I […]
Book Review: The Externally Focused Quest
The challenge of turning an inwardly focused church into a vibrant, externally focused mission to its community is formidable. It’s no accident then that the same writers who gave us The Externally Focused Church, Eric Swanson and Rick Rusaw, felt led to follow it up with The Externally Focused Quest. It is a quest, and […]
Book review: 5 Gears: How to be present and productive when there is never enough time
Most of us have used figures of speech derived from the experience of shifting the gears of a car or a bicycle. “On my way home from work I try to shift gears so I’m ready to interact with my family.” “While doing lunch with my co-workers I have to change gears and remember to […]
“Pastor: How’s Your CHURCH Doing?”
I have many conversations with pastors which include this question. We talk about lots of other things, from illnesses to children to football, and then I invariably get around to the “How’s your CHURCH doing?” question. Some pastors have the privilege of leading churches which are building the Kingdom of Christ with some real God-given […]
