Barna without the Numbers
The popular statistician explores the much-debated subject of leadership.
If you are in the 83.9 percent of pastors who have read 70.1 percent of George Barna’s other works, you will want to read 100 percent of his most recent book.
But this time, you won’t have to take a crash course in demographics.
Leaders on Leadership (Regal, $18.99, 316 pp.) is Barna without the numbers. In this book, he moves from statistician to post-game interviewer; he asks winning coaches and players to tell why and how they made the decisions that determined the outcome of the game. Barna writes only two chapters; the rest are written by popular leaders such as Gene Getz, Leighton Ford, H. B. London, Jack Hayford, Wallace Erickson, Hans Finzel, and Doug Murren.
Barna writes that the numbers he has been collecting convince him “the American church is dying due to a lack of strong leadership.” He then explains why the church is facing a leadership crisis and how this is the mother of all crises.
Perhaps the key issue that determines how you read this book is whether you buy Barna’s premise that the American church is dying. Spending years collecting data from religious leaders and organizations must be depressing. It’s a little like tracking patients in an oncologist’s office; you hear stories only of dying, none of birth.
For Barna to project the depressing nature of his work onto the American church may be presumptuous. Obviously the church in America is not what it should be; but a suggestion that it is dying seems an overstatement.
If evidences of a living church are the stories of changed lives and examples of people willing to give up affluent, tax-deductible lifestyles to minister to the inner city, then maybe Barna’s terminal diagnosis is premature. The fat lady has not sung and may not even be headed to the microphone. She may be serving on the soup line at a rescue mission where attendance trends are not charted and the participants do not care if the spoons are user-friendly.
Practitioner’s optimism
It’s no surprise that the least optimistic chapters of the book are written by Barna and the most hopeful are by the practitioners whom he identified as effective leaders. The value of the book comes from the cavalcade of leaders Barna has assembled to write on specific issues of leadership.
Perhaps the most unique chapter is by Jack Hayford, pastor of Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California. In “Character of a Leader,” Hayford hones in on the leader’s relationship with Christ: “The development of leadership character takes more than the practice of external disciplines, for it involves the heart, not just the habits.” I found this refreshing. The center of leadership is located not in skills, energy, or even conduct, but in the leader’s heart.
Perhaps Barna should have included a contributor whose focus is not on growth. Although the contributors to Leaders on Leadership differ in personality, I got the feeling they read the same books and attend the same seminars. All lead or work in large organizations. Though leadership principles never change (the applications do), I believe more wisdom is required in leading a small organization than just knowing how to scale down the applications. The manager of the local McDonald’s may need a different leadership manual than the one Ray Kroc operated by.
The preacher who reads Barna only to find statistics and sermon illustrations will be disappointed in Leaders on Leadership, but church leaders seeking to make a difference will find in this book a primer to help them change their lives and the world in which they serve.
—Gary Fenton Dawson Memorial Baptist Church Birmingham, Alabama
Why I Write a Manuscript
Two recent books on preaching help preachers with word choice.
When golfer Steve Jones won the 1996 U. S. Open, he credited Hogan, Curt Sampson’s biography of golfing legend Ben Hogan. What Jones gained seems ridiculously simple: a commitment to practice harder and focus on each shot. Still he insisted: “I don’t think I would have won the Open without reading that book.”
The right book can make all the difference.
I am sometimes skeptical, though, about the payoff of reading more new books on preaching. I wonder if the latest homiletical primers can really accelerate my improvement as a preacher. The fact is, they can. Two recent books on preaching deliver what Steve Jones found in Hogan: a fresh reminder of principles I know but forget to implement.
In Pitfalls in Preaching (Eerdmans, $12, 152 pp.), Richard Eslinger, pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church of Brandywine in Niles, Michigan, catalogues some “underlying assumptions and techniques” that undermine preaching. He cites pitfalls in rhetoric, interpretation, method, illustration, and context and delivery. The book’s layout allows preachers to enter where they like and pursue other topics later.
Southern Baptist Calvin Miller, on the other hand, provides a philosophy of preaching sprinkled with practical ideas in Spirit, Word, and Story: A Philosophy of Marketplace Preaching (Baker, $15.99, 239 pp.). Published in 1989, this re-issue comes from a former pastor who now teaches communications and homiletics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Each book prompted me to work on what Miller calls “wordsmithing.” A wordsmith sifts words or phrases and catches those that trap a listener’s mind. Instead of settling for an abstract term like fall, a preacher can select a concrete word like stumble or collapse. The issue is not cleverness but specificity.
But beware!
Richard Eslinger writes about “empty calories.” Empty calories come from modifiers—adjectives and adverbs—that attempt to dress up bland nouns and verbs. Eslinger calls this “a sort of homiletic cotton candy that audiences find surprisingly difficult to retain.”
This is how a preacher can stumble into this pit: He senses the word “noise” needs to increase in energy, so he adds the adjective “loud.” But “loud noise” still does not snap, crackle, or pop. Solution: add another modifier: “incredibly loud noise.”
Effective? Not nearly as effective as a single word like “roar” or “shriek” or “boom.” A wordsmith will choose nouns and verbs that burst with flavor. Miller advocates words like spark, stomp, slither, bang, scratch, slick, and whack.
How can you recruit words that sizzle?
Miller recommends the discipline of sermon manuscripting: “Developing our word power is best done in explicit, written preparations.” This does not mean that a preacher carries this manuscript into the pulpit. In fact, Miller advocates “speaking extempore.”
What’s the payoff? Writing and editing a manuscript forces one to wrestle with word choice.
Reading Miller and Eslinger won’t make you a preacher. But if you’re a preacher, they will help you preach sermons that roar rather than whimper.
—Steven D. Mathewson Dry Creek Bible Church Belgrade, Montana
Software for Study
Two applications play to the different needs of pastors.
It’s easy to get caught in the hype of competing Bible study products. Some claim the best search engines, while others state they have the finest tools for exegesis.
To cut through the hype, I looked at two of the top Bible study programs on the market: Logos Bible Software 2.0 from Logos Research Systems, and Parsons Technology’s QuickVerse 4.0 Deluxe Bible Reference Collection, Teacher’s Edition. Each holds its own, depending on the money you want to spend and how you’ll use the software.
Laudable Logos
The Logos System comes in two parts: the “viewer” (user interface), which is excellent, and the “books.” The viewer is essentially free, and you can buy additional books as you need. Logos Bible Software 2.0 ranges in price, from Level 1 ($119.95) to Level 4 ($599.95). The levels refer to the number of unlocked books available at that price. Additional books are accessible at extra cost by calling a toll-free number.
It didn’t take me long to feel at ease with the program. I opened more than thirty Bibles, including KLJ, NIV, ASV, RSV, NRSV, NKJV, the BHS Hebrew Bible, and Rahlfs’s Septuagint. There are commentaries, maps, concordances, dictionaries—Vine’s, Louw/Nida Lexicon, Strong’s, and more. Logos 2.0 also boasts devotional tools, including an electronic hymnal featuring audio clips of each song.
Logos 2.0 also contains Hebrew and Greek texts, showing accents and points. Three morphological databases are included.
Perhaps the strongest feature is Logos’s search engine. You can conduct a search of a single verse reference across all the included works (whether the books are currently opened or not), finding verse abbreviations, ranges, contexts, footnotes, and cross references.
STEP of faith
QuickVerse 4.0 Deluxe Bible Reference Collection, Teacher’s Edition ($379) comes from Parsons Technology. QuickVerse is a step-compatible (Standard Template for Electronic Publishing) Bible study program, meaning it can open and access electronic books made by any publisher using the step format, including works from Tyndale House, InterVarsity Press, Moody Press, Baker Books, and more.
QuickVerse 4.0 operates much more smoothly using Windows 95 than older Windows versions. Using Windows 3.11, I found the program slowed considerably during certain functions; the Windows 95 version hummed right along.
While not quite as seamless as Logos (you have to open three separate programs to move easily between reference works, maps, and Bibles), QuickVerse’s dictionaries didn’t have any trouble finding words I needed. (I had some trouble finding definitions of a few words when using Logos, depending on which Bible version I was using.) The works included with QuickVerse (at least the dictionaries) are slightly more up-to-date. It also contains Nave’s Topical Bible, NAS Exhaustive Concordance, Disciple’s Study Bible, and more.
Logos is my favorite to study and search texts in original languages. Of course, you’d expect this with a higher-priced (Level 3) program. If you don’t use the Hebrew or Greek texts in your weekly preparation, QuickVerse is a good option at a lower cost, especially considering the many books available from other publishers using the step format. Logos is by no means short on additional books, but they are the only vendor of their electronic titles.
Purchasing Bible study software pretty much comes down to this: test it, and buy what you like.
—Tim Ostermiller assistant editor Computing Today magazine
1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or contact us.
