What leadership requires

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Time now for Quest: conversations with thoughtful leaders about three books that have shaped their thinking.

George Grant joins us now for this month’s discussion.

GEORGE GRANT: Today I'm speaking with author, pastor, professor, and my friend John Currie. John, you not only serve as a local church pastor, but you teach seminary students about pastoral leadership and preaching. So how have books, the books that you've read, shaped your life, your preaching, and your teaching?

JOHN CURRIE: Well, George, thank you. Very good to be with you. One of my favorite books, the one that I think has influenced me perhaps the most is Calvin's Institutes. And not only for the theological vision that Calvin gives to us, but actually his methodology and how he handles the scripture. And as you study Calvin, his concern for the text, and then his pastoral impulse and why he does what he does with the text, that has been one of the books that's actually shaped my approach to how I think through a text and the purpose and how I deliver that kind of a text.

GRANT: A lot of people are intimidated when they come to the Institutes. How should a first time reader of the Institutes approach a book like that?

CURRIE: Well, first of all, I think you have to take time in it. It's like having a conversation with a trusted pastor but from another time. As someone has said, seek first to understand, then be understood.

And I think with a work like Calvin or any of the other great Reformed theologians, you kind of have to understand their cadence, their syntax, how they put things together. So the first thing that I would say is take time just to read through it, just to really get to know how he expresses himself.If you can find a good biography, a reliable biography on the author, it helps you understand their concerns. It helps you understand their context, helps you understand the way they approach things.

GRANT: All right, we could probably spend our entire time talking about the Institutes, but let's go on to a second book that has influenced you and in what ways has it influenced you, resonating in your life and your work? What's the second book?

CURRIE: Martin Lloyd Jones's Preaching and Preachers. I think it was Lloyd Jones that first gave me the sense that there's such a thing as a preacher, and that preaching has a nature to it. And it's not just an exercise in rhetoric. And I think Lloyd Jones was perhaps the first, and maybe the most formative, to give me a sense of what preaching is and who the preacher is.

GRANT: All right, third book. What's another book that has shaped you and how does it add to your story?

CURRIE: Well, it's a little bit out of the genre of the biblical, theological or systematic, but it's along the lines of something we've talked about already, the line of biography. Something that has been very formative for me are biographies of Reagan. President Ronald Reagan. One in particular I would focus on. I've loved his autobiography, An American Life. I think that was my introduction. But then Peggy Noonan's book, When Character Was King. When Character Was King …

GRANT: What a great book.

CURRIE: It is really really formative. And how it has helped me is she makes this comment in the book, that the reason Reagan was who he was and was able to achieve what he achieved was that he had a clear moral compass. Another of his biographers says the reason he was the greatest communicator was he really was who he was. He was the same man in the Oval Office as he was behind the podium.

GRANT: All right, now let's tie all three of these books together. How do they together sort of shape your life, your thinking? What's the thread that connects them all?

CURRIE: That's a great question, George. And I think the thread that connects them all is leadership, particularly pastoral leadership, through communication by a leader who can be an example. I think that's common to all of them. You know, Calvin is the great theologian, but he was a prolific preacher, and he was putting his life on the line for what he was teaching and writing and preaching. And of course the same's true of Lloyd Jones. He was so active. In fact, I think he probably wore himself out two or three times with his activity. I think the common thread is that these were all men who were leading in a cause. And they were leading by communication, but they were exemplifying what they were leading in. It was not just an exercise in rhetoric.

GRANT: John Currie is the senior pastor of Proclamation Presbyterian Church and is the president’s professor and Broekhuizen professor of pastoral theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. His latest book, The Pastor as Leader, is published by Crossway.

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