What If You Could Change the World without Changing Your Daily Routine?
When you've been transformed by God's love, you can't help but want others to experience the same grace and freedom. But how do you share it without scaring them away or offending them? For most Christians, 'evangelism' is an intimidating word that suggests handing out tracts to strangers or doing other awkward things.
But what if there was a more organic, more authentic way to share your faith with your friends, neighbors, and coworkers?
Dave and Jon Ferguson have found five simple, straightforward practices that will allow any believer to do just that. And by consistently living them out, you can affect not just individual lives but your entire neighborhood and community-one person at a time.
In Hero Maker you will learn how to bring real change to your church and community by developing the practical skills to help others reach their leadership potential. Discover how to activate gifts, help others take ownership, and develop a simple scorecard for measuring your kingdom-building progress.
"God, if you're real, make yourself real to me."
Each of us spends our lives on a journey toward God. Yet often our most deeply felt longings-for meaning, for love, for significance-end up leading us away from, instead of toward, our Creator and the person he made us to be.
Finding Your Way Back to God shows you how to understand and listen to your longings in a whole new way. It's about waking up to who you really are, and daring to believe that God wants to be found even more than you want to find him. It's about making the biggest wager of your life as you ask God to make himself known to you. And it's about watching what happens next.
The church is on the verge of some tremendous changes. Contemporary church growth, despite its many blessings to believers, has failed to stem the decline of Christianity in the West. These times require a different kind of church---a church where every person is living a mission-sent life.
The Bible uses the word apostles for Jesus' followers---that is, people sent on Jesus' behalf. In every existing form of the contemporary church---from the mega to the multi to the incarnational---some churches have taken the idea of apostolic mission seriously. Successful church leaders are discovering how to shift their existing resources and church structures into more adaptable forms to reach their communities.
In this book, Alan Hirsch and David Ferguson share inspiring stories about leaders who have diagnosed their churches' failure to embrace a biblical model of mission and have moved toward a fuller expression of the gospel. On the Verge will help pastors and church leaders discover how these forerunners and their insights are launching a new apostolic movement---and how any church can get involved.
Jesus challenges us to heal the hurting, feed the hungry, include the lonely, and help people find their way back to God. Most people listen to the missional challenge of Jesus as if it were a good motivational talk---something to inspire us, but not something we can actually achieve. Others hear the challenge of Jesus and become frustrated with how little they've done. The mission Jesus gave us was not just meant to inspire us, nor was it intended to frustrate us. Jesus gave us this mission because he wants us to actually do it!
Within each person lies a potential movement that could change the world. The beginning of such a movement is simple: you living a life as a Christ follower that is worth reproducing. You will reproduce what you say. You will reproduce what you do. You will reproduce what you don't do. You will reproduce who you are.
Each of us has the ability to catalyze a movement that can accomplish the mission of Jesus. Some of us have the ability to impact 10 people; some of us have influence over hundreds, while others have the potential to reach thousands. The Rapidly Reproducing Church will present a Biblical strategy that explains how every Christ follower can successfully 'reproduce' himself and maximize his impact for the kingdom of God.
The purpose of this book is to communicate a simple strategy that will engage every Christ follower and challenge every leader to become a reproducing leader. Our hope is that every church will become a reproducing church. This book will lay out a brief, but solid theology for a reproducing strategy and then give very practical 'how-to's' for reproducing Christ followers, leaders, artists, groups/teams, venues, sites, churches and networks of churches. Weaved throughout this book will be the amazing story of Community Christian Church, started by five friends who used these reproducing strategies to grow one of the most influential churches in the U.S and develop a network of reproducing churches.
Community Christian Church embraced the Big Idea and everything changed. They decided to avoid the common mistake of bombarding people with so many 'little ideas' that they suffered overload. They also recognized that leaders often don't insist that the truth be lived out to accomplish Jesus' mission. Why? Because people's heads are swimming with too many little ideas, far more than they can ever apply.
The Big Idea can help you creatively present one laser-focused theme each week to be discussed in families and small groups.
The Big Idea shows how to engage in a process of creative collaboration that brings people together and maximizes missional impact.
The Big Idea can energize a church staff and bring alignment and focus to many diverse church ministries.
This book shows how the Big Idea has helped Community Christian Church better accomplish the Jesus mission and reach thousands of people in nine locations and launch a church planting network with partner churches across the country.
This book is part of the Leadership Network Innovation Series.
