Reinventing Your Church [Paperback]

Brian D. McLaren (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1998

Eighteen tested strategies for pastors and churches are included in this book, all of which encourage church-members to acknowledge their desire to be somewhere else and to use reliable and practical help to get there.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Is any one way really the right way for a church to impact today's rapidly changing culture? With all the different church models to choose from, does any one of them truly have the answer? Brian McLaren offers churches large and small a fresh, creative option--beginning, as he did, by asking, What kind of church would we want if we had to start from scratch? With wisdom gleaned from experience and seasoned with humor, McLaren presents not another here's the way approach, but thirteen tested strategies that can help pastors and congregations of every kind to determine where they want to get to . . . and how to get there.

From the Author

Brian D. McLaren is founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Lanham, Maryland. A founder of the Seed Fellowship network of church planters, he is active in the Willow Creek Association and in International Teams, a short-term missions agency. He and his wife, Grace, have four children

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Zondervan (March 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0310216540
• ISBN-13: 978-0310216544
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,486,638 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, pastor, and networker among innovative Christian leaders, thinkers, and activists. His groundbreaking books include A New Kind of Christian, A Generous Orthodoxy, The Secret Message of Jesus, and Everything Must Change. Named by Time magazine as one of America's top twenty-five evangelicals, McLaren has appeared on Nightline and Larry King Live, and has been covered by The Washington Post and the New York Times.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Bold Strategy For The Church In a Post-modern World, February 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Reinventing Your Church (Paperback)

REINVENTING YOUR CHURCH

By Brian D. McLaren

There are many books being written these days on the need for change in the church. This book certainly should be included among the better in this category. It is remarkable for its clarity of thought and its balance in venturing into this somewhat controversial area. The author does not hesitate to suggest bold and radical departures from "tradition", but not without good reason.

For example, he distinguishes between renewed, restored and reinvented churches. "The renewed church is an old church that, after having lost touch with its own people, goes through a process of change in order to relate to them and better meet their needs again." (p. 20).

The restored church is the result of a sincere effort to establish a "New Testament Church". Often this involves resurrecting some detail of New Testament church life, and making it the litmus test of faithfulness to the Biblical pattern. For this reason, McLaren suggests that the restored church often becomes "The Church of the Lost Detail". The "lost detail" can be almost any form that is found in the book of Acts, such as speaking in tongues, elder rule, house churches, one church per city or whatever. McLaren is not nasty about it, but he does conclude that eventually this lost detail assumes a significance beyond all sane proportions.

"By contrast, the reinvented church not only changes its style, but it changes its attitude. Change is accepted as an unchanging fact of life. The reinvented church not only catches up to the present but also corrects those tendencies that would make it keep falling behind. It removes the anti-change bias." (p. 21)

The reinvented church is characterized by "paradigm pliancy". Paradigm pliancy requires a strategy of maximizing discontinuity, "which means not trying to fix up the horse to get a few more miles out of it, but burying it and looking for a new one. The journey is the important thing, not the horse that you take to get there." (p.23)

Perhaps the most significant aspect of this book is the fact that the author has actually gone through the trauma of "re-inventing" his church. In 1982, he planted a church that grew from 11 to about a hundred in three years. He was dismayed, however, that practically all the growth had come by transfer from other churches. He therefore proposed to his church that they "maximize discontinuity" by disbanding it for a period of ten months, after which they would launch a new church with a new name in a new location with a new mission of reaching secular people. Those who like lists, especially long lists, will love this book. The chapter titles are a list of 13 strategies for reinventing your church. In addition, many of the individual strategies consist of long lists as well. For example, he lists:

a) 14 observations on system thinking

b) 6 traditions to trade up for Tradition

c) 5 characteristics of an ineffectual apologetic and 5 new apologetic themes

d) 5 hunches on learning a new rhetoric

e) 16 conclusions on abandoning structures as they are outgrown

f) 7 characteristics of the new breed of leaders

g) A long (21!) list of problems in missions and a short (6) list of solutions

h) 5 core values of postmodernism

i) 15 ways of engaging postmodernism

A major thrust of this book has to do with better equipping Christians to engage meaningfully with unbelievers. He decries the "Christian nation" myth, which breeds an "us and them" mentality and makes us hostile to those to whom we should show compassion. For example, in his second strategy of redefining our mission, he insists that we need both more Christians and better Christians. By this, he means that the key to reaching unbelievers is to be better Christians, that is Christians who better incarnate the Gospel of Him Who was a "friend of publicans and sinners". Even more than seeker-sensitive churches, we need seeker-sensitive Christians. Instead, we often find Christians that are "seeker-hostile", as parodied in a Moody Monthly cover story entitled "Sinners in the Hands of Angry Christians".

McLaren has several excellent thoughts on leadership as well. The title of the chapter on leadership: "Save the Leaders" suggests the many perils that leaders face, and he expresses his regret that many qualified leaders have left, or are considering leaving, the ministry. Perhaps his most helpful insight on leadership is a list of reasons why imitating success in leadership can guarantee failure:

He also gives some very helpful guidelines for understanding and engaging postmodernism, which he sees as a reality with which we must come to terms. He writes: "Opposing postmodernism is as futile as opposing the English language. It's here. It's reality. It's the future." (p. 69)

McLaren questions the assertion that post-moderns don't believe in absolute truth. He suggests that the real issue may be one of absolute certainty. He further argues that post-moderns may care so much about truth that they are skeptical of the ability of fallible human beings to apprehend it or communicate it accurately. Seen from this point of view, it is easy to see how our certainty about knowing absolute truth can come across not as faith but arrogance. Furthermore, many post-moderns probably question our commitment to absolute truth because we seem to have such a hard time agreeing on what it is. He writes: "We have to distinguish between genuine Christianity and our (individual and various culture-encoded) versions of it." (p. 178)

There are several other very helpful chapters on topics such as leadership, church structure, apologetics, theology, and missions that make this book well worth the reading. It will be especially enlightening and helpful for those who are seeking to "go to" the lost and engaging them with the Gospel.

John Ed Robertson

November 27, 1998

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a unique practical book causing ministers every to- THINK!, August 11, 1999

By 

Mark Miller "rellim" (chicago, il) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Reinventing Your Church (Paperback)

Brian gives us a book that actually tackles the postmodern subject without losing the reader with philosophical jargon. I found that his approach is so practical because he is living it out. He writes out of experience and gives us a framework to enter this bold new world with a sense of optimism rather than fear, excitement rather than dread.

His writings on leadership and missions are a must read for every church practitioner.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Understanding the needs of the neXt generation, February 14, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Reinventing Your Church (Paperback)

This book is a "must read" for every church leader and Bible College student. If you are struggling with how to understand and communicate with those steeped in Postmodern thought this book has many answers. Its not just another mega-church "how to" book. Reinventing Your Church goes much farther. This book is a refreshing and practical look at what it will take to communicate Jesus to the world in the next generation. The chapter on missions is especially insightful.