Monday, October 07, 2013

Review: "I've Got Your Back"


I’ve Got Your Back by James C. Galvin is a “biblical” leadership book told first through narrative and then didactically. 
I have difficulty reading fiction for theology; I do much better with instruction and explanation.  Though I read the narrative part, and found it fine, I found myself understanding what he was getting at more fully in the didactic part of his book.

Galvin begins with an understanding that the entrance of sin into the world has broken our ability to lead or follow properly all the time.  Only God can lead and follow perfectly and sinlessly.
After this, Galvin’s theory is broken down into four charts –

The first (174) deals with the types of authorities/leaders and the responses of their followers:  God, legal/parental, and organizational.
The second (175) divines five levels of followership out of the parable of the Ten Servants in Luke 19.  I must admit, I am uncomfortable with his explanation of the parable – I find the accumulation of God’s Glory and the revolt of the Jews to be talk about here (cf. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom32.ii.lxxix.html).

The third (180) works from his interpretation of the parable and combines levels of followership and engagement.
The fourth (182ff) deals with being a Responsible Ethical Authentic Loving follower and/or leader, for which he quotes Scripture at length.

Perhaps the best point of this book for me was understanding that no matter what position of leadership one is in, one is also in a position of followership.  I.e., every leader (except God the Father) answers to someone above him.
However, for the interesting and instructive points of this book, I just kept coming back to seeking the Scripture being forced into his model, rather than the Scripture leading naturally to it.  That may be because the Bible is a book about theology first and does not mean to be, for example, a textbook on leadership.

[This review appears on my blog and at Amazon.com.  I received a copy of this book free from Handlebar Publishing for review.]

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