Summoned to Lead

This is the first of hopefully an ongoing "conversation" through blogs/comments about Leonard Sweet's book "Summoned to Lead". A few friends are trying this way of conversing about a similar topic. We'd love you to join us, so comment away, link to your blog, etc. Josh is already blogging on the intro here.

Introduction

I need to be honest as I begin this whole thing. The conversation about doing this on a book thrilled me. The conversation about doing this on a leadership book... not so much. I'm kind of anti-leadership book. It's not that I don't think leadership to be good, important and a reality, but rather that I think if you have to do a bunch of reading on it, then perhaps you're already following and not leading. Besides that, my life is spent in the unique and admittedly oftentimes odd world of the church. But odd as it may be, it's not a company and it's pastor(s) is not a CEO. In fact that whole approach, I would argue, has gotten us into more trouble than good in recent history. The elaboration of that point I'll save for another day (or maybe just for myself). I've said all that to say, I didn't really want to do a leadership book. But my good friend talked me into it and I've had this book in my "to read" stack for quite a while (it kept getting pushed down). So here we go...

Being privy now to my thoughts on this matter it will not suprise you to find that my favorite quotes up front were,
"This is an anit-leadership book. It offers a patentely and passionately unfashionable stance on one of the defining issues of our day." (12)
"To put it bluntly: the whole leadership thing is a demented concept." (12)
"'Now our all-purpose explanation is leadership... We have basically lots of witchcraft, lots of religion, and very little understanding.'" (15 quoting Jim Collins)

So far I'm digging that he also has found leadership as an educational topic and book fodder to be pretty empty. He digs into this further when he begins to elaborate on the concept that leadership is about "hearing" more than "vision". "The words ear and wisdom are the same in ancient Sumerian." (17). In fact in the "famous" passage where Solomon asks God for "wisdom", he actually asks God to give him a "hearing heart". I don't know if this will come up later in the book or not, but I find it fascinating that the man many consider (biblical followers or not) to be the wisest or one of the wisest leaders and kings in history didn't actually ask for wisdom, but for a hearing heart. That is such a different prayer in my opinion than, "God please make me wise". To me one smacks of selfishness and the other of humility.

Sweet addresses this as well, in that humility is a greater attribute than charisma. An interesting thought in light of what many are "looking for" in a leader. If you've ever sat in on pastoral search meeting... well, that just gets funnier. "We need someone who our teens will think is cool and want to hang out with," and "we need a pastor who people are just naturally drawn to," seem so out of place when considering the "hearing heart" prayer.

Sweet then goes on to use Ernest Shackleton as a leadership model and will retrun to his quotes and stories as a reference for this kind of leadership. I dig it. I'm vaguely familiar with Shackleton before this and am excited to hear more about it.

I really liked how he launches out of this intro into the book, "This is a new age of exploration. In this emerging culture, everyone is an explorer, and every profession requires sailing in uncharted waters. " (23) I'm finding this to be more and more true the more life I live. No one is really comfortable. All of us are in new territory. If this is true, then why not allow those who are passionate, called and are heading towards something lead us there? Perhaps a leader these days is as much a curator and gatherer as anything else.

All in all I was encouraged at the end of the intro (this may change - it is about leadership). Mostly because I felt like he was focusing more on being what God has called us to be, than he was on becoming something your not (which I feel like a lot of leadership books are). This is more in tune with my own experiences. Does God really call us out of ourselves or deeper into ourselves? When I look at Scripture I see Gideon as called and not created, learned or born... "for such a time as this", says Esther. I think this theme goes on throughout Scripture.

At the end of the day the question I ask is this:
Is it easier to say "yes, I need to be totally different than I am and will start now to try to become that", than it is to just do what we already know is right? I think the talk of becoming something else is false. I would argue we need to focus more on being more of who we are created to be. Maybe leadership is just being what we're created to be the best we can and know. Maybe this blog is too long already...