Leonard I. Sweet

Lance Ford

It's time to leave the leadership obsession behind. It's never been about leading. "Leadership" has become a runaway obsession for those who are called to equip the body of Christ for service in the Kingdom of God. The concept of "followership" is all but lost in the wake of this leadership fetish, a near hypnotic obsession. Jesus' clear call, and the pattern of New Testament leadership, are actually found in a pattern of followership. We've been told otherwise but when it comes to a movement in our churches, our families, or the workplace, everything rises or falls on followership. Sweetproposes an intentional shift from leadership cults to followership cultures. He critiques the issue of leadership obsession but focuses onreigniting a passion for the "follow me" theme found throughout the gospels and the entire New Testament. Building on a set of metaphors/images, hestirs the imagination by showing what it means to be a follower of Christ and explainsthe vital cog that followership and the first follower play in helping others enter into the Kingdom of God. I Am A Follower moves readers: from leaders that are over to followers that are among from sages and gurus to scouts and guides from Saul's armor to David's sling from having the right answers to asking the right questions from architects to gardeners

The Way, Truth, and Life of Following Jesus

I Am a Follower

Brad Brisco

There was a time when neighbors knew each other's names, when small children and the old and infirm alike had more than their families looking out for them. There was a time when our neighborhoods were our closest communities. No more. Neighborhoods have become the place where nobody knows your name. Into this neighborhood crisis the words of Jesus still ring true: Second only to the command to love God is the command to "love your neighbor as yourself." In Next Door as It Is in Heaven, Lance Ford and Brad Brisco offer first principles and best practices to make our neighborhoods into places where compassion and care are once again part of the culture, where good news is once again more than words, and where the love of God can be once again rooted and established.

Living Out God's Kingdom in Your Neighborhood

Next Door As It Is in Heaven

Alan Hirsch

Rob Wegner

Leveraging the metaphor Ori Brafman popularized in his NYT best-selling book, The Starfish and the Spider, Rob Wegner, Lance Ford, and Alan Hirsch show why the distributed structures of starfish organizations are uniquely fit to the church. They can function without a rigid central authority, and their regenerative abilities make them nimbler in reacting to external forces. Seeding starfish networks inside today's churches will prepare the church of tomorrow to be agile while still maintaining the necessary accountability to be effective. Rather than advocating the adoption of a starfish structure in place of the hierarchy of the spider, Wegner, Ford, and Hirsch emphasize the advantages of adapting the structure and order inherent in a spider organization toward a hybrid model--either a Spiderfish approach (leaning toward centralization) or a Starder approach (leaning toward decentralization). The Starfish and the Spirit is about creating a culture where church leaders view themselves as curators of a community on mission, not the source of certainty for every question and project. It is about creating a team of humble leaders "in the middle" of the church, not at the top--leaders who naturally reproduce multiple generations of leaders, from the middle out on mission. Imagine a church led by a team whose gifts and talents are completely unleashed, enabling everyone to show up and step up with all they really are. The joy and vigor coming from the collective strength, intelligence, and skill in the community of leaders not only brings greater potency but better yields for your ministry as well. What would it be like to see this kind of healthy leadership reproduced into the second, third, and fourth generation, on multiple strands?

Unleashing the Leadership Potential of Churches and Organizations

The Starfish and the Spirit

When you hear the word evangelical, do you think “good news”? That’s what the word means, and it’s what we are meant to be. Yet the surrounding culture often views us as exactly the opposite. Calling yourself an evangelical too often means you are seen through a negative stereotype; people are apprehensive when they hear that an evangelical family has moved into the neighborhood. But is this the way it has to be? What would it look like if evangelical Christians were joyfully living out the gospel in such a way that the culture had no choice but to recognize us as Good News people? Revangelical is a call to realign your heart with the things that most concerned Jesus—a bold message to get the Good News of the gospel of Jesus back into our heads, hearts, mouths, and feet. Full of stories of evangelicals who are living out the Good News and changing the world, Revangelical will inspire and equip us to relearn the heart of the gospel and to become the people God has called us to be.

Becoming the Good News People We're Meant to Be

Revangelical

People in all walks of life are discovering what it means to be involved, concerned, missional Christians. But simply having block parties or spending more time downtown is not enough to describe what it means to be a missional people. What is needed is a reformation of the way we actually live our lives as Jesus followers. We need to see a way of living faithfully to God's mission in the world, right here, right now. In this inspiring yet practical book, Alan Hirsch and Lance Ford equip believers to live missionally regardless of situation, vocation, or location, making the concept of being missional accessible to the whole body of Christ. Touching on issues of discipleship, spirituality, and church at every level of experience, Right Here, Right Now calls readers to be the people God has made them to be.

Everyday Mission for Everyday People

Right Here, Right Now

There was a time when neighbors knew each other’s names, when small children and the old and infirm alike had more than their families looking out for them. There was a time when our neighborhoods were our closest communities. No more. Neighborhoods have become the place where nobody knows your name. Into this neighborhood crisis the words of Jesus still ring true: Second only to the command to love God is the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” In Next Door as It Is in Heaven, Lance Ford and Brad Brisco offer first principles and best practices to make our neighborhoods into places where compassion and care are once again part of the culture, where good news is once again more than words, and where the love of God can be once again rooted and established.

Lance Ford

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