Going Deep Review

Going Deep is a strange book by Gordon MacDonald. It is a book about becoming a person of influence with the idea that while the church should be developing deep, influential leaders, they should be people who lead and influence not just within their church but at their workplace and family too. Which sounds all well and good. However there is a twist – the book is written as a novel, making it quite unlike any other Christian teaching book I have ever read.
The book tells the story of a pastor’s 2 year mission to establish a small group that he trains to be deep people and has some good bits of teaching about what deep people are like, about spiritual gifts, personal temperaments  and Biblical and church history examples of leaders and what qualities they had that made them good (or not so good) leaders. However because of the fictional narrative there is also a lot of padding about meetings and the pastor’s personal life that doesn’t add much and isn’t exactly page turning stuff. At the same time, if you are a church leader it does give some insight into the ‘politics’ of starting new initiatives to grow deep people, and it is clear that prayer has to be the foundation that it is all built on.
While the teaching content of Going Deep is good, I feel it would have been better presented as a straight teaching book about how to cultivate deep people rather than be interspersed throughout a fictional account of a pastor setting up a small group in his church. It is a pretty slow-paced book with lots of meetings and discussions that essentially repeat the same things to different groups of people that could have been cut down on.
Also on a side note, I’d advise not searching the book title on Urban Dictionary…
Legal disclosure so that the next USA president doesn’t hunt me down and extradite me to a US jail – Booksneeze provided me with a free copy of this book in order for me to review it. I was not under any pressure to write a positive review.
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