I faced Leviathan last weekend and made it out alive!

Mark Sayers new book Facing Leviathan, Leadership, Influence and Creating in a Cultural Stormcould be one of the most important works of the decade. Let that sink in for a moment.

Not only does Sayers provide strong if not intense narrative scenes from history, he also clearly and efficiently defines underlying themes in our culture that have a direct effect on Christian leadership and the church.

As a pastor, Sayers delicately shares a behind the scenes crisis of faith (or crisis of church) and his remarkable journey with the Lord to reclaim Jesus’s biblical model of leadership.

“For the next fifteen or so years, I lived out the conviction that the postmodern world had changed everything. Through my leadership I would attempt to embody the organic values in a variety of missional movements and innovative plants. Yet, something was amiss. The organic values were not delivering the idealized world that they had seemingly promised.”

In Facing Leviathan, we are transported back to the morass of 18th century Paris, the advent of the Enlightenment, and the counter-revolution of the Romanticists. We are then able to carefully to trace the route that brings us to contemporary struggles such as hipster inner city vs. white suburbs, liberal vs. conservative, indie vs. pop, art-house vs. Hollywood, mall vs. boutique, fast food vs. organic, Microsoft vs. Apple, the Coast vs. the Midwest.

He elegantly groups modern and postmodern leaders into two factions. In one corner of the ring are the “mechanical” people engineering a better world through rigor and rules. In the other corner are the “organics” or artists who have abandoned social and political hierarchies to embrace a bohemian world vision. Sayers remind us that social unrest didn’t start in the 60’s. We are reaping the destructive fruit of what he calls “the chaos monster” in our present day.

If you are a leader who has a deep yearning to know where she is in space and time, Facing Leviathan is a must read. Tread carefully my friend, these are dangerous days.

Stephen

Purchase Facing Leviathan here today:
or download it (like I did) in the iTunes bookstore.