I am co-teaching an honors course this semester, and students are doing a series of critiques about the subtexts in advertisements in an interdisciplinary course called “What does it mean to be human?” One student’s ad caught my attention: it was for digests of popular books on leadership, and the hook was the amount of time
Life is Good! Photo by julesinky
that an aspiring executive could save by reading only brief digests of the best-selling titles. What a vignette of our world!
Here are some titles I found on the Web: The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John Maxwell; The Four Factors of Effective Leadership by David Rendell and Daniel Ford; and Creating Magic: 10 Common Sense Leadership Strategies from a Life at Disney by Lee Cockerell. I can buy the books, or buy audio CD’s for some of them, or download them to a Kindle. I can probably find digests of them as well. How about a book entitled Ten Easy Steps to Spiritual and Emotional Maturity. Do you think that would sell? Would you order one?
The book, of course, would be a fraud. Years ago, as a young(ish) pastor with a freshly-minted doctoral degree, I was talking with a veteran missionary from Africa. Thinking he could give me a dynamite idea about disciple-making in the local congregation, I asked him, “What kind of programs do you use on the mission field to help make disciples of new converts?” (Oh, so green!) He paused a moment, then looked me straight in the eye. His answer stunned me. “We dare not use any program or material at all. If we do, our converts will complete the program and assume that they have learned all they ever need to know. We have to be careful never to leave any hint of the idea that there is an end to the process of becoming like Jesus.”
My friend’s warning has remained with me over the years, and deeply influenced my thinking as I wrote Walking Together: Relationships that Transform. Throughout the book I laid out questions to be discussed, ideas to be digested, and areas of life to be examined. But there is no schedule, no 13-week segments, no 2-year study plan–and never a certificate of completion. The question continues to nag at me, however. What if the absence of a flow chart to completion is a deal breaker? Will anybody buy a book that is an open-ended invitation to a life-long commitment to building relationships with others who will walk with us for indefinite periods of time? Am I suggesting a way of life that does not make sense to our hurried, agenda-driven culture?
One Step at a Time: Photo by kconnors
Of course, we all know that relationship-building is such an open-ended life. Marriage is the great test case of that kind of commitment, but we are failing miserably at that. But there is no other way to have open, honest, and formative relationships with anyone, God included, if we will not take the open-ended path.
Okay, which would you buy: Ten Easy Steps to Spiritual and Emotional Maturity or Walking Together for the Rest of your Life? I’d love to hear your responses and your suggestions on communicating the difference to friends today.
Answer: Walking Together for the Rest of Your Life, AND the Short-term goal oriented books. (Although to give an unprompted plug, Walking Together is an excellent book and I’d be shocked to find a short-term goal book that could compete.)
It might be a boring answer, but they’re not exclusive, are they? I was counseled to not think about the whole dissertation when I started, but to instead just think about the next step I needed to take. Be like PacMan and just eat the one dot in front of you. Thinking about it all would be overwhelming and thus self-defeating. Similarly, instead of trying to bring forth the Kingdom of God tonight, maybe the more achievable goals like laying my to-do list on the alter or sacrificing some work for a relationship are the way we live out our faith.
But to be sure, I’m playing devil’s advocate here to see where this goes.
Every journey consists of sequential choices to take the next step. That’s the way we live our lives. I’m reading Platt’s “Radical” right now, and I’m already suspecting that this is a book about goals without supporting processes. It’s great that Jim X has reorganized his medical practice and now works in the inner city (at a greatly reduced income. But how did he make that life-changing choice. Probably not by sitting in a pew and listening to great preaching. I’ll bet a bundle that he moved (with his wife, of course)to that choice by small steps taken in the context of friendships and small groups. I find the book very frustrating. But if we have no idea that there is a goal of Christ-likeness out there, why would we even take the first step?