Prepares Christian congregations to fulfill their basic function - to make disciples who make a difference for Jesus Christ.

This book is about helping "stuck" and "unstuck" churches either become unstuck or constantly improve their ministry of making disciples. This book is designed to help church leaders make profound changes in the way they do ministry or constantly practice methodological innovation/improvement to be effective in creating disciples in their churches.

Here are twenty tested church-growth strategies that have been implemented by church consultant William Easum with more than 4,000 church leaders across the United States and Canada. The Church Growth Handbook provides diagnostic tools, which now can be used with The Complete Ministry Audit, also by Easum.

Before long, many of our Christian congregations will be perceived as sentimental creatures who are studied primarily as skeletons in the halls of museums. The church is in danger of becoming a dinosaur, according to church consultant William Easum. We live in a secular or unchurched world, but the church continues to develop ministries as if the church were in charge of a churched society. Dancing with Dinosaurs will help pastors and church leaders to plant culturally relevant congregations, explore first-century Christian communities as the primary model for viable congregations,...

For many congregational and denominational leaders, the goal for churches experiencing declining worship attendance is to turn those congregations around. The "turnaround church" is one that has stagnated or is in decline. The old trends are reversed, new members are added, and everyone rejoices in this story of a congregation restored to health and vitality. But what if the metaphors of decline, stagnation, and loss of health just aren't getting to the problem? What if the situation is much worse than what those ways of describing it imply? What if the congregation is spiritually dead? The...