Resources List

"An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge."
Proverbs 18:15

Most of the book summaries listed below will help you grow in understanding yourself & others. They will give you knowledge and skills to lead well.

However, even more foundational is understanding God and your heart. As leaders, we are the first followers. Our top priority is to follow hard after the heart of God so that others can follow our example. We don't want people to follow us, we want them to follow God.

So how do we lead? We lead by following God. We lead as the first followers.

The "Top Theology & Christian Life Books" is a list of some of the most impactful books in my life that have helped shape my understanding of God. I haven't had the opportunity to write summaries for these books yet, but recommend them highly to you.

These books will help you balance your leadership/ministry reading with theological books. The books on this theology & Christian life list will help you know God better and will give you deep roots to help you withstand the storms of life and leadership.

Top Theology & Christian Life Books

What leadership book would be most helpful to me?

SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING: Discover the area of learning that is most beneficial RIGHT NOW.

We learn best when we self-identify a current problem or need and pursue the knowledge, skill or inner change to overcome that need.
After finishing a book, revisit these questions to evaluate if you want to learn more on the same topic or select a different topic.
Recording your answers is helpful for future reference. There is a PDF version below.

1. My ideal self - What kind of a leader do I aspire to be?

2. My real self - Who am I? What are my strengths and gaps?
Further questions to help identify strengths/gaps:

What areas of leadership do I enjoy or find energizing? (Strengths)
What areas of leadership would others say I am gifted at? (Strengths)
What area of leadership has the most room for improvement? (Gaps)
What area of leadership drains me? (Gaps)
What are my current needs/challenges in leadership? (Gaps)

3. My learning agenda - How can I build on my strengths while reducing my gaps?
What areas of leadership do I most want to improve? (Top 2-3)

4. What area of leadership do I want to focus on first?

Leading from a Healthy Soul/Spiritual Leadership
Leading with Emotional Intelligence
Leading through Coaching
Leading through Problems
Leading through Change
Leading with Vision
Leading Difficult People
Leading with Personal Productivity and Efficiency
Leading with Good Listening/Interpersonal Skills
Leading in Good Decision Making
Leading with Delegation

5. Answer these questions for the leadership area you selected. This will help clarify your goals and evaluate progress.

What knowledge do I need to learn?

What skills do I need to learn & practice?

How do I need to grow or change? (attitudes, behavior, character)

6. Choose a book.

Below is a list of books for each leadership area. Books will often cover more than one area, but they are grouped in the areas that I found most helpful.
Find the leadership area you want to focus on and select the book that is most applicable to you right now.
Many of these books are not Christian books, but read them through the lens of the Bible. They often teach us practical ways to fulfill the command to “love one another” and to lead with a "skillful hand".

7. Make learning stick.

Don’t let books run through your mind like water through a pipe. Here is how you can make learning stick:
After finishing a book write your own short summary (1/2 - 1 page). This crystalizes the main points in your mind. Occasionally reviewing it will refresh your memory in the future.
Write a few action steps: "How am I going to apply what I have learned?" (Change of attitude, thoughts, behavior or actions)

PRINTABLE QUESTIONS FOR SELF DIRECTED LEARNING

Leading from a Healthy Soul/Spiritual Leadership

Leading on Empty

By Wayne Cordeiro

Ministry is draining. Thankfully, God promises to renew us and give us strength to minister. But, as the author Wayne Cordeiro reminds us: “We don’t forget that we are Christians. We forget that we are human, and that one oversight alone can debilitate the potential of our future.” We tend to push ourselves too hard for too long, not realizing that little by little our spiritual and physical tank is running dry.

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Top Ten Leadership Commandments

by Hans Finzel

The Top Ten Leadership Commandments is an excellent book for self reflection in leadership. It isn’t a difficult book, but it challenges you to consider your heart and the direction you lead. I would highly recommend it to anyone in any form of leadership. Whether organizationally, church or ministry...there are many applications for life.

This summary has the key ideas, a few important quotes that I return to regularly and some of my own personal applications.

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The Heart of Leadership

By Mark Miller

Skills are important, but “if you don’t demonstrate leadership character, your skills and your results will be discounted, if not dismissed.” If these qualities covered in this book don’t become part of who you are, your leadership will never really change. Our leadership reflects who we are inside. You can fake it for a while, but eventually it will come out. “If you do all those activities and your heart doesn’t change, you won’t be the kind of leader you want to be. Leadership is not about what you do nearly as much as it’s about who you are becoming—the heart of leadership is a matter of the heart.”

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Other Recommended Books:

Dangerous Calling
Replenish
Spiritual Leadership
Leading with Love

Leading with Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence 2.0

By Travis Bradberry

“Emotional intelligence is your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships.”

IQ vs. EQ
Contrary to popular believe, IQ is not the best predictor of how people perform in work or leadership. Rather, Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is “the single biggest predictor of performance in the workplace and the strongest driver of leadership and personal excellence.”

Unlike IQ, which is essentially fixed from birth, EQ is not fixed. We can learn and grow in our Emotional Intelligence as we understand ourselves and others better.

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Primal Leadership

By Goleman, Daniel; Boyatzis, Richard; McKee, Annie

We can all think of good leaders and bad leaders. There are leaders we would love to follow and those we would not love to follow. What characteristics set the good leaders apart?

"Primal Leadership" looks at the role that emotions play in leadership. Good leaders take people’s emotions into account because people’s first response to a change or a rollout is with emotions, not intellect. If it feels bad, people won’t truly engage intellectually to give it a fair chance. Good leaders take this into account and help those they lead work through both the emotional and intellectual process of change.

Great leaders “ignite our passion and inspire the best in us. When we try to explain why they are so effective, we speak of strategy, vision, or powerful ideas. But the reality is much more primal: Great leadership works through the emotions.”

Just because something is the right decision doesn’t mean you can ignore people's emotions. You can do the right thing in the wrong way. The wrong way is ignoring or being ignorant of the emotional impact of your decision. This book helps leaders to consider the emotions of others as they lead.

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How to Win Friends and Influence People

By Dale Carnegie

“How to Win Friends and Influence People” has been one of my most influential books. It has completely changed my life by helping me to better understand myself and others.

How?
I read it through this lens: How can I better understand myself and others so I can “love my neighbor as myself”? As I understand myself and others better, I can then be better prepared to give others what they most desire.

This book is worth your time. “Most people go through college and learn to read Virgil and master the mysteries of calculus without ever discovering how their own minds function.”

You don’t know what you don’t know. This book helped me discover many things I didn’t know.

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Leading through Coaching

The COACH Model

By Keith Webb

“The COACH Model” defines coaching as “listening to others, asking questions to deepen thinking, allowing others to find their own solutions, and doing it all in a way that makes people feel empowered and responsible enough to take action.”

As missionaries, our goal is empowering local believers to do the work of ministry...coaching gives this opportunity.

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The IDEA Coaching Pathway

By Terry B. Walling

One of the key differences between “The IDEA Pathway” and other coaching models is the blend between Coaching and Mentoring. “Coaching pulls things out. Mentoring puts things in.” When coaching others, the discussion often comes to a point when you realize that you may have some insights or observations that would be helpful for this person to hear. “The IDEA model still affirms conventional coaching wisdom, which holds that most answers are already in the coachee and it’s the coach’s job to pull them out. But the IDEA model creates space for coaches to sensitively share what they sense God doing and to offer what has been entrusted to them when the time is right.” Many of the skills learned in "The COACH Model" are used in this model but with the added component of mentoring.

As Christians, we want to help those we coach to overcome problems. But each person’s greater need is to be sensitive to the work that God is wanting to do inside of us. Therefore, the goal is to coach the person, not the problem.

The IDEA Pathway gives an excellent way to help others grow in their walk with Christ and to develop as a leader.

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Leading through Problems

Canoeing the Mountains

By Tod Bolsinger

Lewis & Clark’s plan was to find a water route to the Pacific. But as Lewis stood looking at “the most terrible mountains I ever beheld”, everything changed. “He was planning on exploring the new world by boat. He was a river explorer. They planned on rowing, and they thought the hardest part was behind them...They would have to change plans, give up expectations, even reframe their entire mission. What lay before them was nothing like what was behind them.”

When we face mountains instead of rivers, we need to be willing to adapt and forge ahead. It is a true saying that “what got us here wouldn’t take us there.”

There were no experts, no maps, no “best practices” and no sure guides who could lead them safely and successfully. The true adventure—the real discovery—was just beginning.

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The Advantage

By Patrick Lencioni

What makes a Successful organization? Organizational Health. Without health, you can have great intelligence but go nowhere. “People in a healthy organization, beginning with the leaders, learn from one another, identify critical issues, and recover quickly from mistakes. Without politics and confusion getting in their way, they cycle through problems and rally around solutions much faster than their dysfunctional and political rivals do. Moreover, they create environments in which employees do the same.”

This book helps you identify and work on four disciplines that lead towards organizational & team health.

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Sticky Teams

By Larry Osborne

Leading teams is hard. Each person comes with their own ideas and priorities. What can help a team move together in unison? What are some pitfalls to avoid? The author wrote this book because of his conviction that “the health and long-term effectiveness of any ministry begins with the health and unity of its primary leadership teams”. The way he aims to do this is by shoring “up the foundation of a healthy team, because even the clearest vision, greatest innovations, and most stellar programs won’t make much of an eternal (or even short-term) difference if our ministry and leadership teams are mired in the deep weeds of disunity and conflicting agendas”.

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Other Recommended Books:

5 Dysfunctions of a Team
Extreme Ownership

Leading through Change

Start With Why

By Simon Sinek

Do you want to lead well in your ministry, team, church or organization? This book challenges you to answer the question that matters most to lead towards the things that matter most.

“There are leaders and there are those who lead. Leaders hold a position of power or influence. Those who lead inspire us. Whether individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead not because we have to, but because we want to. We follow those who lead not for them, but for ourselves. This is a book for those who want to inspire others.”

“Great leaders…are able to inspire people to act. Those who are able to inspire give people a sense of purpose or belonging that has little to do with any external incentive or benefit to be gained.” (pg. 6)

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Primal Leadership

By Goleman, Daniel; Boyatzis, Richard; McKee, Annie

Canoeing the Mountains

By Tod Bolsinger

Switch

By Chip & Dan Heath

Change requires that we act differently. But people act as they do because one or more of the following is true: 1. they think it is right, 2. they don’t want to change or 3. change is too difficult. In order to help people change we must determine which area to address.

Helping others change is more than simply telling them what to do. There are ways to help others overcome the obstacles to change. Understanding the key areas involved in all change will help us make change in our personal lives, help others make change, and help teams, organizations and churches to change.

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Leading Change

By John P Kotter

Leading change is hard. People don’t want to change unless staying the same is harder or less desirable than change. So as leaders, our role is to help change become desirable, and to help others see that staying the same is going to be harder in the long run.

Many great ideas never take flight because they are launched in stormy weather. If change is pushed too hard, organizational or team storms can brew very instantly. This book helps leaders learn how to test the weather and prepare to launch ideas and change that will take flight, not crash at the end of the runway.

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The COACH Model

By Keith Webb

The IDEA Coaching Pathway

By Terry B. Walling

How to Win Friends and Influence People

By Dale Carnegie

The Oz Principal

By Roger Connors, Tom Smith & Craig Hickman

Many times individuals and organizations fail to change and grow because they are “trapped in the victim cycle. This kind of thinking is “Below the Line”, it will never improve itself because it blames all the failures on something outside itself. This attitude does not see the need for itself to change.” The only way to overcome this is by truly beginning to “take accountability for our actions and being willing to confess that we may not be doing everything we could be if we truly want something to succeed.” We should always be willing to have the humility to ask ourselves and those we work with ““What else can you do” to overcome this obstacle and achieve the desired result.”

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Other Recommended Books:

The Leadership Challenge

Leading with Vision

Primal Leadership

by Goleman, Daniel; Boyatzis, Richard; McKee, Annie

Courageous Leadership

By Bill Hybels

Bill Hybels believes that “the local church is the hope of the world” (p. 15). Because of this, his great desire is to see churches flourish and grow. Yet many churches never do, or even have that on their radar screen. He has found that “what flourishing churches have in common is that they are led by people who possess and deploy the spiritual gift of leadership” (p. 25). This book unpacks some of the key leadership components to enable church leaders to grow in their ability to lead.

One of the most helpful sections for me in this book was: “Discovering And Developing Your Own leadership Style”. In many leadership books I would come away trying to be the kind of leader the author was. This section challenged me to examine the way God had wired me to become the kind of leader he made me to be. The result was a great sense of freedom in leading as I was gifted to lead, not trying to lead as someone else was gifted to lead.

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Leading from the Sandbox

By T. J. Addington

Leading from the Sandbox helps you develop high-impact teams focused on results, not activity. To do this leaders must have maximum clarity on the 4 sides of the sandbox:

1. Mission (Our goal)
2. Guiding principals
3. Central ministry focus (What we must do each day)
4. Preferred culture

This book has helped me identify leadership areas where I need to improve. While this is not a focus of this book, as Christian leaders it is vital to remember that character trumps everything. Who we are is more important than what we do. If our character slips, so does our ability to lead.

Character is like the rails on a train track. All of the train's ability, speed and movement is meaningless if you derail.

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Other Recommended Books:

The Leadership Challenge

Leading Difficult People

Crucial Accountability

-By Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, David Maxfield

No one likes to confront. That’s why problems go unresolved, growing like an unseen cancer. We all want to obey Matthew 18, yet many times we delay confronting because it isn’t a sin issue or because of fear and uncertainty about how to confront.

This book gives practical steps to:

-Know when to hold people accountable
-Know how to hold people accountable
-Know how to make it easier to hold people accountable (by setting clear expectations)

If you lead in any way, this book can strengthen your ministry & relationships.

READ MORE

The Advantage

By Patrick Lencioni

Leading with Personal Productivity and Efficiency

Essentialism

By Greg McKeown

We can learn to "make one-time decisions that make a thousand future decisions so we don’t exhaust ourselves asking the same questions again and again. The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless."

Our life can either be going in 1,000 directions or in a few, but we can’t do both. For most people, they would like to accomplish more meaningful things, but they don't feel they have the time or energy. It doesn’t take more energy or time to go far in one direction, it takes clarity of focus and removing the nonessentials. This book helps you do both.

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First Things First

By Stephen Covey

This book was very helpful to me in learning to prioritize. It teaches you to make the distinction between what’s “pressing” and what’s actually important, and looks at techniques for quickly and regularly identifying those which are important. We all strive to do the things that are important to us, but we’re often distracted by things that are “pressing” – things that have to be done right now that aren’t necessarily a part of the central values of our life.

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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

By Stephen Covey

“The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” is a very helpful tool to identify the key habits we must develop in our lives. Busy does not equal effective. This book has helped thousands of people to focus their energy and time in the areas that will help them leave the impact on others and the world that they desire.

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The Power of Habit

By Charles Duhigg

Our brains are fascinating. “Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.” Much like water cuts into a mountain to form a ditch. So our habits make a path in our brain. When it rains on the mountain the water takes the easiest path and our brains do the same things with habits.

To be able to create new habits, we must identify the old ones and create new patterns. Understanding the “The Habit Loop” can help us know where to start in rewiring our habits.

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Leading with Good Listening/Interpersonal Skills

How to Win Friends and Influence People

By Dale Carnegie

How to Talk to Anyone

By Leil Lowndes

Some of us are not born with an innate ability to navigate social settings with the ease of a social butterfly. Thankfully, this book and others like them can serve as a guidebook on how to improve in this area and to make it more enjoyable. As with all books I read on understanding people, I read it with this lens: How does this help me understand myself and others better so that I can fulfill Jesus’ command to love others as myself?

This book gives some very practical tips to do just that. You probably won’t use them all, but there are many helpful hints.

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See Me as a Person

by Michael Trout

Jesus commands us to love our neighbor as ourself. One of the greatest ways that we can show love to others is by actively listening. This shows care & concern. As people feel heard it also opens opportunities for us to share truth with them, whether by sharing truth for God’s Word or some other helpful insights to fix a problem they face. As someone has wisely said: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

While this book is written for physicians, it gives some practical ways to be a better listener that can be applied in leadership, family or evangelism.

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Love is the Killer App

By Tim Sanders

When I began my Masters degree in Organizational Leadership, I was grateful that this was the first book my professor had me read. It enabled me to be more effective in helping others. I love to help others by sharing solutions to problems they face. However, when done in the wrong way it is easy to unintentionally come across as a know-it-all. When this happens, it doesn’t actually help the other person because they aren’t listening to you. This book challenged me to a new way of gaining and sharing knowledge with others. This book shares a few very helpful tips on how to point people to the source of knowledge so they can discover it for themselves, this way you don't come across as a know-it-all. If you love to help others, this book is a great resource.

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The COACH Model

By Keith Webb

Primal Leadership

by Goleman, Daniel; Boyatzis, Richard; McKee, Annie

Power Questions

By Andrew Sobel & Jerold Panas

“People will forget what you said to them. They will even forget what you did to them. They will never forget how you made them feel.”

If you are like me, sometimes you struggle to come up with questions that people will respond to with more than a simple “yes” or “no” answer. I want to ask questions that people love to answer, and that can be insightful to discovering new insights from others lives, both for me and for them. These questions are an excellent guide of where to start.

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Leading in Good Decision Making

Blink

By Malcolm Gladwell

Do you ever have a “gut feeling” about something? Maybe a decision that just “feels” wrong, but you aren’t able to articulate the reasons why? We all have, and this book explains why.

Sometimes, we need to analyze every angle and come up with a clear and well articulated reason for our decision. Other times, we may not know the reason why a decision “feels” wrong and we need give ourself the permission to make those decisions without being paralyzed by our fear of not being able to explain ourself. This book explains how our brain functions so that you can make those decisions with more certainty.

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Essentialism

By Greg McKeown

Decisive

By Chip Heath & Dan Heath

In life we are constantly facing decisions. In leadership you will face even more decisions and many will be larger in scale. If you do not have a process to make decisions, the sheer volume of decisions will cause decision fatigue, poor decisions or indecision. This book identifies the 4 “villains” of decision making so that we can be aware of the key areas we typically make mistakes. It then gives a simple process of decision making that addresses each of the “villains”.

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Other Recommended Books:

Principles: Life and Work

Leading with Delegation

Strength-based Delegation

By various authors

When many people hear the word “delegation” they may think of dumping work on someone else. While it is true that some people treat delegation this way, it is not an effective way to view delegation.

Delegation that people love is strength-based delegation. Delegating to people’s strengths is empowering and energizing to others, develops others, gets great work done, and allows you as a leader to focus on your personal areas of strength which keeps you energized. This is not a book, but is a short collection of helpful resources to help you empower others through delegation.

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StrengthsFinder 2.0

By Tom Rath

StrengthsFinder 2.0 is designed to help you identify your key strengths. However, it can also be used by leaders to look for the strengths in those we lead and empower them to use them. This is important because “people who do have the opportunity to focus on their strengths every day are six times as likely to be engaged in their jobs and more than three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life in general.”

I personally devote equal time to developing strengths and overcoming weaknesses. By identifying your strengths, you will be more aware of opportunities to use those strengths so that you can lean into your gifting.

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Other Helpful Resources

Discover God: Key Discoveries from the Bible

Our Western Europe missionaries have been asking for an evangelistic material to:

Cover the basics of the gospel in 4 sessions or less. This helps people who are interested in learning more about the Bible but are unwilling to commit to a 6-10 week study. People in Europe rarely commit to a 6-10 week study.)
Be digital. This helps the material to be easily shared on phones, tablets, computers or in print. This is especially important to reach people who move, are located around the globe, or in lockdown.
Be free. This helps multiplication by removing the hindrance of finances.
Equip people to study the Bible. This helps people to not always be dependent on new material to grow in their understanding of the Bible.
Provide some guidance beyond questions. This helps ensure that God’s truth is properly understood.
Be written in very simple English. This helps those who speak English as a second language.
Be easily translated into different languages. This helps missionaries and believers worldwide to quickly use the material.

This material is an attempt to meet these needs.
I hope it is a blessing as you seek to make disciples that make disciples.

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The Story of Hope

The Bible is a big book with many stories. Many people struggle to understand how they all fit together. Have you found this to be true?

This is a brief overview that puts up the basic structure of the Bible. It doesn't get into details, but it will help you understand the big story.

Even though the Bible has many stories - they all form one BIG STORY - God's story of hope for all peoples.
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7 Practices of Effective Ministry

By Andy Stanley, Reggie Joiner & Lane Jones

This idea has challenged me to think long and hard before adding a new ministry focus. “You have to do less if you want to grow more”. To be more effective I need a “Stop Doing” list rather than a “Start Doing” list. Everything that you start you must also maintain. This takes time and energy away from the other things I am doing.

But what activities are essential to focus on? This book will help you evaluate where you should spend your limited energy. It will help you know where to focus because focus yields great results. “Focus is why a river has more force than a swamp”.

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Communicating for a Change

By Andy Stanley & Lane Jones

Why do we communicate? What is our goal? So many times when we have the opportunity to communicate we are just transferring knowledge. But for people to change they need more than just knowledge, they need to know the practical application of that knowledge. For the message to stick, it must be clear and not cluttered in the midst of a hailstorm of information. This book gives some very simple steps for evaluating how to communicate in a way that helps people change and grow in their walk with God. The goal in communication is not just changed knowledge, it is changed lives.

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Cross-Cultural Servanthood

By Duane Elmer

We have all been there in missions. We encounter a cultural difference that just DOES NOT make sense to us. It is tempting to think our way of doing it is better and to be frustrated at how another culture does things. But each culture is like a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece of their culture fits in their jigsaw puzzle, not ours. Even if we don’t understand why a piece is part of their culture, we can remember it is.

Our goal as Christians is to display Christ to the people we minster to. We are called to serve others. But how can we best do this cross culturally? There are often obstacles that we unknowingly carry with us that hinder us from effectively serving and loving others. If our life is not communicating love in a way that others understand, then our message of Christ is clouded because our lives are a daily testimony of Christ.

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Resources

What leadership book would be most helpful to me?

Leading from a Healthy Soul/Spiritual Leadership

Leading with Emotional Intelligence

Leading through Coaching

Leading through Problems

Leading through Change

Leading with Vision

Leading Difficult People

Leading with Personal Productivity and Efficiency

Leading with Good Listening/Interpersonal Skills

Leading in Good Decision Making

Leading with Delegation

Other Helpful Resources

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