Emersion Books

Intuitive Leadership Excerpt

Read an excerpt from Intuitive Leadership by Tim Keel. This includes the Table of Contents, Introduction, and Chapter 8 "A Modest Proposal."

Download Keel_Intuitive Leadership_Excerpt.pdf

Intuitive Leadership by Tim Keel

Intuitive Leadership (the 5th release in the emersion line) released early this month. You can read more about it below or read an excerpt here.

About the Book: As our culture shifts from modern to postmodern, pastors and church leaders are finding that old, rigid church leadership systems and structures no longer seem to work. Church leaders are searching for and discovering new, creative ways of leading—emphasizing intuition, creativity, narrative, and an embrace of the chaos and tension of our time.

Tim Keel, pastor of a thriving emergent church and a rising leader in the emergent church movement, offers a thought-provoking yet practical exploration of this new style he calls Intuitive Leadership. His fresh approach will be welcomed by pastors and lay leaders interested in the emergent conversation and how Christian mission should look in our rapidly changing culture.

Praise for Intuitive Leadership

"Tim Keel writes with the eye of an artist, the heart of a pastor, the mind of a philosopher, and the hope of a visionary. His intuitions will inspire your own, and his voice will add so much to the conversation about what is emerging in our lives, churches, and world."

--Brian McLaren, author/speaker (brianmclaren.net)

"Tim Keel has written a fascinating and engaging book that will quickly become both a starting point and a standard bearer for thinking about leadership in the emerging church. In addition to reimagining the nature of leadership, it also offers an implicit and enticing portrait of the type of community that will be formed in response to the vision and values described in these pages. In other words, if we follow the direction set forth in this volume, things will start to look different in the church. For many of us, that’s a reason to hope that this book is widely read."

--John R. Franke, professor of theology, Biblical Seminary

"Deeply personal and human in its approach, Intuitive Leadership both charms the mind and informs the heart. The result is a wise and gentle tracing of the contours of postmodernism that is as healing as it is liberating."

--Phyllis Tickle, contributing editor in religion, Publishers Weekly

"Read Tim Keel’s book. Let it invite you to connect with your stories, the markers along the road that have been shaping you so far. Let it permit you to give voice to your questions. . . . Let’s see how these narratives and the metaphors shaping your life might provide all kinds of clues for the risky ways in which God is calling you to embrace the chaos of our time with hope and expectation. Thanks, Tim! You resisted an answer book and in so doing invited others to embrace the radical hope of God’s future."

--From the foreword by Alan J. Roxburgh, director, Allelon Center for Missional Leadership, Allelon Missional Leadership Network

"Erudite, eloquent, and engaging, Tim Keel’s Intuitive Leadership is a landmark in pastoral ministry, for he brings together the multiple streams of emerging church, postmodernity, media theory, biblical interpretation, church planting, cultural studies, and holistic, missional life. This book is destined to be a church leadership classic."

--Tony Jones, national coordinator of Emergent Village; author The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier

My Expert Answer: “I Don’t Know” (an excerpt from Intuitive Leadership)

Tim Keel, author of the upcoming book from emersion: Intuitive Leadership (Available Oct. 2007), is a pastor of a growing
church in Kansas City, Missouri, called Jacob’s Well. A frequent speaker, Tim is a
leading voice in the emerging church conversation and a founding member of the
Emergent Village. He has contributed to several books and magazines.

My Expert Answer: “I Don’t Know” (an excerpt from Intuitive Leadership)

Speaking on this topic at an event for evangelical denominational leaders, one pastor raised his hand to ask me a question. He said he was a pastor of a 75-year-old church in the Pacific Northwest. As he introduced himself and described his community’s context, I knew what his question was going to be before he asked it. He listened to me describe the context of a “post” world, the necessity of engaging incarnationally in contexts of specificity, and how we work within systems and structures that either inhibit or empower such engagements. He wanted to know how what I was saying applied to him in his context, an aging denominational church, as compared to Jacob’s Well, a first-generation independent Christian community. It is a great question, and it is one that I hear all the time.

The first answer I always give is simple: I don’t know how to answer that question, at least not in the way it is often asked. It is often asked as if I can reduce these complex realities down to simple, acontextual answers that will apply in that pastor’s context the way that they have in my own. But I cannot deliver a step-by-step implementation manual because a manual assumes the transferability of a model. I have been trying to deconstruct this approach throughout the entire book. If I could be said to have a model, then it would be a model that is radically localized – in fact, so localized that the only way to come up with an implementation manual would be to write one for each community – and to write it after the fact and with an open ending that allows for the possibility of additional chapters. Thus my answer, if it is to have any integrity with the rest of what I have written so far, must be “I don’t know.” The second part of my answer is not any idea or application but the community itself. This community, Jacob’s Well, is how we have responded to the “post” world. And this book is in many ways my attempt to articulate and describe the context and the community that has developed over the last several years in this place as our faithful attempt to answer the question, “How are we to be the people of God here and now?”