Leadership Network commissioned a study by Ed Stetzer (who heads up LifeWay Research) on church planting, i.e., the process of getting a new church started. Leadership Network wanted to find out what the best practices were in church planting and uncover the common threads among them. This book will use research findings to inform, guide, and even catalyze today's many church planting leaders. It will show them how to form a movement and will hopefully also inspire them to do so. It will address their felt needs of what to do next in their church planting strategies, in light of research on what's actually working best.
Are you tired of reading another news story about Christians supposedly acting at their worst?
Today there are too many examples of those claiming to follow Christ being caustic, divisive, and irrational, contributing to dismissals of the Christian faith as hypocritical, self-interested, and politically co-opted. What has happened in our society? One short outrageous video, whether it is true or not, can trigger an avalanche of comments on social media.
Welcome to the new age of outrage.
In this groundbreaking book featuring new survey research of evangelicals and their relationship to the age of outrage, Ed Stetzer offers a constructive way forward. You won’t want to miss Ed’s insightful analysis of our chaotic age, his commonsensical understanding of the cultural currents, and his compelling challenge to Christians to live in a refreshingly different way.
**Contact Customer Service for Additional Material**
See yourself, your church, your world... differently.
Ed Stetzer turns conventional Christian living on its head with this inspiring, instructional guide to life in the kingdom of God—not just church, not just check marks, but a full, everyday, out-there adventure of worship, lifestyle, relationships, and service. It’s about living so confident in God’s eternal promises that you can live every moment at His complete disposal, deployed by His Spirit to make creative, courageous inroads into the heart of a dying culture. Join the army of fellow followers who are rescuing lives, changing assumptions, and subverting by God’s grace a world gone horribly wrong.
Churches committed to following Christ’s example want this world changed for the sake of eternity. While the supernatural piece of making that happen goes without saying, how does a body of believers do its part to be in that “sweet spot” where true spiritual transformation occurs? In Transformational Church, best-selling research authors Ed Stetzer and Thom S. Rainer survey fifty thousand churches—then narrow the scope down to five hundred congregations—for a qualitative answer. Their book, the most comprehensive study of the modern American church to date, contains a wealth of indispensable new data, nuanced insights, and how-to guidance, all centered on this key finding: “Transformational churches make disciples whose lives are being transformed by the gospel, so that people engage the culture around them for its ultimate transformation. Deeply committed to the essential foundations of discipleship (worship, community, and mission), transformational churches practice their faith and make disciples through vibrant leadership, prayerful dependence upon God, and relational intentionality. And they do so paying mind to their unique context and with a missionary mindset.”
Lost and Found is written to the church, using often-surprising results from the copious research here to strike another nerve and break some long established assumptions about how to effectively engage the lost. Leading missiologist Ed Stetzer and his associates first offer a detailed investigation of the four younger unchurched types. With a better understanding of their unique experiences, they next clarify the importance each type places on community, depth of content, social responsibility, and making cross-generational connections in relation to spiritual matters. Most valuably, Lost and Found finds the churches that have learned to reach unchurched young adults by paying close attention to those key markers vetted by the research. Their exciting stories will make it clear how your church can bring searching souls from this culture to authentic faith in Christ.
