Book Reviews
Book Review: Lifelong Leadership
- Details
- Written by: Wei-Han Kuan
Lifelong Leadership:
Woven together through Mentoring Communities
by Mary Kate Morse
Navpress 2020
‘When I look back at the past decade… this group is the thing that’s kept me in ministry.’ – Mentoring Community member, Australia
I know several individuals who would echo those precise words. Vocational gospel ministry is tough, perhaps the toughest gig in town. How we find encouragement and support along the way is a critical issue for the longevity of ministers and the progress of gospel ministry. Lifelong Leadership tells the story of one powerful solution. It declares its purpose up front:
‘…this book serves as a comprehensive, step-by-step, practical guide for experienced leaders in any country to learn how to create and launch a Mentoring Community.’
The book is part practice manual, part biography of a movement, part spiritual devotional. I loved it because I am part of its story and I’ve experienced the love and ministry of the authors and others involved in this work.
Part One outlines the urgent need for leaders and the urgent need of leaders for long-term spiritual mentoring.
The book tells the story of Mentoring Communities beginning with Leighton Ford and the forming of the Point Group. One of its members was and is Stephen Abbott, who was once the EFAC Victoria Training Officer and taught evangelism at Ridley.
My connection with Mentoring Communities began shortly after ordination when Steve invited me into what became the REFRESH Mentoring Community. We had each been his students at Ridley and were fresh out of college. He sensed rightly that the group would be critical to our longevity and health in ministry. We’ve tracked together for over a decade and are now spread across Australia with one in the UK.
Six years ago, I gathered younger clergy into the Resilience mentoring community, a third-generation group that is able to trace its links back to Leighton Ford.
We are part of a world-wide movement and international community of practice, the patterns and culture of which are the subject of the book. The aim is to draw together ministers who want to, ‘lead like Jesus, lead others to Jesus, and lead for Jesus’.
Groups come together annually in, ‘a safe space and time, with safe people’, to engage in a process of peer spiritual mentoring. The process includes practices that make up the chapters of Part Two of the book: Solitude, Prayer and Bible Reflection, Listening, Questions, Discernment, Group Listening Prayer. These chapters form the bulk of the book.
These practices have pushed me to lean into the immanence of God and the intimacy of the Holy Spirit’s knowledge of my life and care over me. In a Mentoring Community, we express God’s care for each of us in the context of the people of God. It’s an amazingly powerful and tangible expression of wise, prayerful, loving support – vital encouragement amidst the challenges of ministry.
Each of my two groups’ members would attest to that. Part Three reflects on the experience of Mentoring Communities – what are they like to be a part of? How are they gathered together and sustained? Read Lifelong Leadership to grab a sense of what Mentoring Communities might mean for you and your longevity and health in gospel leadership. If you’re a more senior leader, what might they mean for your capacity to multiply ministry and invest in a subsequent generation of leaders? What would EFAC’s ministry look like if Mentoring Communities proliferated among us?
(Feel free to chat with Steve or Wei-Han too.)
Wei-Han Kuan is the Director of CMS Victoria
Book Review: Be Thou My Vision by Jonathan Gibson
- Details
- Written by: Hilton Jordan
Gibson, Jonathan. Be Thou My Vision: a liturgy for Daily Worship. Crossway Books: Wheaton, Illinois. 2021.
If you, like me, have struggled with focus, freshness, and a framework in your private time of prayer and Bible-reading (or quiet time) then “Be Thou My Vision - A Liturgy For Daily Worship” by Jonathan Gibson may be just the tool you are looking for.
“Be Thou My Vision” is essentially 31 days of gospel-shaped liturgy borrowing heavily from the gospel structure of the services in the Book of Common Prayer 1552 … but with a wonderful variation. The variation is that most of the prayers don’t come from BCP but from a great variety of writers from church history.
The ‘contributors’ to “Be Thou My Vision” include saints the likes of: à Kempis, Ambrose, Anselm, Augustine, Baxter, Bucer, Calvin, Chrysostom, Edwards, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory the Great, Luther, and Patrick; as well as Church of England saints, such as: Cranmer, Herbert, Johnson, Taylor, Toplady, Wesley, and Wilberforce.
The author, Gibson, a Presbyterian pastor and Cambridge PhD, was struggling with his private worship during the COVID-19 lockdowns. An Anglican Australian friend recommended he apply himself to compiling a resource that others could use, and the product of that is “Be Thou My Vision”.
The basic structure of each daily liturgy is: call to worship, adoration, reading of the law, confession of sin, assurance of pardon, creed, praise, catechism, prayer for illumination, Scripture reading, prayer of intercession, petitions, the Lord’s Prayer.
There are also a treasure trove of appendices which provide: musical tunes for the doxology and Gloria Patri; the Heidelberg Catechism and the Westminster Shorter Catechism; the M’Cheyne Bible reading plan; the collects from BCP 1552 (many of which date back to the early church); and an author and liturgy index.
“Be Thou My Vision” is a feast of spiritual feeding as the different contributions are not only theologically profound but they are also thoughtfully, creatively, and sensitively combined. It is considerately prepared so that each daily liturgy is able to be completed in approximately 20 minutes (even the Athanasian Creed is wisely broken up across three consecutive days). In addition it is beautifully presented in a box with a cloth-bound hard cover and three differently coloured bookmarks.
“Be Thou My Vision” does, however, have a few ‘weaknesses’. For example, the language used is the original English or English translation, which can be hard going for some, yet with American spelling. The variety of authors from different church ages means that the expression is quite a mix of quaint and sophisticated, of dense and pithy. I also occasionally find myself distracted by a minor theological quibble, such as the beatitudes being presented as law or encountering descended “into hell” - rather than “to the dead” - in the Apostles’ Creed.
“Be Thou My Vision” is an enormously helpful resource for private worship which could well revolutionise your quiet time or, at least, breathe new life into your time alone with God. Although the book is presented as a resource for personal or family worship, I would only recommend it to adults and especially to theologically mature readers.
Hilton Jordan is Senior Pastor of RAFT Anglican Church in Rowville, Victoria.
Book Review: The Sexual Reformation by Aimee Byrd
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- Written by: Elizabeth Webster
Byrd, Aimee. The Sexual Reformation: Restoring the Dignity and Personhood of Man and Woman.
Zondervan Academic: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2022.
Aimee Byrd’s take on Song of Songs is a lot less risqué than it may seem, or is it? Byrd ventures through this oft ignored - because we don’t know what to do with it - part of Scripture to try to give us a new way to look at the relationships between genders. Her aim is to show the intertwined nature of male and female voices in the story of God and call the church to reconsider the way it has limited the voice of women over the centuries. She does so without being heavy-handed, though sharing some of her own personal struggles in using her voice in the church sphere. Byrd is calling us to go beyond the mechanics of the egalitarian v complementarian debate and get to the heart of the matter, the love of God for all his people and his desire to see them flourish.
She does a fantastic job of relating each of her posits to the whole story of Scripture tying her ideas through Genesis to Revelation, wanting to explore a renewed understanding of the dignity and personhood of each gender. She wants to get away from defining genders based upon roles and move towards a new, or reformed, understanding of what it means to be men and women. For someone who already subscribes to the idea of mutuality between genders, Byrd’s take was refreshing. She’s not trying to tell us what we can or can’t do, but rather, encouraging us to find value in our biological sex, something that the world around us is currently breaking down.
Overall, the book gave me a fresh understanding of the Song of Songs, showing the different ways to read it, and encouraging a broader look at the beauty of the language held within, without getting caught on the erotic nature of some of the text. The book seems to say, it’s time for the church to stop feeling uncomfortable in these conversations, and try to step forward and encourage healthy conversation around gender and sex.
While anyone with a good biblical knowledge can probably get around it, I would recommend a read through the Song before you venture into this book.
Elizabeth Webster is an Assistant Minister in the St Hilary’s Network, Melbourne.
Book Review: Cynical Theories
- Details
- Written by: Tim Horman
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody
By Helen Pluckrose And James Lindsay, 2020.
Pitchstone Publishig, 2020
Reviewed By Tim Horman
Helen Pluckrose, editor of Aero magazine, and James Lindsay, a mathematician and cultural critic, have written Cynical Theories to explain how Critical Theory has become a driving force of the contemporary culture wars, and to propose a “philosophically liberal way to counter its manifestations in scholarship, activism, and everyday life.” Their book traces the evolution of postmodern and post-structuralist theory over the last 50 years, showing how these theories have moved beyond the academy and into popular culture, particularly the modern Social Justice Movement. Cynical Theories is a story about how the “despair and nihilism” of postmodernism found confidence, which then developed into the sort of radical conviction “normally associated with religious adherence.”
The story, as Pluckrose and Lindsay tell it, begins with the ‘postmodern turn’ of the late 1960’s. Postmodern and post-structuralist academics such as Jean Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, began to deconstruct what the authors call the “old religions” of human thought, which included traditional religious faiths like Christianity, secular ideologies like Marxism, and “cohesive modern systems, such as scientific approaches to knowledge, philosophical liberalism, and the concept of progress.” Early postmodern theory achieved this by questioning the capacity of language to produce meaning, by rejecting the legitimacy of metanarratives, and emphasising the endless deferral of truth or objectivity, since ‘truth’ is merely the socially constructed effect of language games. Such ideas were effective at dismantling those ‘old’ modes of thought, but not particularly useful for reconstructive social change.
Book Review: Jerks at Work
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- Written by: Tim Foster
Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and what to do about them
JESS WEST
WHEATON: CROSSWAY, 2020
This recently published book offers excellent advice to church leaders. It’s great to see a non Christian writer who recognises the impact of sin, both on the way we lead and on the behaviours of others. You can substitute ‘parishioner’ here for ‘co-worker’ and find good advice on how to deal with challenging people who sap our time and emotional energy. As a social psychologist West categorises different kinds of toxic co-workers (the kiss up/kick downer, the free rider and the gaslighter, to name a few) and describes how best to engage with each of them.
Tim Foster is the Vice Principal of Ridley College and the Director of the Ridley Centre for Leadership.