Customer Reviews

11 Innovations in the Local Church: How Today's Leaders Can Learn, Discern and Move into the Future

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What are the most effective new ways of communicating the Good News of Jesus? That's essentially the question addressed in this book by Elmer Towns, Ed Stetzer and Warren Bird. The book describes different strategies adopted by churches, and attempts to identify what we can learn from each one, and also things we should be cautious about.

The specific types of churches described are organic house churches, recovery churches, multi-site churches, ancient-future churches, city-reaching churches, community transformation churches, cyber-enhanced churches, Nickelodeon-style children-focused churches, intentionally multicultural churches, decision-journey churches, and attractional churches. The authors suggest that we can learn important ideas from all of these styles of churches, and I tend to agree, although I think it is more important for a church to do one thing well than to attempt many things poorly.

The ideas which appealed most to me as likely to be effective were community transformation (where the church invests significant resources in the local community), intentionally multicultural churches (where the church deliberately chooses to embrace multiple cultures), and children-focused churches (where the church invests significant resources in making the children's programs compelling).

Great book if you are interested in expanding your church's methods of reaching the lost. Allows you to look at other churches and their methodology while examining the strenght and weakness of each method.