Shortly after Imelda Marcos was found to own 3,000 pairs of shoes, Bill Hybels began a sermon on patience this way: “Bill Hybels speaking on patience is like Imelda Marcos speaking on frugality.”
But it might equally be said that “Bill Hybels writing on leadership is like Tiger Woods writing on golf.” In his latest book, Courageous Leadership (Zondervan, 2002), Hybels has written a manifesto on leadership, probably his most important book to date. If you believe a pastor should primarily be a shepherd or theologian, be warned: Courageous Leadership is the clearest, most forceful case yet for pastor as leader.
The classic, wry definition of a leader is “someone who has followers,” and Hybels has plenty, both at the sprawling Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, and in the 7,200 churches of the Willow Creek Association. Now, after surviving 30 years of church leadership, virtually all at Willow, Hybels tells us his approach. (Not to make you feel old, but the youthful architect of a “new” way of doing church has turned 50.)
In 12 chapters of take-no-prisoners passion, Hybels discusses the essentials of leadership: turning vision into action, building teams, finding resources, developing leaders, enduring. But unlike, say, Jim Collins’s Good to Great, this is not a business book; it’s a church book, by a church leader for church leaders. Hybels proclaims up front, “The local church is the hope of the world, and its future rests primarily in the hands of its leaders.”
In a key early chapter on vision (an overworked topic in leadership books), Hybels offers a useful definition: “Vision is a picture of the future that produces passion.” Then he describes in clear terms how to see, feel, own, embody, and communicate that picture.
In chapter 5, “The Resource Challenge,” Hybels confesses, “I was to learn the hard way that unless I was willing to become the CRR (chief resource raiser) our new church would be short-lived. It would starve to death from lack of funding.” He then offers war stories on finances that make this chapter one of the most valuable.
To mention one more high point, in the final chapter Hybels admits, “I came very close to bailing out of church work many times because I knew, deep in my heart, that I could not continue to live the way I was living over the long haul.” The chapter describes the difficult changes he’s made to ensure longevity.
In Courageous Leadership the principles are not theoretical; they are written by a working leader, so they readily transfer. The illustrations, though, come almost exclusively from Willow, so we see Christian leadership primarily in a large, highly structured, staff-led organization. We get little picture of it in the typical church—small or mid-sized, loosely structured, volunteer-led.
Should you buy the book?
If you regularly attend Willow’s Leadership Summit conference or avidly read Leadership, you’ll recognize a few chapters, but buy the book anyway; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
If you went slinking out of a Barna seminar feeling, “I don’t have much of a leadership gift, so maybe I should resign,” you might like the book more than you think. Although it insists that pastors should lead, Hybels doesn’t elevate leadership beyond all reason. He clarifies, “It’s not that I believe the gift of leadership is more important than other gifts. It’s simply that people with the gift of leadership are uniquely equipped to come up with strategies and structures that provide opportunities for other people to use their gifts most effectively.”
Courageous Leadership inspired me—no, impelled me—to take more seriously my gift of leadership and to risk more in expressing it.
Kevin A. Miller is editor-at-large of Leadership.
Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
