I just picked up Rob Bell’s new book. The first few chapters are good. Here’s the paragraph from the back cover:

“We have to test everything. I thank God for anybody anywhere who is pointing people to the mysteries of God. But those people would all tell you to think long and hard about what they are saying and doing and creating. Test it. Probe it. Do that to this book. Don’t swallow it uncritically. Think about it. Wrestle with it. Just because I’m a Christian and I’m trying to articulate a Christian worldview doesn’t mean I’ve got it nailed. I’m contributing to the discussion. God has spoken, and the rest is commentary, right?”

Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter of “Searching For God Knows What.”

Some would say formulas are how we interact with God, that going through motions and jumping through hoops are how a person acts out his spirituality. This method of interaction, however, seems odd to me, because if I want to hang out with my friend Tuck, I don’t stomp my foot three times, turn around, and say his name over and over like a mantra, lighting candles and getting myself in a certain mood. I just call him. In this way, formulas presuppose God is more a computer or a circus monkey than an intelligent Being.

I started reading the Bible very differently. I stopped looking for the formulas and tried to understand what God was trying to say. When I did that, I realized the gospel of Jesus, I mean the essence of God’s message to mankind, wasn’t a bunch of hoops we needed to jump through to get saved, and it wasn’t a series of ideas we had to agree with either; rather, it was an invitation, an invitation to know God.

I read quite a few books on my trip. My favorite by far was “Searching For God Knows What” by Donald Miller. I read an earlier book, “Blue Like Jazz” by him as well and really thought it was well written. But this was better.

In fact, here’s the deal:

I liked the book a lot.

I think you’ll like the book a lot.

I bought a bunch of them… for you and me.

If you email me (joshuascott@ctkpolaris.org), I will send you a copy.

But (the catch) … you have to read it and post about it on your blog.

Cool?

The reason: Sometimes I read a book and think maybe I’m crazy or werid and I’m the only person who thinks like this guy. I want to know if anyone out there thinks the same way. If I had to choose one book this year to share with other people, this would be it. So read a little, tell me what you think and finish it if you like it.

Send me your address and the address to your blog and I’ll get it out to you. I’ll put together a list of everyone who is reading it and blogging about it.

We started training yesterday for our youth mission trip to Peru and Guatemala. We have 3 teams of close to 90 people leaving early Sunday morning for 2 weeks of life changing ministry.

I’m sure I will be unavailable to post during those 2 weeks, but I will come back with some pictures. One of my favorite things to do on the mission field is photography. It is one of my creative outlets during the year.

I will also be taking a serious size stack of books with me. I am sorting through some now at my house.

Any recommendations on what I should take?

What books have you read that really spoke to you recently?

I read two books while I was away in Florida. Courageous Leadership by Bill Hybels is a great book on leadership and spoke a lot to some of the things I’ve been experiencing or thinking through.

The chapter on leadership styles was the most profound. What leadership style or styles are you?

1. The Visionary Leader - Such leaders cast powerful visions and have indefatigable enthusiasm for turning those visions into reality.

2. The Directional Leader - The strength of this leader is his or her uncanny, God-given ability to choose the right path for an organization as it approaches a critical intersection.

3. The Strategic Leader - Strategic leaders have the God-given ability to take an exciting vision and break it down into a series of sequential, achievable steps.

4. The Managing Leader - A leader who has the ability to organize people, processes and resources to achieve a mission.

5. The Motivational Leader - The have the ability to keep their team mates fired up.

6. The Shepherding Leader - These leaders build a team slowly, loves team members deeply, nurtures them gently, supports them consistently, listens to them patiently and prays for them diligently.

7. The Team-Building Leader - This leader knows the vision and understands how to achieve it, but realizes it will take a team of leaders and workers to accomplish the goal. Team-builders have a supernatural insight into people that allows them to successfully find and develop the right people with the right abilities, the right character and the right chemistry with the other team members.

8. The Entrepreneurial Leader - What distinguishes these leaders from the others is that they function optimally in start-up mode. If these leaders can’t regularly give birth to something new they begin to loose energy.

9. The Reengineering Leader - These leaders are gifted to thrive on the challenge of taking a troubled situation and turning it around. Reengineering leaders love to patch up, tune up and revitalize hurting departments or organizations.

10. The Bridge-Building Leader - They have the unique ability to bring together a wide range of constituent groups. They are diplomats that possess a supernaturally inspired ability to compromise and negotiate.

My primary style is a team-builder. But I also have some directional and strategic leadership in there too.

A great article from the Detroit Free Press on one of my favorite communicators: Rob Bell.

I just recently picked up all of his nooma films. I watched them all last night. I don’t know of anyone who communicates as good as this guy.

I had the opportunity to hear Roy Moore today at World Harvest Church. Roy Moore was the Supreme Court Justice in the state of Alabama who was removed for not taking down a sculpture of the Ten Commandments.

It is part of Rod Parsley’s Center of Moral Clarity.

Also check out the Foundation for Moral Law.

I picked up another Moleskine (The legendary notebook of Van Gogh, Hemingway and Matisse) last night at Barnes and Nobel.

I now have 4 that I use regularly:

1. Task and Projects - this is a pocket size journal that I use to keep track of what I need to get done on a weekly basis.

2. Fitness - another pocket size that I use to chart my workout routine.

3. Meetings - this is a normal sized journal that I picked up last night to record meeting notes into.

4. Devotions - another normal sized that I use to record scripture, inspirational thoughts, etc.

I listed a few great blogs about Moleskines below. I think they are going to become really big. They are the best journal I have used and they’re packaged right. They even have a pocket size designed around storyboarding. It’s really cool stuff.

Check these out and then pick a few up (B&N or Amazon).

Moleskine Homepage
Fred On Something
Todd Storch
From Where I Sit

Great quote from a book I just finished, “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi. I first heard of Keith in an article last year by Fast Company on how to be a networker. I was fascinated with the article then, so I naturally bought the book as soon as I heard it had come out.

“Never Eat Alone” is really about the art of connecting. And what’s different about Keith is that he is not one of those lame, never-have-a-job-more-than-six-months and then off to something better, pass out your business card to everyone you meet, schmoozer, “networkers.” His slant is that to be a good connector you have to be able to add value to people.

“The currency of real networking is not greed, but generosity.” pg 21