The Return

  Review: Churchless: Understanding Today’s Unchurched and How to Connect with Them Barna Group; George Barna and David Kinnaman, General Editors Tyndale Momentum 2014   This books validates the trends in declining church attendance in a way that I think is helpful.   How so? They spent years investigating the people that make up the unchurched and dechurched groups.   The findings are revealed in this book in simple narratives and graph formats with each chapter concluded with a few questions for the reader to consider.    Probably the most surprising finding for me was that 1 in 6 unchurched Americans is a born again Christian.   Yes, they do give the definition of born again and it is precisely what most believe it to be.   So what is going on?   Why the disconnect?   No spoilers here, but they do explore those questions and reveal some interesting information.   The book also discusses other groups too like th...

Review: Ministering to Problem People in Your Church: What to Do with Well-Intentioned Dragons Marshall Shelley Bethany House Publishers 2013 This book covers most of the people issues anyone has encountered if they have hung around the assembled church folks for any length of time.   Some of us have been on both sides of this one, regrettably.   Not fun from anybody’s perspective.   And that is the reason that this book needs to read.   By all of us.    What this author describes may be told from the church perspective, but I think you’d meet the same challenges elsewhere.   But since this is for ministers we’ll stay in that realm.     His list of Dragon Species (42) is pretty thorough and he will introduce the reader to several of them in the reading. My favorite, if I can use that term in that way, involves the charter member’s reaction to a growing church and all the tactics that person used to stay in control. ...