I first mentioned Church Unique when I posted about it on my facebook page and have been chomping at the bit to share a review of it. Well, I’ve finally found a day off to share with you some insight. For the most part I really learned a lot from this book. It challenges a lot of the perspectives I have been taught about strategic planning, casting vision, and creating a missional culture within your church – but it also confirmed a lot of thoughts that have been rolling around my head.
Below are some quotes from the book that caught my attention. Just because I mention them does not mean I agree with them. Some I agree with, some I don’t, but all of them got me thinking. If you are involved in church leadership at any level, I totally recommend this book.
- reaching the surrounding community should be innate, driven by the church’s DNA rather than programming
- The reality is that most people don’t think; they only rearrange their prejudices. Real thinking can be disruptive to the status quo and requires a great deal of courage.
- The pastor on Sunday morning no longer speaks to a monolithic culture with shared experiences and anchor points….it is increasingly difficult to discern and then lead from a common DNA
- (Defining the “stuck church”) They simply define their vision in terms of glorifying and propagating the past.
- …strategic planning is no longer the preferred tool for leading the church into the future…change now happens so fast that the planning processes of yesteryear are obsolete.
- Sending is not something you do, but being sent is something you are.
- This is exactly what happens when church people resist change in a program. They simply don’t want their personal value to drop to zero (who does?)
- Would you rather rally a hundred people into one effective initiative, or have a hundred people going in a hundred directions? Inadvertently most churches tend toward the latter. When they do, they often sacrifice their cooperative potential for the well-intended whims of the individual.
- Missional leaders need to polarize this same reality for their people. It should be clear that the most important people are those outside the church.
- …differentiate or don’t exist…people desrve to know why your church is special, what God is doing uniquly through your leadership, and why they should sacrificially contribute.
- You walk into a church you have never attended and pick up a guest brochure at a welcome center. On the inside flap you see a nice mission statement. Then on the next page (and the rest of the brochure) you see umpteen ministries, listed from A to Z. As you stare at the brochure, a paralytic effect ensues. “What in the world do I do next?” you momentarily wonder. Then you choose to do nothing at all.
- Growing people grow people. Consuming people consume programs.
- …stop vision casting to making the church better and show people how the church makes life better…”Now is the time” is the mantra of the leader\
- Everyone in your organization is in one of four categories
- Stowaways: people who don’t know the vision and don’t want to contribute
- Passengers: people who do know the vision and don’t want to contribute
- Crew: people who do know the vision and do want to contribute
- Pirates: people who don’t know the vision and do want to contribute
- To want to contribute and to not agree with the vision is an act of piracy, whether the person has harmful intentions or not
- role of worship is to keep the community so God-centered that the euphoria of being used by God doesn’t replace intimacy with God Himself.
