Leadership Network

Leadership Network Advance recently spoke with Earl Creps, author of the newly released Off-Road Disciplines: Spiritual Adventures of Missional Leaders.

Why did you write this book?
I wrote out of concern over the divorce of leadership from spirituality. On too many days, I just didn't see what Christian leaders were offering that talented atheists couldn't do better. There had to be something more, some way in which leadership is the fruit of spirituality, rather than spiritual issues being used as the "raw material" or subject of our leading.

What was the genesis of the ideas?
The ideas came out of my own sins and shortcomings, so the supply of raw material was ample. Life experiences, positive and negative, began to coalesce around a different way of looking at my relationship with God. What if God wants to meet me everywhere, rather than exclusively in a 30-minute window way too early in the morning? What if God is vastly more available than I believe and is waiting for me to sync my life to his presence in every context, especially leading? This way of thinking led me to the notion that a set of "spiritual disciplines" were available to leaders "off-road."

What did you learn about these off-road disciplines?
My sense of spiritually-forming experiences

Click here to order this new book from Earl Creps.

awaiting leaders outside the usual list of practices produced a list of twelve spiritual disciplines for leaders: six personal and six organizational. Some of these feel quite spiritual--death to self--and others feel quite practical--reverse mentoring--but all of them bring the leader to the same place. . . the cross.

If readers could begin applying one discipline from your book immediately, what do you hope it would be?
One practical thing would be to find one or more reverse mentors--someone, say, 18-24 years old--to teach you about the "real world" because the world as you think it is has been gone for a long time. It's like looking at the sun. What we see is represented by light that left the sun about 8 minutes ago, so we never see it in "real time." Our view of the world is the same, filtered by cultural distance rather than celestial distance. So I need someone to say, "Hey, Earl! Your thinking is so . . .