The Top 19 Books Christian Leaders Need To Read In 2019

The Christmas shopping season is now upon us!  In an effort to help you know what to purchase for the Christian leader in your life, the following are a number of quality resources to choose from.

Leaders are readers.  Therefore, you can never go wrong with books.  The books listed below provide a nice cross-section between systems, processes, leadership development, instruction, inspiration, prayer, church growth, and challenging personal development.  There is something here for everyone.

The following are The Top 19 Books Christian Leaders Need To Read In 2019:

1. The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb: Searching for Jesus’ Path of Power in a Church that Has Abandoned It by Kyle Strobel and Jamin Goggin.  Pastor Jamin Goggin and theology professor Kyle Strobel invite readers on a journey to uncover Jesus’ seemingly contradictory way to power: weakness.  Why do so many rock-star pastors implode under the spotlight? Why do modern-day churches become so entangled in growing their brand that they lose sight of their true purpose? Because, according to Jamin Goggin and Kyle Strobel, Christians have succumbed to the temptations of power and forgotten Jesus’ seemingly contradictory path to power—first giving it up.  This may be the most important book you read all year.
2. Didn’t See It Coming: Overcoming the Seven Greatest Challenges That No One Expects and Everyone Experiences by Carey Nieuwhof.  Carey has written a masterpiece!  As Founding Pastor of one of North America’s most influential churches, he wants to help you avoid and overcome life’s seven hardest and most crippling challenges: cynicism, compromise, disconnectedness, irrelevance, pride, burnout, and emptiness. These are challenges that few of us expect but that we all experience at some point. If you have yet to confront these obstacles, Carey provides clear tools and guidelines for anticipation and avoidance.
3. Unspoken: What Men Won’t Talk About and Why by Dr. Johnny Hunt.  With sensitivity and clarity, Pastor Johnny addresses some of the issues men find most difficult to talk about: pornography, substance abuse, anger, depression, unforgiveness, and more. Unspoken will give you the courage to overcome your stumbling blocks and step into a new life, free from the bondage of shame and silence.  You can stand stronger when you stand with a community of believers—and Pastor Johnny will show you how.
4. It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way: Finding Unexpected Strength When Disappointments Leave You Shattered by Lysa TerKeurst.  Life often looks so very different than we hoped or expected. Some events may simply catch us off guard for a moment, but others shatter us completely. We feel disappointed and disillusioned, and we quietly start to wonder about the reality of God’s goodness.  Lysa TerKeurst understands this deeply. But she’s also discovered that our disappointments can be the divine appointments our souls need to radically encounter God. In It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way, Lysa invites us into her own journey of faith and, with grit, vulnerability, and honest humor.
5. Church Growth Flywheel: 5 Practical Systems to Drive Growth at Your Church by Rich Birch – Are you ready to see your church impact more people than you have ever before? Are you tired of church leadership books that are long on theory but short on practical help? Have you wanted to reach more people in your community but you weren’t sure where to start? Are you worried that your church isn’t reaching its full potential? Rich has pulled together his own hard-fought experience leading within one of the fastest growing churches in the country as well as over 200 interviews with church leaders from prevailing churches to help you know how.
6. Hero Maker: Five Essential Practices for Leaders to Multiply Leaders by Dave Ferguson.  Everybody wants to be a hero, but few understand the power of being a hero maker.  In Hero Maker you will learn how to bring real change to your church and community by developing the practical skills to help others reach their leadership potential.  Drawing on five powerful practices found in the ministry of Jesus, Hero Maker presents the key steps of apprenticeship that will build up other leaders and provides strategies for how you can activate gifts, help others take ownership, and develop a simple scorecard for measuring your kingdom-building progress.
7. How To Ruin Your Life: And Starting Over When You Do by Eric Geiger – Eric offers a sobering reminder that many great and godly people have imploded, and none of us are above the risk. Looking at the story of David’s infamous implosion, readers will learn how to ruin our lives (so we won’t), and also how to find hope if we do–as all of us need His grace.
8. Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People by Bob Goff.  Driven by Bob’s trademark storytelling, Everybody, Always reveals the lessons Bob learned–often the hard way–about what it means to love without inhibition, insecurity, or restriction. From finding the right friends to discovering the upside of failure, Everybody, Always points the way to embodying love by doing the unexpected, the intimidating, the seemingly impossible. Whether losing his shoes while skydiving solo or befriending a Ugandan witch doctor, Bob steps into life with a no-limits embrace of others that is as infectious as it is extraordinarily ordinary.
9. Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin.  Goodwin draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights)—to show how they recognized leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking back to their first entries into public life, we encounter them at a time when their paths were filled with confusion, fear, and hope.  This book tells the story of how they all collided with dramatic reversals that disrupted their lives and threatened to shatter forever their ambitions. Nonetheless, they all emerged fitted to confront the contours and dilemmas of their times.
10. The Power of a Positive Team: Proven Principles and Practices that Make Great Teams Great by Jon Gordon.  This is the follow-up to The Power of Positive Leadership: How and Why Positive Leaders Transform Teams and Organizations and Change the World, from one of one of my favorite authors .  Utilizing examples from the writing team who created the hit show Billions, the National Champion Clemson Football team, the World Series contending Los Angeles Dodgers, The Miami Heat and the greatest beach volleyball team of all time to Navy SEAL’s, Marching bands, Southwest Airlines, USC and UVA Tennis, Twitter, Apple and Ford, Jon shares innovative strategies to transform a group of individuals into a united, positive and powerful team.  
11. There Is More: When the World Says You Can’t, God Says You Can by Brian Houston.  In his latest book, Founder and Global Senior Pastor of Hillsong Church and author of LIVE LOVE LEAD shows how, with God’s power, you can believe and achieve a life that exceeds every earthly expectation. When you surrender control and follow God’s guidance, you become empowered and equipped to do the impossible, reach higher, and go further than you could have ever imagined–giving Him all the glory.  
12. Finding Favor: God’s Blessings Beyond Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Brian Jones.  Why settle for success when you can have God’s favor? Deep down everyone wants God’s best for their lives―also known as God’s favor. Unfortunately, most of the time we don’t feel “favored” when we’re being “blessed.” It takes perspective to recognize what’s going on. God often uses confusing, painful, and counterintuitive measures to bring us his best in our lives. God is always working for our good, even though we may not recognize it at the time. We want immediate success and easy positive results. God wants long-term transformation. Pastor Brian Jones weaves together stories and Scripture to help readers find God’s favor in their own lives.
13. Your Marriage Today. . .And Tomorrow: Making Your Relationship Matter Now and for Generations to Come by Dr. Crawford and Karen Loritts.  Build a marriage now that your kids will thank you for later.  Your parents’ marital choices have greatly affected your own attitudes and actions in marriage, for better or worse. Your choices will affect your children, and grandchildren, and so on. It’s time to get proactive about your marriage legacy.  Dr. Crawford and Karen Loritts have been married 45 years and have spent the last 30 years speaking on marriage. This book contains their most successful, proven material. Interlaced with personal stories and letters from their four children this book will teach you the biblical and theological foundation for marriage, godly disciplines and habits that will improve your marriage and how to use your marriage to shape future generations
14. The Gospel According To God: Rediscovering The Most Remarkable Chapter In The Old Testament by John MacArthur – Often hailed as one of the greatest chapters in the Bible, the prophecy of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 foretells the crucifixion of Jesus, the central event in God’s ultimate plan to redeem the world.  Written by one of the great theologians of this or any generation, this book explains the prophetic words of Isaiah 53 verse by verse, highlighting important connections to the history of Israel and to the New Testament—ultimately showing us how this ancient prophecy illuminates essential truths that undergird our lives today.
15. No Limits: Blow the CAP Off Your Capacity by John Maxwell.  In his newest book, John Maxwell identifies 17 core capacities needed in increase your capacity. Some of these are abilities we all already possess, such as energy, creativity and leadership. Others are aspects of our lives controlled by our choices, like our attitudes, character, and intentionality.  Maxwell examines each of these capacities, and provides clear and actionable advice on how you can increase your potential in each. He will guide you on how to identify, grow, and apply your critical capacities. Once you’ve blown the “cap” off your capacities, you’ll find yourself more successful–and fulfilled–in your daily life.
16. The Last Arrow: Save Nothing for the Next Life by Erwin McManus.  When you come to the end of your days, you will not measure your life based on success and failures. All of those will eventually blur together into a single memory called “life.”  On the other hand, what will haunt you until your final breath is who you could have been but never became and what you could have done but never did.  The Last Arrow is your roadmap to a life that defies odds and alters destinies. Discover the attributes of those who break the gravitational pull of mediocrity as cultural pioneer and thought leader Erwin McManus examines the characteristics of individuals who risked everything for a life they could only imagine. Imagine living the life you were convinced was only a dream. 
17. Virtual Culture: The Way We Work Doesn’t Work Anymore by Bryan Miles – In VIRTUAL CULTURE, my good friend and visionary entrepreneur Bryan Miles champions the benefits of remote working, which will save your company tons of money and create an atmosphere of trust between you and your employees. I also want to add The Third Option: Why a Woman Doesn’t Have to Choose between a Career and Family, but Can Actually Have Both and Succeed by his wife Shannon Miles.  The BELAY Solutions Co-Founder and CEO shares how she took a leap of faith to create a flexible career that gives meaning to both her work and her family, and she shows how you too can accomplish the same. 
18. Lead Like A Shepherd: The Secret To Leading Well by Larry Osborne.  Some instruction is timeless. Regardless of the age in which we live, certain instruction carries no expiration on its relevance. Pastor, author, and leadership consultant, Larry Osborne has discovered this to be the case with instruction on how to be a good leader. The best, most practical advice comes from the Bible, and in particular, 1 Peter 5:1-4. It’s in this short passage where leaders are exhorted to shepherd the flock among them.
19. The Hospitable Leader: Create Environments Where People and Dreams Flourish by Pastor Terry Smith.  Successful leaders today don’t dictate; they invite.  They don’t dismiss; they welcome.  They don’t neglect; they care.  Now more than ever we must pay attention to the soft side of leadership if we want hard results.  As leaders–from parents to CEOs–we must learn gracious leadership to truly, positively, change our spheres of influence.  In this passionate, powerful book, pastor and leadership mentor Terry Smith fleshes out five vital principles you need to become a hospitable leader.  He shows that this type of leadership is not superficial niceness or allowing people to do whatever they want.  Hospitable leadership is result-oriented because it’s motivated by genuine love.  It’s how you create environments where people and dreams can thrive, where vision turns to action, and where great things happen regularly. Here is everything you need to become the type of leader people want to follow.

If you have not purchased my book Timeless: 10 Enduring Practices Of Apex Leaders it is available for purchase as well.  If you have ever wanted to become the leader God created you to be, this book is for you!  By combining leadership lessons from biblical heroes like Jesus, Daniel and Joseph, along with modern day leaders like Bill Gates, Nick Saban, Kobe Bryant and multiple pastors, Timeless will equip and inspire you.  This book is not to be read alone.  Discussion questions are included in each chapter allowing you to develop those in your circle of influence.  Click HERE or on the image provided and order your copies TODAY.