Chart Your Journey Through Church Leadership

In Lead, authors Andy Coombe, Andy Blacknell, and John D.H. Greenway bring together helpful insights and inspiration on leadership from various sources – all in one relatively short paperback.

They cover three main areas:

Mapping your journey

I was trained as a geographer – I love maps. But it took me years to realise that leading a church is so much more like using a chart at sea than a map on land.

Everything is moving, all the time, with tide and wind to reckon with, unseen dangers lurking below the surface, arising new opportunities for making progress that were hard to foresee, with a crew that may get sea-sick and dispirited, and a harbour that can feel a long way off.

Leading through that is nothing like the ‘drive straight along this road for five hundred yards, turn right, then second left, and you’ll arrive in 3 minutes time’ of a satnav. And so, it is even more tricky than a gold D-of-E challenge over steep hills and deep valleys in the dark.

I know it sounds ridiculous to say, but coming to that realisation helped me in my leadership no end.

Instead of feeling that my map reading as a leader wasn’t very effective, I began to understand that leadership is as much an art as a science, that comparing two church ‘boats’ in different conditions is unhelpful, and that experiencing difficulties helps even more than easy early success as the journey goes on.

Thankfully the Bible is the chart I need and it marks out the danger zones of shoals that might shipwreck us. And the Lord provides a true compass in the power of the Holy Spirit, and he is sovereign over the ‘sea conditions’ we face as leaders.

The book provides some great ways to think, discuss, and then navigate the changing conditions leaders face. It is a hugely accessible and simple tool for you to use with your team. It is worth reading just for this!

Navigating the twists and turns

The book's next section works on navigational skills like seeing the big picture, checking progress, and the like.

There is such a lot of good here, and so many terrific things from the best leadership books around are brought together in a concise way.

Great and clear diagrams throughout help too. These can do a lot of heavy lifting as you seek to help others – if you don’t know that already.

You can see some of them on the Lead Work Life website. For example:

My only reservation is that this section can feel like it’s a big buffet with everything you’d like to eat laid out before you – but you have a digestive system that can only take so much. A lot of rich food makes you…(!)

So, a slight health warning: read it through once, perhaps quite quickly so that you know what is there, then go back and very slowly go through the things that would help you and your team the most.

Growing as leaders

The final section looks at personal and team growth.

As you read this section, you’ll see that the authors aren’t so much interested in how to ‘make a quick buck’, earn an OBE, or have others admire you due to your achievements - despite the sub-title! They are asking more fundamental questions about life and its purpose.

Two of the authors make it clear in the closing blurb that they are Christians, and though they don’t make the book an explicitly Christian one, it does share some of the best of common grace insights and wisdom on leadership.

I warmly commend this book to you – and it saves buying/reading a whole lot of other ones!

You can find out more and order a copy of Lead: 50 models for Success in Work & Life from the Lead Work Life website.