Leadershipnext: Changing Leaders in a Changing Culture

by Eddie Gibbs (InterVarsity)

Book review by Tamara Rice

In LeadershipNext, Gibbs (Fuller Theological Seminary professor, author of ChurchNext) offers a navigator’s guidebook for the movement of the 21st century Church into uncharted territories, using a creative yet concrete approach to equipping and inspiring church leaders.

Prior to reading it, I was in the process of planting a church in the Houston area with a local team of leaders. We charted a direction for the new church journey with conviction and creativity, but our approach was soon deemed unorthodox and too risky by our contemporaries and many important stakeholders. The church we’d been commissioned to plant had not been cultivated in our cultural context before. But the principles outlined in LeadershipNext gave us permission to trust God’s voice. We were challenged to press forward.

Gibbs’s principles guided our journey: First, we dismissed our marketing objectives as a Christian institution and embraced a missional strategy as a Christian movement; second, we moved beyond church as a centralized “institution of society” and embraced it as “a movement that operates from the margins”; finally, we expanded our capacity as church leaders who, in Gibbs’s words, guide others to places they (and we) have never been.

LeadershipNext is more than a peripheral promotion of new perspectives. I have personally known it to be a salient resource, pioneering a grassroots pathway to the present future of the Church.

-Outreach magazine, "Media Cue," November/December 2005

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