The 5 Best Books I Read in 2021
Every year I want to read. Some years I do a great job of it, and others years it falls flat. 2021 was shaping up to be one of those flat years, but I picked up a bunch of steam at the beginning of the summer. I also began learning about how my own life gets tons of energy from reading, especially across different topics and disciplines. So here is my favorite list of 2021, with a deep honorable mention section that oddly enough is all the same type of book.
The biggest thing that I really kept up with was trying to find writings to understand how the normal church is functioning during the pandemic and in (if we can really call it this) the post-pandemic. Some of these writings are recent, and others of them end up actually being super old. I also deep into historical topics that affect the Bible. This was a really fun thread to run down in the last quarter of the year.
Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash
So here is my favorite list of 2021
Leadership, God’s Agency, and Disruptions: Confronting Modernity’s Wage | Mark Lau Branson and Alan J. Roxburgh
I have referred to this book so much in the last year. I took a slow time to read it and I am absolutely happy about that decision. It wasn’t a hard read, but I really wanted to and had to think about each chapter. This book was written mid-pandemic and it challenges people in church leadership to realize how we have come to a point where secular leadership strategies don’t provide a way forward necessarily. I’m not one to normally dive headlong into this idea of dualism, but the authors make a really strong point. Once they got their thesis fleshed out, they went through 4 movements of scripture to talk about how leadership leads during major seasons of disruption. While I can’t put out a list of tangible growth points, I can point to TONS of small changes and adaptations this made me consider and begin implementing.
No Silver Bullets | Daniel Im
At some point in time this summer I saw a recommendation for this book. I grabbed it and read it on vacation. It was fantastic in helping me begin fleshing out a changing idea I had about goals for ministry and what it means to build a healthy and sustainable idea of church. This points above to the larger investigation I have had about flux in the life of the average church. Im really influenced my understanding of inputs and outputs and helped me work through a deeper belief in the power of recurring systems both in personal management as well as ministry design and systems.
Jerusalem: The Biography | Simon Sebag Montefiore
Earlier this year I was in a teaching series around the letter of James in the New Testament. I kept thinking about James’ context. I also really fell in love with visiting Jerusalem a couple of years back. I grabbed this book to just get an idea of James’ situation and it ended up throwing me into a deep rabbit hole of understanding the historical context between 500BC to 80AD. This book is a great read not just about the history of Jerusalem, but the various ways the Jewish people have governed themselves and gives a bunch of great insight into understanding so much of the larger conversation of the Bible. I really like how it explained the complexities of the role of the High Priest and how various powers used the role as a governing position for the Jewish people.
The Master’s Indwelling | Andrew Murray
During my personal worship time, I like to always be reading some sort of devotional writing. More often than not I reach back for something from previous generations. Andrew Murray is a giant in the world of prayer. The Master’s Indwelling is a fantastic small book about the presence of God and I found a great level of intersection with a larger theological project I am working on personally as well as a great point to understand my own spiritual growth and spiritual health. I read it earlier this year and have ended up going back to it a couple of times to go through a specific chapter.
The Lost Art of Disciple Making | Leroy Eims
On a Q&A Instagram story, I saw Jon Tyson recommend this book as the best thing to read about discipleship. So I pretty quickly picked it up. It’s an older book, so the language is a little funky (mainly in how he seems to only write with men in mind), but I found it to be really helpful. One of the reasons I think I liked it was remembering how different people who’ve been influential in my life have all come out of the Navigators ministry. The author does a great job of being super practical and pointing to other resources that aren’t that hard to find. It has made me realize the power of one-to-one relationships with others in the Christian life.
Honorable Mention
Ok. So these are all biographies. I’ve always been attracted to them and after this year, I am even more. I think it is important for anyone in leadership to be reading biographies. For many different reasons, but I think us beginning to have healthy and accurate understandings of important (or just interesting) people matters. We all have failings. We all have blind spots. We all have strengths. And in terms of biographies of spiritual figures, it helps to understand their growths and struggles. They normalize all of the emotions we are going through.
Crazy Horse and Custer | Stephen Ambrose
Stephen Ambrose is famous for the “Band of Brothers” and this is the first book of his I read. It compares and contrasts General Custer and Crazy Horse. They were almost the same age and the back and forth he goes through is fascinating…all of it leading up to the battle of the Little Bighorn. It was great seeing the different things that drove them to make bad decisions and the way they were both affected by some of the same weaknesses.
Boone: A Biography | Robert Morgan
It was after a couple of outdoor podcasts I wanted to pick up this biography. I was also on vacation and only brought heavy theological stuff…and I needed something light to read. I spent the evenings reading through this book of such an enigmatic figure in American history. Back again to understanding struggles and success. Boone had plenty of both.
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