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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