Reviews of Recent Reads

From time to time, I like to mention books I've read, along with my recommendations. Three recent reads are worth mentioning.

Joseph Ellis won a Pullitzer Prize for his book, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. In it, Ellis presents a series of profiles of people like Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. It was Ellis' recent biography, His Excellency: George Washington, in fact, that incited me to read this earlier work.

On this blog, I've described His Excellency as commendable. But it's neither as eloquent or as insightful as the Washington biographies written by Richard Norton Smith or James Thomas Flexner, Smith's being the best of the lot, so far as I'm concerned.

I was primed for reading Founding Brothers also, because I'd recently read David McCullough's Pullitzer-worthy 1776.

While Founding Brothers is adequate, there's really nothing special about it. It presents no new insights into the minds or interactions of the Founders, although it might be a good introduction for anyone who knows nothing of what Ellis rightly argues here was, at least in a political sense, America's greatest generation.

I say it might be a good introduction. But Founding Brothers suffers from excessive wordiness. Ellis sometimes seems like the smartest kid in the class trying to show us how smart he is. He expounds on a point and then keeps expounding on it longer than is necessary, pages after we've understood what he wanted to tell us. Ellis could learn something about brevity and effective communication from McCullough. I found myself growing bored and restless as I read Founding Brothers.

Improving Your Serve: The Art of Unselfish Living is a book from Chuck Swindoll, written back in 1981. While I don't always agree with his theology, I've always been a fan of Swindoll's. This book, like all of Swindoll's stuff, is full of Biblical insight, great illustrative stories, and self-deprecating good humor.

It's also positively inspirational. Let's be honest: Servanthood is one of the least attractive elements about following Jesus Christ. In a look-out-for-number-one world, Jesus' call for us to serve one another or Paul's admonition to concern ourselves with the interests of others over our own aren't things we want to hear. (This helps to explain why the anti-Christian theology of someone like Joel Osteen finds such resonance in our culture.) Swindoll, particularly in one chapter toward the end of the book, acknowledges the difficulties associated with embracing a servant lifestyle. Yet, Swindoll, through much of the book, also effectively conveys why it's good to live Christ's way rather than our ways.

I suppose I wish he hadn't included a whole chapter on rewards for faithful servanthood. Having life with God forever as the result of trusting Christ and what He's done for us on the cross seems reward enough to me, an undeserved reward at that. Servanthood, as I see it, is simply an appropriate response to God's undeserved charity--the word charity being a transliteration of the New Testament Greek's word charitas, which is usually translated as grace.

Nonetheless, this is a fine book and I recommend it.

Finally, I'll mention a book which will probably only be of interest to pastors and those in lay congregational leadership, Leading the Congregation: Caring for Yourself While Serving the People by Norman Shawchuck and Roger Heuser.

The subtitle is a bit misleading. There's little here about self-care, a contemporary obsession among American clergy, it seems. It's entirely okay with me that the topic is given short-shrift.

This is a book about leading, but from the standpoint of a servant of God and of neighbor. It incorporates not only the counsel of Scripture and of the history of the Church and its spiritual giants, but also such contemporary leadership gurus as Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis.

There's a lot in this book on which I'll be cogitating for awhile. (I usually make notes on interesting or important passages of books on blank pages in the backs of them, noting where the key passages appear. I've made two-and-a-half pages of notes in this book.)

I like the way Shawchuck and Heuser talk about vision here. It's less mystical and more organic than what most leadership gurus expound. In other words, there's an accountability built into their ideas of vision. Vision isn't something that a domineering leader palms off on a congregation with the words, "Thus saith the Lord!" Instead, as Shawchuck and Heuser conceive it, the leader's vision is forged in her or his interaction with the community, both the community of the congregation and the larger community the congregation is called to serve. That vision, which really answers the question, "What shall we do?", resonates with the congregation.

I'm also intrigued by the three questions that Shawchuck and Heuser say leaders must ask themselves:

• What do I do well? (This isn't necessarily what I most like to do, by the way)
• What is the one thing that only I can do that this organization needs and how can I get it done?
• How can I project what I do well on what most needs done?

This book also places emphasis on the importance of the pastor spending time in Bible-reading and prayer. This may be what the authors had in mind in the book's subtitle. But, as they emphasize, no congregation can progress in its discipleship (or in what I would call its followership) beyond that of its pastor. The pastor must tend to her or his relationship with Christ in order to create an example (spirituality, as the authors point out, is more caught than taught), to be given direction for their leadership, and to be sustained through inevitable challenges.

This is a book to which I will turn again, I'm sure. I also intend to share it with some of our congregation's leaders.