Customer Reviews

We Are Here Now: A New Missional Era

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This is an unusual book. On the one hand, it is a kind of cultural and congregational study in the traditional vein of materials that addresses change in the church. Keifert assesses "where we are", and is a participant in the on-going missional church, post-Christendom thing. The book is helpful as a summary of that discussion.

But it is also a description of the way Partnership for Missional Church (PMC) works with clusters, judicatories, and congregations to effect change, to consult for missional church, asking the key question, "What is God's preferred and promised future for our local church?"

As a springboard for reflection on the local congregation and its ministry, this is profoundly helpful. Since it is the description of a consulting process, it does not work well as a "how-to" book, since a finding of Keifert's is that partnership for missional church is effected most successfully when it is a partnership of 12-15 churches.

Keifert writes, "To review, the purpose of this book is to describe a journal of spiritual discernment that is done communally within local congregations, among 12-16 partner churches, and with still other partners."

Probably the most important insight from the book (there are an incredible number of these insights in the book- it is VERY rewarding): development of mission/vision for a congregation takes place in the late stage of a 4-6 year process of discernment that begins with "dwelling in the Word," includes experimentation, and then only begins after considerable time spent doing these things, as well as "listening each other into free speech."

This is a crucial insight, because a lot of mission/vision resources will start you right away writing a mission/vision statement, without any insight into whether those will be effective over the long term, or appropriated culturally within the congregation.

I recommend this book. It bears more and more fruit through multiple readings. Our leadership team is reading it this summer as part of discernment and dwelling in the Word process.

This is simply a wonderful book for every one who are interested in missional transformation. Prof Keifert has the rare gift to integrate theology thinking and practical matters on the missional journey. Almost on every page the reader will find case studies that connects you in a real and practical way. Nico Simpson's wonderful drawings are much more than illustrations, they intive and stir the reader in a playfull way to re-think. The depth of research and years of experience as a church consultant, makes the book honest. The insights are well tested and carefully described. May be this is the reason why the book excites clergy and laity when they read it. Leadership teams in congregations that used We are here now! for a team reading, was challenged and recieved new hope that their congregation can become missional. May this book find a huge audience word wide!

There is much to commend We Are Here Now. It is compact, well organized, well written, and unerringly linear in its focus and presentation of a promised journey to church renewal. To use Keifert's words, it is deliberate, sustained, and critical -- in both senses of the word. Innumerable little line drawings lighten the load of the serious topic of church renewal. There is a 30 entry Glossary of technical terms and words used in unusual ways. There are some technical discourses that require the reader to slow down, read carefully, or re-read paragraphs for clarity, a necessity for him to communicate these matters. There is a lot of material in 152 pages. Too, there are some real jewels in the book: it's about multigenerational change; worship is public witness; healthy congregations are NOT families; "excellent mistakes;" the future as merely continuation of the present; and we are here now. There is no index, always a failing if a book is to be used for study and no foot-/endnotes. The Table of Contents is not detailed, but there is a 55+ entry Bibliography and a one page biography of Dr. Keifert, including his e-address at C.I.I., his corporate entity.
However, there is some to disapprove. If Keifert has an appreciation of other approaches, strengths and perspectives, as he says he does [17-18], it is not demonstrable here. He is consistently critical and dismissive of all but his methods. I heard "my way or highway" in We Are Here Now. He tries to associate his method(s) with the Apostolic Age, but there are sparse Biblical references or explicit or apparent implicit connections to the early church. Keifert is critical, if not hypercritical, of modernity, but this book and, moreover, his methods are thoroughly modern and based on social science, specifically family systems theory. The book is highly technical. There are acronyms, technical jargon, 4 Phases, and the number 5 abounds in his 'how to' lists, but he is critical of lists in others' models.
From reading We Are Here Now, one might conclude there are two satisfactory spiritual disciplines, prayer and its Dwelling in the Word into free speech technique. Objectification of people is reprehensible, but to connect use of census and demographic data to the words "a very bad moral habit of modernity," as Keifert does, is unfortunate hyperbole.
I cannot recommend this book to anyone, unless one is looking for much of what's wrong with the church renewal book genre. Dr. Keifert is a pundit, but not a good one in We Are Here Now.

This is a 152 page advertisement for the consulting group the author has put together. That may not be the author's overt intent, but it is the way the book came off to me He makes up obscure terms or borrows them from systems theory and a variety of other disciplines. Some of them he capitalizes and uses repeatedly throughout the book. Those that he has made part of his consulting package get particularly large play.

Or maybe it is all just over my head. Church should not be this complex.

But, to the extent that I understand where he is trying to lead the church, I think he is right.

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