The church has always been potentially just one generation away from extinction. But now, with a generation of under-thirty-five-year-olds turning away from institutional expressions of Christianity, churches in the West recognize that they face a challenge that is more urgent and radical than it has been for many generations. In this acclaimed study, the authors identify some of the major storm centres through which churches must navigate, not in order to return to a previously more tranquil world, but to enter an entirely new one. They look at mission, church structures, developing new leaders and mentoring, worship, spirituality and evangelism, and ask how our ministry must change in order to serve a new generation of Christians.

A 2001 Christianity Today Book of the Year What will the church be next? CHANGE IS NOW. Competition from nontraditional and Eastern religions join with the pressures of both modernism and postmodernism to squeeze Christianity. While new church models have sprung up to meet these challenges, they each have strengths and limitations. Eddie Gibbs, a well-known church strategist and practitioner, candidly analyzes these models while proposing nine areas in which the church will need to transform to be biblically true to its message and its mission to the world. With vigor and insight Gibbs shows how we can move from living in the past to engaging the present from being market driven to being mission oriented from following celebrities to encountering saints from holding dead orthodoxy to nurturing living faith from attracting a crowd to seeking the lost Here is a book that brings together deep understanding of the quantum shifts taking place in our culture along with concrete suggestions for implementing a proactive mission strategy.

The Gospels record how Jesus approached an extraordinary collection of individuals and treated each with great dignity and respect. No-one loved like him or saw so deeply and clearly into the soul of each person he encountered. Thirty readings to help us learn who he is and how to share his good news. With contemporary meditations by Brian Draper.