Dr. Albert Mohler became Southern Seminary’s youngest president at age of 33. So when he talks about leadership, you almost have to listen to him. Being an admirer of Dr. Mohler, I knew he wrote this book and was intrigued by it, but it wasn’t until a friend said it was “still one of the best books on leadership I have read” that I decided to pick it up.
Dr. Mohler’s premise on leadership is this: “My goal is to redefine Christian leadership so that it is inseparable from passionately held beliefs, and to motivate those who are deeply committed to truth to be ready for leadership,” Thus the word that is bounced around throughout is “conviction”: you don’t have passionately held beliefs while simultaneously being deeply committed to truth unless you have convictions. In the second chapter, he talks about how there have been many good leaders throughout history. There have been 44 Presidents in our own nation’s history. But how many can you name? Washington? Jefferson? Lincoln? The trend that these three leaders have in common is they possessed convictions. Martin Luther King Jr. had convictions to free an entire race of people living in America from the bondage of outdated and unnecessary racism. Martin Luther held convictions that the Catholic Church was perpetuating wrong ideas about the Bible and thus began a “protest” against that entity. The list goes on but the truth behind all of it is that the greatest leaders in history have had convictions. And Dr. Mohler has 25 ways you can develop certain areas of your life to enhance your Christian leadership.
I won’t go through all of the points because you just need to read the book. But the entirety of the book is a mere 224 pages. 25 lessons / 224 pages is about 9 pages per topic. So these are short chapters that have packed within them a lot of excellent content. Sometimes it can be frustrating though, because it is just a little taste of a subject that you want a little or a lot more. In any event, there is a plethora of wisdom in those 9 pages. Two of my favorite chapters were that leaders are readers and leaders are writers.
There is a lot of great content in this little book. It’s an easy read that will challenge your ideas about leadership.