Leading from the Second Chair by Bonem and Patterson is truly not a good book, and the authors have no good excuse for their anachronism, as the book is written in 2005.
First of all, the book lacks almost completely any sense of ecclesiology, except in the Epilogue, where the authors state that the church is the bride of Christ. They don’t bother telling us what they mean by that, and I am not sure I would like to know how they understand the relationship between a bride and a groom.
To be honest, I even wrote on the margin on page 26, in a chapter about the necessity of subordination, that if they would bring into the text a marriage analogy I should burn the book. Needless to say, on page 27, it says:
“Anyone in this role must come to grips with the subordinate-leader paradox.” He considers the partnership between senior pastor and executive to be similar to a marriage.
The book makes a case for subordination, and co-dependency, and in doing so, it uses bad reasoning (see p. 7). It promotes the need for the congregation to have one ultimate leader (p. 14). It assumes hierarchy, and expresses what can only be seen as a lack of understanding between service and slavery. It promotes unhealthy understanding of cover up, and it contains completely messed up ecclesiology (where the first chair is seen as the church, p. 33). To top it the Biblical narrative they use throughout the book is absolutely inappropriate in my narrow mind. It uses the story of Joseph, and his subordination to the Pharaoh, as an analogy between a first and a second chair in a congregation. It is probably just I, but even though I sometimes think that Senior Pastors are evil slave masters, trying to build enormous monuments about their reign, would like to be seen as substitutes for God, and demand their people to worship them, it is not appropriate to write it in a book.
Finally, I could go through examples in the book that I found offensive and there is a lot of them, and perhaps few spots that actually could be useful. However, I think that the main problem is found on page 34, when they talk about “The Right Relationship”. While the authors claim “The right relationship is everything!” Their understanding of the word right is plainly wrong.