Experiencing LeaderShift: Letting Go of Leadership Heresies
Don Cousins
David C. Cook, May 2008, 268 pp., $22.99, www.davidccook.com
Experiencing LeaderShift: A Step-By-Step Strategy for Small Groups and Ministry Teams Application Guide & DVD
Don Cousins & Bruce Bugbee
David C. Cook, September 2008, 252 pp., $39.99, www.davidccook.com
Experiencing LeaderShift Together: A Step-By-Step Strategy for Small Groups and Ministry Teams Leader’s Guide & DVD
Don Cousins & Bruce Bugbee
David C. Cook, September 2008, 154 pp., $24.99, www.davidccook.com
Experiencing LeaderShift Together: A Step-By-Step Strategy for Small Groups and Ministry Teams Participant’s Guide
Don Cousins & Bruce Bugbee
David C. Cook, September 2008, 134 pp., $10.99, www.davidccook.com
The business and self-help aisles at your local bookstore are filled with leadership books. The Christian media market is no different. Don Cousins, who has been part of WillowCreek since day one and coauthored the award-winning, gifts-based curriculum Network, now brings Experiencing LeaderShift. At first glance, it is just another leadership book. High priced. Promises to change your life. Endless opportunities for additional products. However, it is obvious from the first pages that Cousins’ approach is different.
Admitting that leadership is neither the most important nor most needed gift for pastors is a courageous start for a book about leadership. Cousins even calls such belief a “heresy.” We can’t ignore this word. Many people have been burned at the stake over supposed heresies. Experiencing LeaderShift starts with a survey of biblical leadership and a right understanding of the distribution of spiritual gifts. By identifying four heresies of leadership, deconstructing them and recasting leadership as one of the ways God builds the kingdom, Cousins prepares churches, ministries, organizations and families for a new way of leadership, a leadershift.
Along with the book, one can access more of Cousins’ wisdom and real-world experience in the application guide, leader’s guide and participant’s guid, co-written with Bruce Bugbee, who also coauthored Network. These resources turn vision into action, and black-words-on-white-paper into a community endeavor that leads (there’s that word again) to a healthier organization.
