Do NOT Miss Designed to Lead: The Latest from Eric Geiger and Kevin Peck

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Spent some time this week with Designed to Lead: The Church and Leadership Development, a new book from Eric Geiger and Kevin Peck. If Geiger's name sounds familiar it's because he is the co-author (with Thom Rainer) of best-seller Simple Church, one of the most influential ministry books in the last decade. If you're unfamiliar with Peck it's because he is Lead Pastor of The Austin Stone Community Church (where Matt Carter is Pastor of Preaching and Vision). Can I begin by saying, "these two might know a thing or two about leadership development and the church?"

I love the thesis of Designed to Lead: "The center of leadership development must be the Church--meaning, that the leaders who will ultimately transform communities and change the world come from the Church (p. 4)." Far beyond developing an inspiring thesis, the authors do an excellent job of both laying the theological foundation and delivering "a framework for developing leaders in your church."

Like several of Geiger's previous books, Designed to Lead is organized in a very logical and understandable way. Making the argument that "churches that consistently produce leaders have strong conviction to develop leaders, a healthy culture for leadership development, and helpful constructs to systematically and intentionally build leaders (from the cover)," Designed to Lead illustrates convincingly demonstrates the why and the what. Most importantly (to me), the book is made complete with numerous examples of implementable constructs.

If you're looking for help in building a leadership development pipeline, the chapter on discipleship and leadership development is easily worth the price of the book. At the same time, the chapter on pipelines and pathways will definitely end up not only underlined, starred, annotated, and dog-eared...but also end up in what you practice.

Finally, I've made a single pass through Designed to Lead and can see that just like Simple Church made it into church-growth lingo, the constructs here will provide a better way of thinking about leadership development and the Church's role, your church's role, in transforming your community.

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Posted in Book Reviews