on September 16, 2025
Genres: Non-Fiction, Christian Life, Leadership, Work
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Stay True to Your Mission for the Long Haul
How Leaders Lose Their Way is a powerful and reflective exploration of the pitfalls that can send leaders off course―drawing lessons from the life of King Solomon and the timeless wisdom of Ecclesiastes. This book serves as a cautionary tale, equipping leaders to recognize personal and spiritual drift while providing actionable steps to maintain their mission-focused leadership.
Authors Peter Greer and Jill Heisey masterfully blend Scripture with modern-day insights and practical case studies, making this book a compelling guide for pastors, ministry leaders, and organizational leaders aiming to avoid distractions, pressures, and temptations that pull them off course.
This book will help you:
Admit vulnerability: Every leader is susceptible to losing their way. The first step in avoiding personal drift is recognizing that it could happen to you.
Stay disciplined: Staying on mission requires daily discipline, a reoriented understanding of success, and a balance of priorities to reach the finish line faithfully.
Build a support network: Create accountability by building a community of trusted mentors and peers.
Remain faithful: Regular reflection and confession can help you remain on the path of long-term faithfulness.How Leaders Lose Their Way positions King Solomon as both a biblical hero and an antihero. By examining Solomon's wisdom and his ultimate failure to live that wisdom out, readers gain deep insights into avoiding similar pitfalls. Each chapter includes actionable reflection tools and modern case studies designed to equip leaders with practical strategies for staying "mission true."
This book is essential for Christian leaders who are ready to pause, reflect, and realign with their spiritual and organizational missions. Pursue a life of integrity, inspire the next generation, and build a legacy rooted in faithfulness. Stay on the path of mission-true leadership with How Leaders Lose Their Way.
We all know tragic stories about Christian leaders who started out well, but whose lives and ministries later crashed and burned because of immorality. There are also leaders who start out with big dreams of serving and helping others, who later drift off-course into a different focus entirely. This book address both issues, encouraging leaders to take stock of where they are in comparison to where they intended to be when they first set out. Peter Greer and Jill Heisey explain that without active efforts to stay on-course, individuals and organizations inevitably drift. Even when this doesn’t end in moral failure or an organizational disaster, it can dilute our effectiveness.
Greer and Heisey previously wrote a book about organizational drift. In this new book, they move upstream to focus on how personal and organizational drift result when a leader makes ethical compromises and changes their priorities. The author encourage Christian leaders to stay on-course, and their advice and examples speak to people in church leadership, corporate business, and nonprofit work. Also, because so much of the book focuses on personal character, much of it applies to people who aren’t in any formal leadership capacity, but who want to think deeply about their direction their life is heading.
How Leaders Lose Their Way unpacks the story of Solomon from the Bible to reveal the dynamics of leadership drift. The authors also reference contemporary leadership scandals from Christian organizations, but the primary example comes from the Bible, rather than from a contemporary leader’s personal failing. This gives a sense of how universal these struggles are, and it highlights the Bible as a source of wisdom, instead of putting too much emphasis on learning about leadership failings from news articles or podcasts. This aspect of the book felt well-balanced to me.
Chapters address common issues like losing your way in the pursuit of pleasure, achievement, money, and control. The book also warns against conditions that make these struggles more likely, such as when a leader chooses to isolate themselves from community and avoid vulnerability with trusted people. The chapters are all well-organized and concise, and they end with prayers and worksheet activities. These brief activities help people identify areas of strength and weakness in their lives, or help them put that chapter’s positive principles into practice.
How Leaders Lose Their Way: And How to Make Sure It Doesn’t Happen to You is a great book for Christian leaders, regardless of their job title or particular calling. There’s lots of wisdom here about how to understand and prevent personal drift, and this book shows people how to course-correct when they realize that they’re moving in the wrong direction through slow, gradual compromises. This well-written, thought-provoking book is great for individual reading and for exploring together in accountability groups, and I highly recommend it.