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Daron’s Review

Joe Rigney, Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World (Canon Press, 2024).

Joe Rigney’s recasting of Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve is insightful, relevant, practical, well-organized, and short. I highly recommend it for men, women, and teens. It also serves well for group study and discussion.

In a mere 100 pages divided into six well-organized chapters, Rigney first diagnoses a problem and then recommends antidotes to a sinister threat to human flourishing in our culture today: a “crisis of degree.” He describes degree as the principle of cultural order, rule, or hierarchy. Degree manifests in relationships of difference (ordered relationships) in which stabilizing—and often hierarchical—familial and societal roles are recognized and honored: husband and wife, teacher and student, magistrate and citizen, pastor and congregation, and so on. When this principle of ordered contrast is respected, the diversity of human personalities, talents, and actions is productively unified. Degree is like harmony in music or like the sun’s gravity that constrains and protects the planets, where imposed order yields liberty, peace, and long-term productivity.

Rigney soberly describes what happens when an organization or society abandons the principle of degree or social differentiation. Human action becomes driven primarily by passionate reaction to others. Volatility reigns in homes, institutions, towns, and nations. Further, everyone caters to the least mature members of the group, seeking peace at all costs. This leads to emotion-driven blame-shifting and victimization, which destroys social cohesion, leading to desperate, quick-fix solutions that sacrifice long-term social health for near-term escape from pain. And this means that clear-thinking leadership is cast as threatening, when in reality a healthy society requires differentiated leaders who often must cause near-term “pain” to impose order to achieve long-term stability and fruitfulness. Another way to describe the problem is through the destructive pattern born in the Garden of Eden and later repeated in Israel’s worship of the golden calf: abdication (of leadership), then idolatry, then blame-shifting.

What is the solution to this crisis? Rigney applies selected insights from the Ten Commandments to describe the solution, based on a group gaining a “vision for body life that includes both faithful headship and faithful membership.” First, the head or leader focuses internally to structure the body for its purpose through his presence, words, and actions. Next, the leader establishes order in relation to the external environment by maintaining the body’s boundaries and representing the body to other bodies. In turn, the members of the body respond to faithful leadership by providing feedback and counsel to the leader (following is an active role). The body glorifies the head by executing the established mission and amplifying it into the world. The body is the seat of fruitfulness, receiving from the leader in order to give more, beautifying and glorifying what it received.

Rigney describes three traits of the sober-minded leader: 1) clarity of mind, 2) stability of soul, and 3) readiness to act. “To be sober-minded is to be mature, to have your passions governed by what is true and good and beautiful through the habitual exercise of the trained emotions.” Or put simply, “God over mind, mind over passions.”

The remaining chapters are equally insightful and practical. Rigney warns that people will attempt to sabotage sober-minded leaders, and he describes specific ways to combat both overt and subtle attacks. He then applies principles from the opening chapters to three specific domains: the home, the church, and the world at large. These pages are loaded with wisdom.

Leadership and Emotional Sabotage is full of practical wisdom, sharp insights, and meaningful examples–a must-read for leaders of any type: heads of household, business owners, supervisors, church officers, and those who disciple future leaders. And young adults–if you comprehend and apply this book now, you will lead and follow well!

Excerpt:

“This then is the Biblical antidote to the Crisis of Degree, the envious fever that afflicts us. The gospel of Jesus makes us right with God so that we can love him above all else. The glory of this gospel gives us gravity, so that we’re sober-minded, with a clarity of mind, a stability of soul, and a readiness to act. And sober-minded leaders are able to faithfully lead their families, churches, businesses, schools, and nations through their glad-hearted and steady presence, bringing stability and life and health amidst the storms of passions that surround us.”

Daron Drown and his wife Amy settled in Huntsville after an Air Force flying career.  They homeschooled their five daughters and have one younger adopted son.  Daron continues to work in aerospace and Amy serves in church and community along with two kids still at home.  The Drowns love a kitchen full of friends, books by a winter fire, camping, hiking, table games, vigorous conversation, household projects, and opportunities to learn.