Organic Community: Creating A Place Where People Naturally Connect is the best book on ministry I have read in a while. It’s so good that when I started reading it during the middle of the semester, I couldn’t stop until I was finished. As many of you know, there is NO time for extra reading during seminary/grad school, but I couldn’t not finish this book.

This isn’t a book that’s limited to ministers. Joseph R. Myers has written a classic (as Leonard Sweet calls it) and it’s valuable to anyone who leads or works with people on a regular basis. Myers uses 10 word pairings to contrast the implications of two modes of organizing and mobilizing communities. The “Master Plan” model is predicated on top-heavy, position-based authority figures who draw up road maps to future destinations and ask for nothing from their communities but cooperation with the predetermined plan. “Organic Order,” on the other hand, seeks collaboration between community members and values a revolving power structure in which every individual contributes to the evolving story of their community as a whole. For anyone else who considers them self an Organic-style leader, I was surprised to discover the tendencies in myself that derive from the “master-plan” approach.

I really can’t make a hard enough sell for this book. Many of these ideas were not new to me, nor will they be to you, but Myers connects new images and language in a way that makes organic community organizing breathe in a way it never has. I’ll re-read this book every year for the rest of my life.