When I started to read this book, I had absolutely no grounds for either thinking I would love the book or hate the book. I just wanted to read it. I actually had never heard of it as I am not a Senior Pastor, but what caught my attention is the desire to see our church focus on what God has the church here for. Not our programs, events, etc. but just literally..."Why did God leave the church here on this earth?" I thought this book would aid in this understanding.
What is interesting is a lot more study and data went into this book than I had really thought. From the sounds of it they had over 400 churches do surveys, they went and spoke to different church leaders in both person and over the phone (from what I can gather). This truly was a big deal. The whole basis of this book is to see what "kind" of churches are surviving our post Christian era. The reason this thought came to mind is that Eric Geiger had started to take a simpler model for his own church that he is the Executive Pastor at and see if they had "caught on to something."
This book is very well written on how to get your church from a busy program oriented church to a more simple focused church on what the church feels as though Christ has called them to be. Here is what I mean. It is a top down approach instead of a bottom up approach. You are to start with the process that new converts/new members are to start at in the church and bring them through to maturing believers in Christ. Whatever you believe this looks like in steps you need to start there first. So, an example might be that you believe everyone should "Know Jesus, then start maturing in their faith, serving God and then seeking the lost" then you should design everything you do to correspond with each one of those steps. If one of your programs doesn't fit, then throw it out. It might be hard at first, but this is to really keep the church on mission. Also, if you have too many programs for one of the steps, it needs to be thrown out as well. This is meant to stop churches from doing a lot of things mediocre to doing a smaller amount of things very well. This is the very basic idea of this book. But I just hit on the tip of the ice berg.
While I believe the book is well written and well documented I believe that they would like their stats to be better than they actually are. When they sent out the surveys they had statements and had the church leader respond with, "Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Mildly Disagree, Mildly Agree, Agree, Strongly Agree." They then took the stats and wrote a book based on each finding.
Here is my issue with some of the stats. They aren't constant and not very overwhelming at places. They aren't constant because when the leaders responded weakly to a question they might include, "We found that vibrant churches agreed to some degree to the following 'X' amount of the time." When the leaders responded strongly then they would say something like, "We found that vibrant churches agreed or strongly agreed to following 'X' amount of time." So, the findings were all over the board in some instances. This didn't happen much, but enough to catch my attention.
The other thing that I found odd, was that they were overly impressed with a statement even if only a minority of the vibrant church leaders agreed with a statement. Let me give you an example:
We asked church leaders if they have a system in place to evaluate if people are progressing through their process. Of the vibrant churches 27% strongly agreed or agreed with this compared to 9% of the comparison churches. Vibrant church leaders agreed or strongly agreed three times that of comparison church leaders that they measure the effectiveness of their process.
This means that 73% of the vibrant churches weren't "sold" that this was important but this is supposed to wow me because it is three times that of comparison churches? Not really. This was discouraging that this was thought to be overwhelming evidence on some of these questions.
With all that said. This book is still very very good. I really enjoyed the practicality of the book and the effort that Eric and Thom put into to find what is being put into place in churches across America. I actually fully believe in what they are talking about, I just don't believe what they have to say about every single question asked is as overwhelming as they would like us to believe. This happened a lot in the book, but it wasn't the focus of the book, so I can look past it.
I would really recommend this to any church that feels as though they are doing a lot, but accomplishing nothing. Lots of programs, but few converts and few people being changed for the glory of God. Very easy read, very practical and something that you won't look to and say, "impossible." Highly Recommended
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