I’ve written about how the positive reaction that The No Asshole Rule received from several
religious leaders and publications surprised me perhaps more than any other
reaction to the book. If you had told me
a couple years ago, when I was starting to write the book, that The No Asshole Rule would be used as
theme in a bible
study class in Texas, but that The
New York Times would still insist on calling it The
No ******* Rule, I would have told you that you were insane.
I am less surprised, however, that some religious leaders
are attracted to the theme of The
Knowing-Doing Gap. I still recall
giving a talk (in 2001, I think) about how difficult it is for organizations to
do what they know they should (it was to a group of non-profit leaders). A big burly Baptist minister sitting in the
front row raised his hand and said something like, “The Bible is one of the best-selling
and most widely discussed books ever written; most people in my church know
what is in it, but a lot of them have trouble doing it.”
I had
not thought of that in years until a friend emailed me to tell me that pastor John
Ortberg at one of the biggest and most active church’s in my city, Menlo Park
Presbyterian Church, had recently started-off a sermon on “The
World’s Greatest Talk” by explaining the main idea of The
Knowing-Doing Gap. I found out
today that Pastor Ortberg’s sermon’s can be downloaded and played in iTunes and
other formats (The call them Sermon-casts – here is the podcast). I must say that Pastor Ortberg is quite
a speaker, he provides one of the best summaries of the book I’ve ever heard in the opening
minutes of the sermon. Then he makes a transition to a similar argument to that made by that Baptist minister years back, but goes further by talking about how
seriously Jesus takes the knowing-doing problem. And you can see the effect of podcasting, as
this pastor
in Pittsburgh raves about the sermon and also picks-up on the notion of the
knowing-doing gap. As I’ve said before,
I am not a particularly religious person, but I am glad that people who are
religious find the ideas developed by my co-authors and me to be useful.
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