Facing Leviathan:
Leadership, Influence and Creating in a Cultural Storm,
by Mark Sayers
Published by Moody, 2014
Purchase from shop.biblesociety.org.au for $16.95

Like the title, Facing Leviathan promises something bold. Its cover hints at an edgy promise to forge a path for a better model of Christian leadership, despite the culture of today.

But, like the title, not all battles go the way we want them to, and Facing Leviathan ends up as an interesting mess, with occasional promises of what it could have been.

Facing Leviathan is a new book by Australian pastor and author, Mark Sayers. The centre of the book is a cultural analysis that searches to explain why we, as a Western culture, are drawn to organic leadership models, instead of mechanical leadership models. (For the two second summary of this conflict, do a search online for “organic church” and see the first page of results that declare the organic church as having  “left behind the man-made religious system normally referred to as Christianity”, or that their organic church is “church as Jesus intended”.)

“Today many of us want to influence, but not many of us wish to lead. We describe ourselves as activists, consultants, creatives, and entrepreneurs. We shy away from calling ourselves leaders, or even worse: managers … Today, most people prefer hipness to prestige,” Sayers writes in the early pages.

So far, so good, and when Sayers is describing this conflict and its roots in modernism, he is at his best: discerning and well-researched, and with a lovely eye for the stories that help us make sense of the historical background. The strength of this book is this critique of the “organic” and its unabashed acceptance because of cultural reasons, rather than inherent virtue, or a particular biblical basis. This acceptance is rife: it runs through the roots of church organisations, leadership strategy, and ministry focus.

“What on the surface seemed to be theological or missiological discussions, such as the debate between … missional or mega churches, were in fact deeply shaped by the cultural battle between the mechanical and organic values,” he writes.

However, his analysis is not academic but deeply personal: Sayers’ realisation about the problems with the “organic” model of church is formed from his own journey. He went on to become a “senior leader of a missional church”, and realised that the same values that founded the church would not let it continue in the long-term. He realised that the “organic” nature he’d been striving towards would be its own undoing.

But he also shares his struggle with bipolar disorder, initially undiagnosed, culminating in a climactic moment where he has a mixed episode and literally walks away from the pulpit mid-service. This journey and the resultant confrontation with God is a narrative that weaves through the rest of the book.

And, while I don’t want to be unsympathetic to the genuine problem that mental illness within ministry is, and continues to be, this middle section of the book is also where the whole thing starts to founder.

The problem with cultural analysis is that it’s a great tool of discernment and critique, but it’s not that handy for the other side of the coin, for prescribing positive action or for speaking into the space of what we can or should be doing. That is, cultural critique works by saying where we’ve gone wrong, but it doesn’t work very well for describing what to do next. If your argument remains rooted in cultural critique, then you tend to get prescriptions that advocate in terms of overcorrection—for example, “we’re not doing enough to reach Tibetan people, so we need to do more to reach Tibetan people”.

Sayers is too thoughtful to fall into the overcorrection trap, and so he interweaves the book with a third strand which is an exposition of the book of Jonah. However, this doesn’t fully work either: because the exposition has been enlisted to fit into his narrative of leadership and change—it feels shoehorned because it is. Jonah is never held up in the Bible to be the kind of leader that Sayers tries to hold him up to be, and the result is some clangers like: “Does one have to sacrifice the circle of friends in order to lead? The totality of Jonah’s immersion into the deep tells us yes.”

This is coupled with a less provocative cultural analysis over the second half of the book—a few too many stories that seem to be told because they’re interesting stories rather than because they provide genuine examples, a few too many rhetorical questions that grasp empty-handed toward profundity (“Are we happy to allow God to be our PR agent…?”) and the aforementioned personal story of Sayers himself, which carries some emotional heft, but ultimately, not enough to propel the book towards a genuine resolution.

In conclusion, there is a true heart in this book: sections of our culture as Christians do tend to promote the organic for reasons that are only disguised as biblical, and there is a genuine danger of gospel preaching becoming “about appeasing fears and insecurities”. These insights from Sayers are worth hearing, but they’re ultimately drowned out by the rest of a book, which falls short of its lofty promise.

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