During the early days of my blogging, a book was recommended to me called the Purple Cow by Seth Godin. It was a relatively short book and what I didn’t know at that time that Godin’s work would profoundly affect me.

In his Purple Cow book, he mentioned how we are called to be set apart. We can’t be like everybody else. We need to stand out in this world. The value of excellence and creativity helped me when we started our church in Greenhills. Through the book, we aimed to be a church that would reach to the unchurched in our city.

For homiletics, one of the books that have helped me is a marketing book Seth wrote called All Marketers are Liars, where he talked about the power of understanding your crowd’s worldview and how you can enter their world and introduce your worldview. It reminded me of the classic John Stott book Between Two Worlds, which I highly recommend every preacher to read.

And maybe one of my favorite is his book Tribes: We Want you to Lead Us, which talks about how we need to build tribes to carry out the message that is entrusted to us. His other books like Linchpin, another excellent leadership book tells you not to stay mediocre in your work but rather choose to be valuable by adding value to the people around you. And of course his book – THE DIP that teaches us when to quit and when to stick. In that little book, I’ve learned that winners know when to quit.

It’s amazing that some of the important things I’ve learned I’ve gleaned not from a Christian book but from a business or marketing book. I do encourage every leader to read other books that are not in your field. As I have studied and read a lot of theological books that shaped my life and thinking, I’ve intentionally read books that are not religious in nature, to have a feel and a sense of the world I live in and the mission field God has assigned me to reach. And in the process, I’ve learned not just a thing or two but revolutionary ideas that have changed the way I think and live.