Product Description

'We're looking for someone who can hit the ground running'. How many times have you heard this? Or maybe you've said it yourself? 'But,' as Stephen Cottrell says, 'when someone hits the ground running, there is no guarantee that they are going in the right direction'. "Hit the Ground Kneeling" takes common statements about leadership - statements that we often take for granted - and questions them in the light of Christian faith and Christian perspectives on leadership. Ideal for church leaders, this is a timely antidote to the glut of selfhelp, quick-fix management books!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #163175 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 81 pages

About the Author
Stephen Cottrell is the Bishop of Reading. As well as the bestselling Do Nothing to Change Your Life, he has also written or contributed to the following other titles for Church House Publishing: * Reflections for Daily Prayer * the Emmaus discipleship course * Travelling Well * Praying through Life.

Customer Reviews

Insightful, short, enjoyable
First, there were business books about leadership.
Then, there were Christian books about leadership, invariably from an evangelical perspective, harnessing the wisdom gleaned from the business books, and welding it to Jesus (cf. "Courageous Leadership" Bill Hybels, among myriad options). The gung-ho rhetoric remained: it's just that church growth was the name of the game, rather than profits.
Now, there is this. A Christian book on leadership, by a Christian, but not by an evangelical. The belief that there is a distinctive Christian leadership remains, but gone is a gung-ho tone.
Rather, it's laid back, relaxed (too relaxed?): it's leader as master brewer rather than go-getter or one who "makes things happen". Don't hit the ground running; hit the ground kneeling.
So is it any good?
To start with, I found it all fine, but not desperately penetrating: keeping back and staying calm, seeing the wood for the trees; including others in shaping your vision... etc.etc.
Where it took off were in chapters 7 and 8, which to me felt very different from anything I'd read before.
Chapter 7 is about "Reinventing the Wheel" and stems from an insight that the most effective Christian evangelism course in Britain was not Alpha or Emmaus or any of the other glossy options. It was a home-made one run in a fairly ordinary parish. On one level, it might have been similar to Alpha or Emmaus. In fact, objectively, it might not have been as good as them. The point was, though, that this course was home-made. It was owned by the people who ran it and that gave it a special power any imported course couldn't have. If someone had said to them before they ran the course, "Let's not re-invent the wheel" (which we tend to hear and then nod our heads), then it would never have happened. For Cottrell, 9 times out of 10, when given the option, you SHOULD re-invent the wheel.
Chapter 8 is about "Shedding the thick skin." Not out of a death wish, but out of a desire to be authentic and authentically human. Too much advice about distance and developing a thick skin is really about divorcing our humanity from our leadership. For Cottrell, yes, you've got to be careful about your role in situations and not taking everything too personally, but you've also not got to lose your sense of personal interconnectedness.
For me, this is where the book moved from nice but relatively common-sense wisdom to something decisively new and decisively Christian. Counter-cultural even.

You won't have to be a Christian to get something out of this, but still I suspect that the most fertile readership will be Christians, especially clergy, and especially incumbents. There's one cracking example about shifting the momentum of a parish away from a seeming over-riding mission to run jumble sales that rings very true.

So, enjoyable and insightful in places, if not brilliant all the way through.