I Am A Follower

This post has been way too long in coming. I read the new book by Leonard Sweet called I am a Follower the week it came out, but I have had a lot going on and I am just now getting up a review. Sorry Len!

My above the fold statement about this book is: if you are a church leader, seminary student, or wanna be church leader, get this book and mark it up.

I have seen too many pastors adopt a corporate CEO mindset. They have to in some cases. Megachurch pastors have a staff the size of a small or medium-sized church and are running the equivalent of a corporation. Others just adopt the mindset because the megachurch pastors have done this. Since we define success by size, and we all want to be successful, we adopt their mindset. It only makes sense, right? And yes, my tongue is firmly planted in my cheek.

Sadly, this model of church leadership elevates the church’s CEO to rock star status. Rock stars have groupies. Groupies hang on every word and follow all instructions given and buy everything the rock star puts out. I’ve been a groupie myself, so I know how it works. The problem with being a groupie is that you spend so much time adopting the thoughts and actions of the rock star, you forget who you are. It’s hard to be an organic and contextual pastor who is a groupie of another pastor.

The ministry of Jesus was not about him being a rock star. It was not even so much about his God-ness, though He came to be the tabernacle of the most high and the one who exegeted God. He set that aside for a season to show us what it meant to be truly human, to be the person we were designed to be in the Garden. It was to be a servant, a suffering servant for that matter. And he reminded all who followed him that not only would he suffer, but if they wanted to follow him, they would suffer. And they would need to set their interests aside and let Christ live through them.

The disciples would follow in this path. They were not the star of the show, God was. Jesus modeled and reminded them that they would be the folks in charge of the hose and rags that would remove the mud from people’s feet. Not only would they be servants of the Most High but they would also be servants of the most low…valued men and women and children who are broken and need the touch of the Master’s hand, the taste of the Master’s food, and the love from the Master’s heart. They were to take their directions from Jesus just as He took directions from God. They would not be the leader, but they would live that children’s game of Follow the Leader. And we must as well.

Christians need to be First Followers of Jesus, someone who choses to follow Jesus even when no one else does. The first follower is the one who sees Jesus working and takes the initiative to not only join him but to give others the freedom to join in because they took the risk first.

When we move and take the risk to follow Jesus and do what he tells us to do, we often find ourselves among a community of people who follow the lead of Jesus, not us. That is the importance of the term First Followers: the first follower doesn’t point to himself, but to the true leader – Jesus.

Though in the corporate world, everything may rise and fall on influence and leadership, in the church, everything rises and falls on the penetrating and transforming life of Jesus. We just need to find Him and follow Him and do what He tells us to do.

Unfortunately, pastors have adopted a leadership style of “do what I tell you to do” instead of a life that models leaving everything behind to follow Jesus. The result is that everyone is trying to get everyone else to do something, but little actually gets done. In addition, people are following the wrong leader. They are not listening to the Christ and doing what He tells them to do. They have become fans of the pastor, not followers of the Father.

Sadly this seems to be the dominant leadership style in churches today.

Unfortunately, this makes us no different than the culture around us. We enable celebrity-worship. We esteem those who make it to the top, to the largest churches and the biggest ministries. But, as we are finding in our churches and in our culture, this kind of leadership can be oppressive. It is not always indicative of someone who has left everything to follow Jesus but someone who is good at getting people to follow him or her.

Len, in only a way that he can, takes Jesus’ statement that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life and places followership in an expansion of that statement. He leads the reader always back to the primacy of being in a relationship with Jesus because He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The only way to the Father is to follow the Father’s son, to follow in his footsteps, to be a first follower and to be a servant.

My only complaint about this book is that the kindle version severely limits the number of notes you get access to. There is so much great content here, but the publisher’s limits make me wish I had purchased the book in print. But that’s really a publishing issue, not a content issue.

Thanks Len for another challenging and inspiring book!