Through stories from real churches and real people, "Adapt to Thrive" offers an engaging metaphor for the adaptive development of God's creation. This call to action reveals how your church must identify itself as a unique species, modify its dysfunctional behaviors, and multiply its transformational influence in the community.

Church after church faces eventual death while helplessly lamenting its fate. What perversity is at work that causes those who sincerely love the church to become obstacles to growth? Like the apostle Paul, churches don t always do the things they want, but instead they do the very thing they hate. Why? While the theological answer is sin at work in us, the organizational answer may just be that members of dying churches unconsciously find a payoff in the church s decline. They are tempted by church."