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Courageous Leadership

Courageous Leadership

List Price: $34.99
Your Price: $23.09
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Fruit From 30 Years of Service
Review: "The local church is the hope of the world." claims Bill Hybels, senior pastor of perhaps the most influential U.S. evangelical church, Willow Creek Church, and author of the largely autobiographical book, Courageous Leadership. Hybels encapsulates within this statement simultaneously his conviction regarding the weight of responsibility upon the local church, in general, and the leaders of it, in particular, and the solemn calling for those leaders to reshape the world.

Hybels' anatomy of Christian leadership offers pastors and key church leaders a stirring example of leadership vision. Hybels' thirty year commitment to Willow Creek, as its founding senior pastor, along with many of his fellow church staff is a noble, challenging standard to the frequent, revolving door, ladder climbing, episodic leadership of the contemporary evangelical church. He manages to embody both a vigorous life of ministry risk-taking with an idyllic hope of ministry restfulness and resisting the urgent for the prioritized.

Another genuine strength of Hybels' work is his understanding the need for intentional training and development of leaders. Deliberately investing in the theological and spiritual formation of future leaders within churches would add a greater reservoir of leaders who both own the ministry as their own and are equipped to do the work of ministry. His offering character, competency, and compassion as three primary distinctives for leaders helps focus the attention on encouraging people into leadership roles. He challenges leaders with the need to invest relationally in those we lead. I can easily forget the need to build such a healthy esprit de corps with my ministry colleagues instead of merely forging ahead in the pragmatic needs of the work.

Yet Hybels' work is also fraught with potential dangers, particularly with his sole focus on the local church and leadership gifting as the dual, preeminent purposes of God in the world. While freely borrowing from the evangelical innovative spirit that for decades has marked American entrepreneurial Christianity, especially among para-church ministries, Hybels slips into a combined anachronistic view of the church and an a priori commitment towards leadership gifting and calling that the Apostle Paul seems to warn against at great lengths in his writings.

His claim that the local church is the hope of the world has significant theological problems. Jesus is pointed towards, biblically, as the hope of the world. Hybels dangerously toys with actually usurping Jesus' rightful role as Lord over salvation and redemption. While it is true that the local church is a vital piece of God's global working, it appears that he displaces Jesus' rightful position, on the one hand, and, on the other, misappropriates the church from a role as witness and change agent to primary catalyst. Hybels' emphasis has the effect of subsuming God's mission that historically has moved forward through a multitude of combinations (individual reformers and radicals, reforming break-offs, alliances across various lines, etc.) into the local church. The mission is indeed bigger than the church not simply because Jesus, not the church, is the Lord over it, but also because God intends to use the church, manifested in wider forms beyond the local church structure to bring glory to himself. This is not to denigrate Hybels' vision for what the church could do, but to say that the rippling impact of the church spreads far further than the confines of the structures within a church.


Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Best of Hybels on Leadership
Review: Bill Hybels is a Christian leader who has known the elation of leadership success while also having experienced the agony of near fatal leadership disasters. He writes "Courageous Leadership" with conviction, passion, and empathy that could only be gained through his own leadership journey. This book is vintage Hybels, as his words paint compelling images of what effective Christian leadership looks like. He examines such subjects as vision, raising resources, developing the leaders around you, developing your own leadership style, decision-making, self-leadership, endurance, and the "God-factors" in leadership. If you have been a student of Bill Hybels, you won't find too much new material but rather a collection of his best leadership teachings. The two chapters on vision are easily worth the price of the book. If you've never read or heard Hybels you owe it to yourself to listen to what this proven leader has to say about this subject. I highly recommend "Courageous Leadership."

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Best of Hybels on Leadership
Review: Bill Hybels is a Christian leader who has known the elation of leadership success while also having experienced the agony of near fatal leadership disasters. He writes "Courageous Leadership" with conviction, passion, and empathy that could only be gained through his own leadership journey. This book is vintage Hybels, as his words paint compelling images of what effective Christian leadership looks like. He examines such subjects as vision, raising resources, developing the leaders around you, developing your own leadership style, decision-making, self-leadership, endurance, and the "God-factors" in leadership. If you have been a student of Bill Hybels, you won't find too much new material but rather a collection of his best leadership teachings. The two chapters on vision are easily worth the price of the book. If you've never read or heard Hybels you owe it to yourself to listen to what this proven leader has to say about this subject. I highly recommend "Courageous Leadership."

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Courageous Leadership Through The Eyes of An M.DIV Student
Review: Bill Hybels offers a fantastic overview of what it takes to be an effective and efficient leader in today's church. While his anecdotes and examples are born from experience in a mega church,the main points can be applied to a church of any size. This book addresses vital topics, including the concept of self-leadership, avoiding spiritual and emotional burnout, financial management and creating a healthy ministry team. This book is essential for both pastors and seminary students.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: clear and practical advice
Review: Courageous Leadership is a book on leadership from a christian perspective. However the advice given is very practical and usually not biblical. The author, Bill Hybells, is pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., a huge huge church, which wasn't always huge. He frequently relates the point he is making back to his experiences with Willow Creek. He also brings in examples from corporate business models to illustrate points. He relies on worldly rather than scriptural evidence. This has benefits and drawbacks. For me an obvious drawback is that I'd like to see scripture. On the other hand presenting his views as he does makes his advice more action oriented. If you are in a leadership position then you can do it now.

The advice given is good and can be put into practice quickly. I particularly liked chapter 7 on styles of leadership; visionary, organizational etc. It helped me to see that I am more of a visionary leader and to see from that why certain positions felt a bit like beating my head against a wall while others were much more comfortable.

Courageous Leadership is a very practical book on leadership that gives good advice. I recommend it for christians, and not just pastors, since as Hybells points out leadership applies to peers as well as people we are "in charge of". It might be a good book for non-christians, since the advice can be followed either way, but the whole christian thing might put someone off.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: a long time
Review: Great work a must rfead from one of the strongest leaders of our time

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Realistic book on Christian leadership for Pastors
Review: Hybels earned the right to write this book by perservering for 30 years, and turning a revolutionary concept--the seeker-sensitive church--into standard practice within evangelicalism. He offers a breadth of material that will prove most useful to those pastors who have not fed on a steady diet of leadership books.

Much of the information Hybels offers can be found elsewhere, yet he packages it together in concise and cogent chapters that cover the breadth of religious leadership principles in down to earth prose. Perhaps the most useful chapter offered more than a dozen "pathways" to intimacy with God. Ironically, he suggested that relating with other Christians and being aggressive for Christian causes are two pathways that most would overlook. Not all Christians are wired to spend hours in solitary contemplation--and God can speak just as intimately to those who excel in activity or in group fellowship.

Equally important--and perhaps particularly disappointing for many readers--is that Hybels offers no magic formulas. Yes he succeeded in building a unique mega church out of a dream and a handful of people. Yet, he says money problems develop character and faith, and patience and endurance are the stuff fulfilled dreams are made of.

Bottom-line: Hybels may not knock your socks off, but he offers practical, hard-earned advise on Christian leadership that is broad, insightful, and yet very accessible. This is a book the author did not have to write--except that he clearly has a heart for pastors and for the church.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Buy This Book!
Review: I have read a lot of books on leadership and I have read a lot of Hybles writings, but this simply is the best. For a Maxwellite this is a conclusion not easily made. This book should be must reading for every pastor, ministerial student and lay leader. In fact, if your Bible College or seminary does not require you to read it, sue them for malpractice. It is that good.

Courageous Leadership is a clarion call for pastors to step up to the plate and lead, to have the courage and passion not to abdicate leadership to church boards, committees or to every Tom, Dick and Harriet of the church. Hybles cuts to the quick: leaders get things done. If you are not getting things done, if you are not moving people toward a goal you are not a leader; and as a pastor if you are not getting things done you will soon lose credibility and your followers will lose heart.

Chapter Eight, A Leader?s Sixth Sense will transform your decision-making. Often leaders have to make difficult decisions with limited information that have the potential to make or break their ministry. Too often pastors, who by definition are like cocker spaniels- they like to be liked, put off their decision making until they have all the information and the outcome seems assured. What these pastors do not realize that by doing so they have, once again, abdicated leadership. If you are a pastor, or even a businessman who is in a position of leadership, BUY THIS BOOK.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: IF you want make a difference...
Review: IF you want make a difference... then read this book!

Bill Hybels is a mentor of mentors. He has and is paying his dues. The thousands of lives who have been eternally changed because of his commitment to the Body of Christ is reason enough to give him your undivided attention. But Hybels has also written other books to recommend his expertise in building into the lives of others.

Hybels does not sugar coat anything. If you are looking for an easy job as a leader, especially as a church leader then Courageous Leadership might not be what you are looking for in a book on leadership. If on the other hand you are willing to think outside of the box, gladly give of yourself, not care who you empower to see success in a common goal then you will want this book in your personal library!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: IF you want make a difference...
Review: IF you want make a difference... then read this book!

Bill Hybels is a mentor of mentors. He has and is paying his dues. The thousands of lives who have been eternally changed because of his commitment to the Body of Christ is reason enough to give him your undivided attention. But Hybels has also written other books to recommend his expertise in building into the lives of others.

Hybels does not sugar coat anything. If you are looking for an easy job as a leader, especially as a church leader then Courageous Leadership might not be what you are looking for in a book on leadership. If on the other hand you are willing to think outside of the box, gladly give of yourself, not care who you empower to see success in a common goal then you will want this book in your personal library!

-- K. K. Dunn, Kansas City


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