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Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens
written by Neil Cole
Studio : Jossey-Bass
by Jossey-Bass
Publisher : Jossey-Bass
Released : 2005-09-08
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780787981297
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 44 reviews)
List Price : $23.95
Our Price : $12.55
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ISBN13: 9780787981297
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Condition: NEW
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Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Product Description |
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Churches have tried all kinds of ways to attract new and younger members - revised vision statements, hipper worship, contemporary music, livelier sermons, bigger and better auditoriums. But there are still so many people who aren't being reached, who don't want to come to church. And the truth is that attendance at church on Sundays does not necessarily transform lives; God's presence in our hearts is what changes us. Leaders and laypeople everywhere are realizing that they need new and more powerful ways to help them spread God's Word. According to international church starter and pastor Neil Cole, if we want to connect with young people and those who are not coming to church, we must go where people congregate. Cole shows readers how to plant the seeds of the Kingdom of God in the places where life happens and where culture is formed - restaurants, bars, coffeehouses, parks, locker rooms,and neighborhoods. Organic Church offers a hands-on guide for demystifying this new model of church and shows the practical aspects of implementing it. |
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A Great Introduction to Organic Missional Church |
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This book is a great introduction to what it means to be a part of the organic missional church focused on reaching the lost. For far too long the church has been focused on gathering Christians together to go through religious motions, many of which are not found anywhere in the Scriptures. Neil Cole does a great job of showing how the Gospel of Jesus is all that is needed to reach the lost, change lives and start Organic Churches everywhere, Churches that are simple enough to be reproduced with real multiplication. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in "church planting" or anyone who wants to reach the lost in their community. |
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Hard Evidence the Young Adult Emergent Church Movement is Spontaneously Growing Beyond the UK---In the US, and Elsewhere. |
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This is the perfect prescription for North American church leaders addicted to programs and gimmicks. The next generation of Christianity looks more like a movement and Neil Cole and his far-stretching, flat "organization" (read organism) is doing it. Cole helps the reader think in the movement paradigm, reflecting the Book of Acts type of viral movement, where Christianity becomes contagious. One of the strengths of Organic Church is that it breathes missional posturing--from sensitively selecting people groups by strategy to positioning institutionalism as a low priority. The Christian Movement that is coming is not about buildings and budgets, but about authentic relationships meeting in marketplace venues. This book is a prenatal look at the Movement not yet born, but coming into your consciousness soon. |
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Excellent Resource |
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This book took ideas i have thought and put them into concepts and principles i could understand and act on. It was easy to read, moving through the concepts without drudging through theology. I have already recommended it to several friends. |
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The subtitle says it all |
There is a paradigm shift happening all around us in Western Christianity. People are beginning to thirst after learning how to "be" the church instead of just "going" to church.
Neil Cole in his book gives us some very practical examples and advice on how to go out into the lost and hurting world and engage them where the live. How to find that "person of peace" Luke 10:6, the "good soil" Matt 13:8 and then what to do once God reveals that person to us.
Neil interweaves examples from popular culture movies and the parables (stories) Jesus tells to drive the point home about learning how to be the church in our culture.
Neil also uses many examples from agriculture to bring home his points. My favorite is the story of the farmer, the barn and the harvest. You need to read the book and feel the impact of this story on your life.
This book is not about a "model" or "way" to do church, but about learning what Jesus taught about sending out, identifying those ready for the word and then releasing them with a total dependence on the Holy Spirit to continue the work of building the kingdom.
Read this book. It will impact how you view disciple making. |
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The future of the church |
It's about time we acknowledged that the church in the Western world basically is not working. Lost in politics, humanism, consumerism, and lovelessness, it simply has no power to attract anyone to Christ, and more often rather has become a stumbling block.
Ironically, it is in oppressed settings such as China and Africa that the church is thriving. Is it the element of persecution per se that accounts for this?
Not necessarily. Rather, hostile cultures force the Church to cling to her relational roots. Ecclesiology and polity remain primitive and effective, impractical doctrinal distinctions remain an unaffordable luxury, and the focus remains intensely on Jesus, brotherly love, and evangelism.
Neil Cole has written, from experience, a book that describes what the Western Church looks like when it gets back to basics. Shorn of the trappings, what is left? A church that in my view very much resembles that which we read of in the New Testament itself.
Neil makes a great case for taking the church to the harvest field, and for turning converts immediately into workers. And he very insightfully finds repeated, strong Biblical basis for doing just that. He also dispenses gems of practical evangelistic wisdom from the Scriptures that I had never begun to come across before.
Really, what has our adoption of corporate structures and strategies brought us? They work when selling products to customers with disposable income, but not when we're trying to engender a life-transforming and costly level of devotion to the Savior.
Many times I was in tears reading of the power in simple relational church - even boiled down to the essential two or three gathered, with Jesus in their midst. The power to meet people where they really live. The power to meet needs and to exchange emptiness for love and purpose. The power to overcome deep darkness.
Time and again, there would be a community where darkness reigned. One person was found as a beachhead, a church was started virtually on the fly, and conversions and transformations became epidemic.
And epidemic is the correct word. This book is about the viral spread of Christianity, the kind of dynamicism we read about with longing in the Acts and the Letters. We've seen the power of viral "marketing" in the spread of interactive internet sites such as youttube and myspace. It's about time that the Church reclaimed what it itself pioneered all those centuries ago!
Maybe then we won't have tragedies such as people rejected from churches because they can't go along with building programs or clerical career paths, and then spending their days wondering where the church of Jesus Christ might be - or if it even exists at all.
This is a very well-written book, and a very compelling read. I could quibble about a few minor Biblical points, but it's not worth it. This book is headed for the very top echelon of my favorites list. If you've hit a dead end with the way church is traditionally done, I highly recommend that you give this a read. It is among a crop of recent such books I am reading, and is the best yet. I believe its precepts are entirely Biblical, are close to the heart of God, and indeed are critical for such a time as this, as we see the church ebbing and Christ marginalized.
As such, what this book relates will be life-transforming for those who are serious about moving forward with God. And be warned, if you are ripe for this message, I doubt the church's traditional structures will ever satisfy you again.
Just a fantastic job, Neil. How do we get something going in NY?
To His great glory. |
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