As the title indicates, Earl Creps‘ first book, Off-Road Disciplines: Spiritual Adventures of Missional Leaders, is about the Spiritual Disciplines that help to shape “missional leaders.” In it, Creps takes the classic teaching of spiritual disciplines, brought to the forefront by Christians such as Richard Foster and Dallas Willard, and takes them “off-road”. In other words, this is not a book about the practices of prayer, Bible reading, solitude, and meditation (as important as those are). With a leaning towards leadership, he includes disciplines such as gaining perspective, reverse mentoring, missional efficiency, surrendering preferences, and passing the baton.
The book is broken down into two sections of off-road disciplines: personal and organizational.

At first, Creps’ writing style was a little difficult to get used to, but once I got going I was able to follow his thoughts easily. Earl uses a lot of real life stories and examples, many of them taken from his years of “field research” on the American church. This helps in making each discipline clearer and more practical, as I was able to relate to many of the stories.

Off-road Disciplines is not a book that you skim through or read quickly hoping to find quick little nuggets. In my opinion, some chapters carry more weight and impact than others, but each one has an important message worth reading and digesting fully. Furthermore, this is a book that is meant to be applied to life, not just read and put on the shelf. Each chapter issues a challenge to the reader to examine themselves and use the off-road discipline as a means of transformation.

Now, the word “missional” has become quite the buzzword in many Christian circles, but Creps helps to bring clarity to what exactly that means, not just in theory, but in practice. And after reading this book, I personally am inspired to live more “missionally.”

Overall, I found this to be a great book with hardly any shortcomings. I can see this being a powerful resource for church leaders, in fact I plan on facilitating a study of this book among the ministry leaders in our church. I recommend this book, whether or not you consider yourself a leader (which we all are in some way or another), as a valuable resource for helping you become a truly “missional” disciple of Jesus.

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