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 PrintableVersion Leadership nextNew kind of leader?LEADERSHIP NEXT Eddie Gibbs writes: ‘In our post-Christendom, postmodern culture we need a new kind of leader’. Anyone familiar with emerging church literature will recognise the key words included there (and the similarity to Brian McClaren’s trilogy, A New Kind of Christian). This book takes on board the concerns of the emerging church ‘conversation’ (as it likes to be called in preference to being labelled a ‘movement’) that we need a new embodiment of church life for a new historical setting. A previous book examined this area (Church Next, with Ian Coffey). As the title suggests the current book examines the changes needed for church leadership. You can get a feel for the concerns of this book with the buzz words that repeatedly occur within it: passion, networking, innovation, strategy, vision, liberating, affirming, freedom, transforming, relational. Such is the new kind of leader needed as opposed to those who follow the equally frequent opposites: conformity, imposition, hierarchy, critical, ghetto-minded, play-safe, isolating. As these lists should suggest Gibbs argues that traditional styles of leadership are outmoded in today’s culture. They are too often top-down models where leaders impose on people, rather than networks that empower people. Hence we are told that new leaders will ‘work with people not over them’ and ‘transformational leaders connect and combine rather than divide and conquer’. One issue running through the book is that the argument tends to stay at the level of these sorts of phrases which no one would want to argue with (especially in their caricatured positions). The question though is what that looks like on the ground where there are real tensions between exercising authority and empowering people. Gibbs recognises these tensions but doesn’t get much beyond stating the need to be aware of them. Overall, though, much of what Gibbs says about leadership is instructive and challenging. For many leaders who have inherited traditional ways of working he is right that a re-think is needed on how our churches are led and our leaders trained and this book will stimulate thought on that. Particularly helpful are sections on attitudes of leaders, the way we may inherit a ‘success’ culture, genuine appreciation of the diversity of gifts in the church, and the need for team leadership. My fundamental concern with this book though is that in discussing these issues Gibbs mainly describes the characteristics of current emerging church leaders assuming that this is what we need, rather than working from biblical principles. Hence there is no discussion of the biblical passages describing the roles of leaders, but a lot of discussion of recent ‘leadership thought’. I agree with many of his conclusions but not his working. Read this book to make you think about your leadership style, but continually ask yourself what the Bible says about this, and then ask how it might be best done in today’s culture. Graham Beynon,
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