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37 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Recommended with Reservations, May 29, 2007
This review is from: Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community (Hardcover)
This book is about how we do church. More specifically, it is about the need to reinvent or change the church in order to make it more attractive and welcoming to the culture where it is planted.
The book contains some very challenging and helpful information for church planters/pastors/leaders and local church mission teams. For example, the authors begin with a helpful picture of the U.S. changing "glocal" (global/local reality) culture and practical steps to identify the unreached/unchurched people in their community. I also appreciate the emphasis on discipleship and the acknowledgement and warning that we an actually attract a crowd without having a church.
Every church should continually examine human imposed traditions and customs, which can cause a church to stagnate and die. The church must be willing to grow, adapt and try new things to stay healthy and effective. However, the book puts too much emphasis on style, technique and marketing know-how. The authors point to the many "successes" of other churches as a defense of the importance of being missional.
My concern is that while these successful churches have found a niche in their community and experienced growth, some grow as s a result of marketing rather than conversion. When we reinvent the church in order to attract the world, there is a tendency to eliminate or compromise the gospel, because it is divisive, offensive and even foolish to the world. Breaking the Missional Code touches on this fact but continues to advocate style and technique over the importance and power of the gospel itself. There is a great temptation for niche churches to offer another, more palatable, gospel in order to avoid offense. The result can be that many people stay and even invite others for relationships and become members of a Christian club rather than becoming followers of Christ.
The second thing that tends to be eliminated in these churches is the teaching of the whole counsel of God. This is done in an attempt to be relevant and to avoid the controversial truths of Scripture. I find this to be the greatest weakness of this book. It focuses on what people want rather than what God demands. The one area of greatest need in any church is the clear and bold preaching of God's Word.
It does not take cleverness or slick marketing strategies to grow a church or to make the gospel more attractive to the world. It takes authenticity in the life of believers that they meet. See the advise given by the Apostle Paul to Titus for his ministry to plant a healthy church on the island of Crete. Mission is not some hidden code to be broken. It is the work of God in the life of His Church (believers) and found in the power of the gospel. The Word of God, not the latest marketing book, is our best source for reaching the lost and it is Christ Himself who will grow His Church.
I recommend this book as a resource to help leaders examine church traditions that may be a barrier to reaching others and as a tool to think about specific mission strategies. However, read it with a careful and discerning mind being careful not to compromise the non-negotiable God ordained standards for an effective and healthy church.
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39 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Must Read Missiology, February 14, 2006
This review is from: Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community (Hardcover)
Dr. Ed Stetzer is one of the most important Christians in the country thinking through the issues that arise when the gospel and a culture intersect. There is a great buzz lately about being holistic missional Christians engaging culture but very little insight on what that means or how that is achieved. This book is a very important and timely contribution, particulary for those Christian leaders in the emerging church conversation. This book combines the best of biblical thinking and practical insight to help you interpret your culture so that Jesus can be most effectively introduced to people. Most importantly, Ed is not simply giving prescriptions for reaching a culture but rather principles for reaching any culture with the mind of a professor and the heart of a church planter.
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21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Home Run, August 26, 2006
This review is from: Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community (Hardcover)
Combining studies on theology, ecclesiology and missiology with a vast array of quotes and insights, this book is a very important book for pastors attempting to transition churches from programmatic to missional or for planters seeking to learn the "code" of the culture where they are planting.
Stetzer and Putnam write, "A church that is incarnational is interested more in the harvest than in the barn."
"The answer is not to make all of our churches look alike. The answer is to have everyone seeking the same thing: to glorify God by being an indigenous expression of church life where they are."
"Over a decade ago, George Hunter began informing us that secular people had 'no Christian memory' and that the church no longer enjoyed a 'home court advantage.'"
"The key to breaking the code of a community is to have the heart of the Father for that community. The only way to do that is by spending serious amounts fo time with the one who loved Jerusalem deeply enough to weep over it."
This book could be described as a how-to manual to understand the people in each culture around a local church and developing a strategy to break those codes, since, using their memorable phrase, cultures in Opp, Alabama are different from those in Seattle, Washington. (I've been through Opp-definitely different.) This is a book that I wish I had had before we started our transition. It you are a pastor praying through the decision to transtion to reach your community, this book is perfect for your congregational leadership.
Other, important points include how the attempted by-the-book cross application of mega-church principles was doomed to fail on a large scale and a brief distinction of how emerging is not the same as missional and a 3 part breakdown of the former (Relevants, Reconstructionists and Revisionists).
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