I Am a Follower: A Review

My latest offering from the Booksneeze bloggers program is "I Am A Follower" by Leonard Sweet.  In this book Sweet is taking on the leadership culture that is dominating the culture of the church and asking if this is what the church is to be about.  As you might can guess from the title he is seeking to call us away from leadership models and into what he terms followership.  Instead of seeing ourselves as leaders he claims that we are to become first followers.  The reason being that much of the leadership culture that is present within the church can lead us away from following after our own whims instead of listening to the Spirit and following after Jesus.  After an opening section that makes the case for followership, the book is then broken up into three subsequent sections that take a deeper look at Jesus being the way, the truth and the life for those that follow after him.

I will have to admit that I loved this book.  As someone who has worked in the church for the past ten years and has been indoctrinated in the leadership culture, although with a great measure of discomfort, I am happy that someone is finally speaking up.  I only wish that this book had been written ten years ago to save me so much heartache and to help put some of my own thoughts into a more coherent form.  I felt that this book was a very easy read and was clear and understandable.  I think that this book is accessible to all audiences, but I think its biggest impact would be had on pastors and lay people who are in charge of ministries.  There will be a measure of controversy surrounding this book as I know of many a pastor who have sold out to the leadership paradigm to the point where they would turn a deaf ear to Sweet's message in this book.  But there is an important message here for the church and those who have been called by God to be the first followers that help to point others to the way, the truth and the life that Jesus is calling us to live.  Thank you Leonard Sweet for reminding me.

Leadership, the Local Church and the Crisis of Imagination

Tim Keel, the pastor at Jacob's Well in KC, was the next presenter and led a talk of this title.  I had not previously heard anything by Tim other than his church's name, but that will change.  (I recently purchased his book!)  Keel makes the statement that the most significant crisis the church faces is the crisis of imagination.  He defines imagination as the faculty or action of forming new ideas, images or concepts that are not yet there.  Keel reminds us that Jesus proclaims that the Kingdom of God is near, but asks if we have the imagination to see it?

Imagination is going to be necessary if we (the people of God) are going to a place where we have never been before.  Keel claims that our leadership imagination has been domesticated in three ways.

First, our commitment to modern epistemology.  We want to strip things down to observable and applicable truths.  Leadership becomes the art of executing the techniques and we depend more on experts than the people that we are journeying with.  This can cause us to not see where God's Spirit is active around us.

Second, is through our American pragmatism and what he called the ministry of titillation.  Ministry and leadership become a bag of tricks.  The call is for us to seek God and listen to our narratives to discover what God is doing, instead of replicating what others may be doing.

Third, is through isolation which he claimed was Protestantisms dirty little secret.  We in the West tend to distance ourself from those who think and act differently than us.  Keel challenged that thinking and wants us to ask the question of what we could learn from other traditions.

In closing he brought our attention to John 15 and the organic process that is pictured there.  This is the passage that talks about abiding in the vine.  He said that trees do not strain to produce fruit.  Instead it happens as a part of who/what they are.  This same truth is true for us, if we abide in God, our fruit cannot help but to be produced.

So do you think about imagination and his thoughts on producing fruit?