There's An Eggtimer Sitting On Your Desk!

This leadership blog has a very distinct title “Clan of Issachar”. Not for no reason. It communicates an essential skill of effective leadership – discern the times.
Every good leader must be able to read the times and know how to respond. Weak leaders are decades out of fashion or so far in front the vision they cast is too conceptual.
Good leaders learn to ride the wave of history, culture and context.

In this regard there’s a must read book pretty hot off the press God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World @ John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge.

Some have labeled it a political book; others see it as a diagnosis of modern America. I guess the fact that the co-authors are British writers of The Economist would suggest it might be either but it probably isn’t a theological book. Yet – it is all three. The former two topics are obvious to spot as you read about Obama, Bush and Blair or read quotes from people like Michael Novak, Dwight Eisenhower and H L Mencken to name three strange bedfellows.
But the theological topics and discernments are discerning, stimulating, and somewhat shocking.

By theological I mean the writers ability to highlight how people are believing in God today both locally and globally and how America’s approach to God is becoming the global norm. God is back – and how faiths and countries are handling God is shaping this century.

Church leaders need to read this book. I place it in my top five most helpful reads of 2009.

Unlike other bloggers I’m not about to write another 500 words telling you what the books says – buy the book! (Cheapskates visit Borders and read it before you stick it back on the shelves. Sad folks use Amazons reviews and pretend you’ve read the book!)

Discerning the times. If (as Micklethwait and Wooldridge claim) global religion is embracing a market driven American model we are about to see an explosion (maybe not the best term) of fundamentalism beyond the normal geographical/cultural boundaries of religions.
I’ve suggested before that THE crucial question of this century is “will Islam modernize?” However, to this question we need to add this equally crucial question “Will Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity remain within the market driven culture of evangelicalism and other religions or will they go counter cultural and present an alternative, a clear alternative not just in message but in methods.”
Or to say it in a more direct way: "Will evangelicals see that in this context and this culture the method IS the message."

Failure to do this will see this century a continual battle – a religious war – between two dominant religions wielding the same weapons of market appeal laced with each their own fundamentalism and its excesses and dangers.

There needs to be an alternative. And that alternative is in the realization that our method is the message (to quote Shane Hipps who quotes the iconic Marshall McLuhan).

This is a difficult concept to grasp. Tracing how the message changed as we left the method of an oral culture into the method of a written word culture so in this emerging culture does our method change again – but in so changing the message itself also changes.

There’s much to this idea – worth reading Hipps’ book The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture to explore it more.

There is something in it. Something the church needs to discern as we need to move distinctively different than the movement of religion around the globe.

God is Back serves as an egg counter. The evangelical church, your church, needs to discern the global religious movement and be different – not to preserve the church or the Gospel, but to expand both.

Enjoy the book – leaders need to read it.