I AM A FOLLOWER : Book Review

“FOLLOW ME.”

These two words echo the heart-defining call of our Lord Jesus Christ to his disciples.

Sadly, this life-changing invitation has lost much of its original meaning. Immersed in a society that worships success, we have succumbed to a trendy fixation with leadership.

In I Am a Follower, author Leonard Sweet explains how Christians in a twenty-first-century corporate-obsessed culture have shifted away from a Jesus art of following toward a popularized form of leading.”

I read this book, because I thought this sounded like a good principle: That we need to move away from a culture of leadership (actually it says cult of leadership) and focus on followership.

Which is a good idea.

However I felt that the author spent too much time focusing on why leadership is bad, and leaders are misguided, and how we need to stop focusing on leadership.

BUT HE NEVER DOES.

I would have preferred to hear more about how to develop as a follower, and less about how bad leadership is.

I agree with the basic premise of this book,that we all want to be leaders, when we are called to be followers. But I think we can't undervalue the gift of leadership as a calling, provided it is secondary to the followership.

I also found the book a little disjointed. It starts out with a very good prologue, which tells a story about a YouTube video. Of course it assumes you have seen the video, which I have, but it might make more sense if they spent more time explaining what happened in the video, not just what it means. Then it has a section which seems to be part of the prologue, that compares following to dancing. Then it has in introduction, which is actually about 25% of the book, so I think I would have called it something else, like “Followership”. Then it gets to the three areas it wants to focus on (The way. The Truth. The life) which read like short snippets from a sermon or thoughts for the day.

I guess it just confused me more than it enlightened me, because it made it hard to follow any logical thread other than “LEADERS ARE BAD”

Not a book I enjoyed, and not one I would recommend. I am however led to believe that his other books are quite good, so I will try another one at a later stage.