"The Purpose Driven(R) Church has brought focus and direction to more pastors and church leaders than you can count. What a gift "--John Ortberg, bestselling author Every church is driven by something. Tradition, finances, programs, personalities, events, seekers, and even buildings can each be the controlling force in a church. But Rick Warren believes that in order for a church to be healthy it must become a purpose-driven church, built around the five New Testament purposes given to the church by Jesus. "The issue is church health, not church growth " declares Warren. "If your church is...

Many people today, especially among emerging generations, don't resonate with the church and organized Christianity. Some are leaving the church and others were never part of the church in the first place. Sometimes it's because of misperceptions about the church. Yet often they are still spiritually open and fascinated with Jesus. This is a ministry resource book exploring six of the most common objects and misunderstandings emerging generations have about the church and Christianity. The objections come from conversations and interviews the church has had with unchurched twenty and...

Discover a Proven Approach to Raising Your Church's Evangelistic Temperature Evangelism. It's one of the highest values in the church. So why do so few churches put real effort into it? Maybe it's because we don't understand the evangelistic potential of the church well enough to get excited about it. Becoming a Contagious Church will change that. Revised and updated, this streamlined edition dispels outdated preconceptions and reveals evangelism as it really can be. What's more, it walks you through a 6-Stage Process and includes a brand-new 6-Stage Process assessment tool for taking your...

Author Alastair Ferrie brings more than thirty years experience of preaching and working with growing churches. He currently works in Dundee, Scotland, where there has been more than 100 percent growth in two years of ministry. One of the greatest needs of the growing church is a program of aftercare for new Christians.

"Step-by-Step" is a 13-week follow up...

While others lament the declining attendance of mainline churches and blame it on an out-of-date tradition, Jackson Carroll offers a more hopeful perspective, arguing that they key to future vitality can be found in the same tradition. According to Carroll, the tension between tradition and change has always been part of the Protestant heritage, and he argues that now is a time when being faithful requires adaptation.

Based on years of experience as a pastor and professor of theology, John Leith reflects on the dilemma of the church today as primarily "a crisis of faith." He states that renewal is found within Scripture and the tradition of a believing, worshiping community--in hearing the word of God, particularly in preaching, in teaching, in the sacraments, and in Christian conversation.

How is your church going to grow? Will it grow by fine-tuning worship, the preaching, the Christian education programs, and the like? Or will it grow by making strategic assessments of the people it is most likely to reach and focusing the ministries of the church on the goal of offering the gospel to those people? In this brief, practical book Harold Percy helps congregations answer these critical questions about their mission and ministry.

After assisting the reader with the crucial issue of motivation, Percy lays out the four main groups of people that any congregation can and...

In this helpful book, Kent R. Hunter provides clear, practical guidance not only on how to diagnose the difficulties a church is experiencing, but also on how to implement simple, direct strategies for change. He outlines the basic questions a church must ask itself if it is to identify its problems and opportunities for growth, and--most importantly--offers direct suggestions on how a congregation's leaders can move and motivate its members to hear and follow the call to a deeper experience of mission and discipleship.

Move Your Church to Action will help readers...

The temptation to focus only on their own internal problems and issues is powerful for congregations. Without realizing it, even churches that have a long tradition of outreach and social involvement become centered on issues of institutional survival and preservation. Worst of all are congregations that adopt a "fortress mentality," addressing the larger community rarely, and only in the "language of Zion" when they do. This tendency to isolation and insularity flies directly in the face of the gospel imperative to spread the good news of Jesus Christ.

Christian congregations...

A moving testimony to how a church can experience rebirth by discerning its core mission.

The key to becoming a Spirit-energized, people-loving, life-giving, community-transforming congregation, says James A. Harnish, is really very simple. All you have to do is be willing to die. This book describes how God calls each congregation to a specific mission, how God grants discernment to understand what that mission is, and how God enables the congregation to die to its entrenched attitudes and behaviors in order to be resurrected to a new life of ministry and witness.