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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Resource for Building Solid and Multiplying Community Groups, September 21, 2011
This review is from: Community: Taking Your Small Group off Life Support (Re: Lit Books) (Paperback)
Brad House is on staff at Mars Hill Church in Seattle - a church that is solid theologically, philosophically, and missionally. They are a church that is exceptional in theological depth and missional outreach in impacting their culture for the sake of Christ. The message of the gospel comes through loud and clear, and without compromise in both their corporate and communal contexts. In one of the least churched cities in America they have proven that what took place in the book of Acts, is still possible today - especially through the medium of the teaching of the Word and its balanced application within the context of community groups. According to the author one study indicates that less than 18% of young evangelicals ages 18-23 participate in a small group, Bible study, or prayer group that is sponsored by their local churches. This book is not only written to combat this problem, but provides ample Biblical solutions and real life illustrations of how to build a solid foundation for building community groups that are healthy and result in personal, corporate, and communal life transformation via living out the gospel of Jesus Christ. I highly recommend this book for the following types of people: 1) Senior Pastors - It will motivate you to launch community groups in your church and help you to be more strategic and missional in your ministries of in reach and outreach.
2) Existing Small Group Leaders and Participants - It will help give you ideas, tools, and applications that you have never thought of - in order to have a more effective, strategic, and balanced community group.
3) Church Planters - This book will give you a huge jump-start on what you need to launch a healthy church that provides ideas for training, equipping, and providing the infrastructure needed to have a healthy and growing gospel centered church. Overall, I loved this book because it's Biblical, practical, and comprehensive in scope. Any one who loves Christ and His church will benefit from the study and practical implementation of this excellent resource for building gospel communities that make a huge difference for the glory of Christ.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You Need Community..., October 10, 2011
This review is from: Community: Taking Your Small Group off Life Support (Re: Lit Books) (Paperback)
I was privileged to get a copy of Brad House's book Community: Taking Your Small Group off Life Support (RE: Lit), the latest in the RE:LIT series. House serves as a pastor at Mars Hill Church, Seattle, where he oversees community groups for the multi-site church. For me, a good book is built on the basics of God's Word and filled with practicality, or what the foundational truth from God's Word should look like fleshed out. The tension in a book on a particular facet of ministry is that while a broad cross section of evangelicalism may agree that something is important and even rooted in God's Word, we may disagree on its practice. I thought House did a great job of helping us see that what Mars Hill Church has chosen to do, how it has come out of Biblical conviction, but isn't meant to be replicated by every church. We are responsible, however, to flesh out community in our midst and this is the real strength of the book. In Part 1, the foundation (or as he calls them, Building Blocks For Life) is unpacked. This lays some biblical footings for how the book will flesh itself out in the later chapters. Why do we need community? How did God create us for this and other truths. Part 2, health plan, helps to lead us in a positive direction by helping us see the different facts of community that need to be considered. How should groups function, how often should they meet, where should they meet, what should they do? Are you getting a feel for the practical side yet? Part 3, treatment, gives us ways to effect change in our groups. In other words, I'm given practical tools in this section to go about changing things from the way we've always done them. This includes not only changing the past, but equipping leaders for the future. Positives in this book include getting a great feel for what the Bible says about community, how those are fleshed out in a local church taking those commands seriously, humility in communicating what has been pursued, stories of how pursuing this has helped, as well as what I've already mentioned: practical things. Negatives for me were that it is a longer read. At times I felt the book drag. This might have been my fatigue or the time of life when I'm reading this (3 kids under 5), but as I pressed through, it proved to be time well spent. House has definitely thought deeply about this issue. And if community is something you would like help in applying or tweaking in your particular ministry, then this book would be a book worthy of your time and investment.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fantastic resource for leading and living in biblical community., October 16, 2011
This review is from: Community: Taking Your Small Group off Life Support (Re: Lit Books) (Paperback)
'Community', with the bold subtitle "Taking your small group off life support" was written with a clear goal to do just that, however unpopular it may be. This book comes at a timely point in the Reformission movement where we have a bevy of churches, leaders and small group attendees who are tired of the old systems and methods of "community" that seem to be nothing more than an awkward social gathering, yet are unsure on how to cross into organic and truly gospel-made community. The Foundation: Community, broken into three major sections, starts out by laying a theological groundwork for community in the church. This first section does what it was written to do, which is remind the reader of the gospel and the gospel's communal implications, which is essential to building any foundation or vision because "A clear view of God puts life into perspective" (P.37). House uses a host of effective charts, graphs and diagrams to create a clear understand of the church's biblical call to community and the practice of that call. Community is able to successfully avoid being theoretic and successfully springboards into a healthy deconstruction of the current state of the social purgatory that is most churches "small groups ministry". The Health Plan: House gets to the root of the problem, which is, community has become an "event, rather than a lifestyle" (P.96-97). So House digs and digs and digs so much so that you will read this and hopefully feel some holy discontentment in this area. House talks about why non Christians do not and would not feel comfortable in the typical `small group' setting in the Church, and where we Christians have built barriers instead of bridges to the culture around us (p.128) by the way we do small group. House deals here especially with `barriers' (defined as `Issues of practice, culture and perception that inhibit the progress of the gospel" P.128) that tend to be legitimized, accepted as inevitable and pardoned in our church, such as expecting minimal time commitment, flipping the conversational switch from "small-talk" to "spiritual" in the after dinner `drum-circle' (P.98), and that unavoidable awkwardness in most small group settings. But within this second part of the book, House does not leave us out to dry, but offers stories, models and insights as to how to practically break the cycle of unhealthy community in both gospel-founded and culturally conscious ways (the exact purpose of this blog!). In this part of the book especially, House says things that I truly haven't heard before that sharpened my understanding and motivated me to action. Treatment: Community finishes with a section that cleans up and restores order to everything the first two sections have dissected. This is the part where House clearly articulates practical leadership needs, potential pitfalls in rebuilding as well as lay out the framework that has worked so well for Mars Hill, a 10,000+ person church with networks of intimate community and pastoral care that a church of 150 would be lucky to see. One of the most interesting things about this section is House's detailed layout of Mars Hill's community group leader training outlines, (including homework for leaders, and leadership meeting structure) along with a fantastic appendix that includes a blank outline for those interested in using Mars Hill's model. By the end of the book church leaders should feel significantly more prepared to train up new leaders, reach out to the community around them and experience more concrete, gospel-centered fellowship in the context of small group community. I would strongly recommend this book to church leadership and those who are not satisfied with the depth of their small group and want to start gospel-change. And while the book was not perfect, some topics were neglected and I was left with a few questions mostly on leadership expectations and discipleship, Community is an exceptional Operator Manuel for gospel-driven small groups that make disciples, build cultural bridges and love people well.
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