The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church Book

This is the book I wish I had read several years ago! Easily understandable, practical and applicable! I just found a great way to post all the highlights from my kindle (116 of them!)

I feel like I have been playing catchup in trying to bring my older congregation to face the new realities of the world we live in. This book is very helpful.

Here are the highlights:

We also generally think that the present makes sense only in light of the past. Again, we need to check our thinking. The present makes clearest sense in light of the future. We humans write history by looking at the past. God creates history ahead of time.Read more at location 150

If you believe these things, you are operating in a world that has a short time left. Even worse, if you persist in acting on these assumptions, you could actually hinder the current mission of God.Read more at location 193 • Delete this highlight
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The wrong questions reflect an approach to the future that focuses on solving yesterday's problems. In my observation, most church leaders are preoccupied with the wrong questions. If you solve the wrong problems precisely, what have you accomplished? You have wasted a lot of energy and perhaps fooled yourself that you have done something significant. Each tough question reframes the issue in a way designed to prompt discussion within you as well as between you and other leaders in your constellation of influence.Read more at location 214 • Delete this highlight
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The current church culture in North America is on life support. It is living off the work, money, and energy of previous generations from a previous world order. The plug will be pulled either when the money runs out (80 percent of money given to congregations comes from people aged fifty-five and older) or when the remaining three-fourths of a generation who are institutional loyalists die off or both.Read more at location 241 • Delete this highlight
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The death of the church culture as we know it will not be the death of the church.Read more at location 245 • Delete this highlight
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The imminent demise under discussion is the collapse of the unique culture in North America that has come to be called "church." This church culture has become confused with biblical Christianity, both inside the church and out.Read more at location 246 • Delete this highlight
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As he hung on the cross Jesus probably never thought the impact of his sacrifice would be reduced to an invitation for people to join and to support an institution.Read more at location 249 • Delete this highlight
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So far the North American church largely has responded with heavy infusions of denial, believing the culture will come to its senses and come back around to the church.Read more at location 256 • Delete this highlight
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Many churches have withdrawn from the community. An alternate form of denial has been the attempt to fix the culture by flexing political and economic muscle.Read more at location 257 • Delete this highlight
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Does your town even have room in all the churches for 40 percent of the population? A friend of mine in a Southern Bible Belt town called every church in his town after Easter in 2001 and reported that only about 25 percent of the town attended church'on Easter!Read more at location 270 • Delete this highlight
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Most churches have actually just written them off, waiting for them to grow up and learn to like what the church has to offer.Read more at location 276 • Delete this highlight
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90 percent of kids active in high school youth groups do not go to church by the time they are sophomores in college. One-third of these will never return.Read more at location 293 • Delete this highlight
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A growing number of people are leaving the institutional church for a new reason. They are not leaving because they have lost faith. They are leaving the church to preserve their faith.Read more at location 295 • Delete this highlight
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The American culture no longer props up the church the way it did, no longer automatically accepts the church as a player at the table in public life, and can be downright hostile to the church's presence. The collapse I am detailing also involves the realization that values of classic Christianity no longer dominate the way Americans believe or behave.Read more at location 302 • Delete this highlight
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Sure, when there's a community disaster or a national calamity such as 9/11, people scurry to church. This is not because they have a sudden interest in church but because they have a huge need for God, and they still seek sacred spaces to pray.Read more at location 305 • Delete this highlight
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Having retreated into a diminishing corner for several hundreds of years, the North American church culture unfortunately now reflects the materialism and secularism of the modern era. Not only do we not need God to explain the universe, we don't need God to operate the church.Read more at location 318 • Delete this highlight
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The culture does not want the powerless God of the modern church.Read more at location 321 • Delete this highlight
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If we can pay attention we will eventually discover that not only will we not lose God in this emerging postmodern world, we will find him again!Read more at location 324 • Delete this highlight
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Faced with diminishing returns on investment of money, time, and energy, church leaders have spent much of the last five decades trying to figure out how to do church better.Read more at location 333 • Delete this highlight
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Church activity is a poor substitute for genuine spiritual vitality.Read more at location 344 • Delete this highlight
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The portfolio of skills that once gave them standing in the community of faith no longer distinguishes them, ensures their effectiveness, or guarantees their continued leadership position.Read more at location 349 • Delete this highlight
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Many church members feel they have been sold a bill of goods. They were promised that if they
would be a good church member, if they would discover their gifts, or join a small group, sign up for a church ministry, give to the building program, learn to clap or dance in worship, or attend this or that, they would experience a full and meaningful life. Trouble is, we don't have much evidence to support the assumption that all this church activity has produced more mature followers of Jesus. It has produced many tired, burned-out members who find that their lives mimic the lives and dilemmas of people in the culture who don't pay all the church rent.Read more at location 353 • Delete this highlight
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The faithful, maybe silently or not so silently, wonder when their ticket is going to be punched, when they are going to experience the changed life they've been promised and expected to experience at church. In North America, these people have been led to believe that their Christian life is all about the church, so this failure of the church not only creates doubt about the church, it also leads them to all kinds of doubt about God and their relationship with him.Read more at location 358 • Delete this highlight
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Many congregations and church leaders, faced with the collapse of the church culture, have responded by adopting a refuge mentality. This is the perspective reflected in the approach to ministry that withdraws from the culture, that builds the walls higher and thicker, that tries to hang on to what we've got, that hunkers down to wait for the storm to blow over and for things to get back to "normal" so the church can resume its previous place in the culture. Those who hold this perspective frequently lament the loss of cultural support for church values and adopt an "us-them" dichotomous view of the world. Those with a refuge mentality view the world outside the church as the enemy. Their answer is to live inside the bubble in a Christian subculture complete with its own entertainment industry. Evangelism in this worldview is about churching the unchurched, not connecting people to Jesus. It focuses on cleaning people up, changing their behavior so Christians (translation: church people) can be more comfortable around them.Read more at location 363 • Delete this highlight
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world'people outside the church think church is for church people, not for them.Read more at location 391 • Delete this highlight
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North American Christians think in terms of its institutional expression, the church, as opposed to thinking about Christianity in terms of a movement.Read more at location 397 • Delete this highlight
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Many church leaders confuse the downward statistics on church participation with a loss of spiritual interest in Americans.Read more at location 406 • Delete this highlight
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The North American church is suffering from severe mission amnesia. It has forgotten why it exists. The church was created to be the people of God to join him in his redemptive mission in the world. The church was never intended to exist for itself.Read more at location 470 • Delete this highlight
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We do not need to be mistaken about this: if the church refuses its missional assignment, God will do it another way. The church has, and he is.Read more at location 476 • Delete this highlight
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The movement Jesus initiated had power because it had at its core a personal life-transforming experience. People undergoing this conversion could not keep quiet about it. They had discovered meaning for their life and wanted other people to experience the same thing. They had a much more powerful spiritual tool at their disposal than coercion or legalism. They had grace and love.Read more at location 500 • Delete this highlight
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They don't trust religious institutions because they see them as inherently self-serving. So they are off on their own search for God.Read more at location 506 • Delete this highlight
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Feeling trapped in the collapse of the church culture, club members are huddling together in the dark and praying for God to rescue them from the mess they are in. This is the refuge mentality that pervades the mentality of many congregations and church leaders. Instead, the church needs to adopt the role of the rescue workers on the surface. They refused to quit, worked 24/7, and were willing to go to plan B or whatever it took to effect a rescue.Read more at location 523 • Delete this highlight
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Central to church growth teaching was an admonition that church leaders should assume responsibility for the growth of the church, and, as a corollary, if a church isn't growing it is being disobedient to God, falling short of his expectations.Read more at location 546 • Delete this highlight
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The culture began a decided march away from church values, and church leaders didn't know how to deal with a church that moved from a privileged position to a church in exile in an increasingly alien culture. Tending to church members who were bewildered at the cultural shifts was draining enough, but to add pressure to grow to the list of expectations of church leadership proved too much for many.Read more at location 554 • Delete this highlight
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With rare exception the "growth" here was the cannibalization of the smaller membership churches by these emerging superchurches.Read more at location 570 • Delete this highlight
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created thousands of "losers," pastors and church leaders who are not serving in high-profile, high-growth churches. Consequently, a large part of the leadership of the North American church suffers from debilitation and even depression fostered by a lack of significance. The army of God has a lot of demoralized leaders.Read more at location 575 • Delete this highlight
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either it has church growth as its engine (improving church health so that the church can grow'the point still is to grow) or it is an attempt to find another way to measure success other than bottom-line numbers growth (since this is not occurring in most places).Read more at location 582 • Delete this highlight
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we have the best churches men can build, but are still waiting for the church that only God can get credit for.Read more at location 587 • Delete this highlight
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The focus was on methodology'how to catch peoples' attention, sign 'em up, keep 'em busy, and get 'em to contribute money, talent, and energy to church efforts. There were church growth ratios to consider (how many dollars each parking place produced, how many contacts it took to close the deal on membership, how many relationships it took to "assimilate" someone, how many people could be served by a staff member, and so forth).Read more at location 605 • Delete this highlight
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Unfortunately, several decades of the church growth movement's emphasis on methodologies have conditioned church leaders to look for the next program, the latest "model," the latest fad in ministry programming to help "grow" the church.Read more at location 618 • Delete this highlight
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The target of ministry efforts of the refuge churches (who certainly have not adopted church growth methodologies) is also on the church. In these churches ministry is spent largely to provide hospice care for the dying church, to ease its pain as much as possible. The refuge churches maintain their denial through more club member activities, better club member facilities, and more staff to attend to club member needs.Read more at location 621 • Delete this highlight
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More energy expended on the church's survival or success is misplaced.Read more at location 624 • Delete this highlight
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Churches that understand the realities of the present future are shifting the target of ministry efforts from church activity to community transformation.Read more at location 633 • Delete this highlight
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what most churches practice won't fare too well outside because they are selling membership packages (institutional wrapping: membership, fellowship, member services). The world does not want what the typical North American church has to offer. We can keep trying to get them to want what we have or we can start offering what they need. They need what people always need: God in their lives. This spiritual reality is what makes this such a tough transition. The North American church culture is not spiritual enough to reach our culture. InRead more at location 635 • Delete this highlight
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Religious people don't see people; they see causes, behaviors, stereotypes, people "other" than them.Read more at location 655 • Delete this highlight
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The reason Jesus had trouble getting his disciples to see what he saw was simply this: they had grown up in church! They had been trained to be concerned with internal issues (keeping the law, and so forth) rather than on keeping their eyes on the harvest. Not that the harvest was totally out of their mind. It could just wait (four months more) until the internal needs could be met.Read more at location 656 • Delete this highlight
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Their message to people outside the bubble was: "Become like us (translated: believe like us, dress like us, vote like us, act like us, like what we like, don't like what we don't like). If you become like us (jump through cultural hoops and adopt ours), we will consider you for club membership."Read more at location 664 • Delete this highlight
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Will people need to become like us in order to hear the gospel?Read more at location 702 • Delete this highlight
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It is the expectation of Pharisees that people should adopt the church culture, including its lifestyle, if they want admittance.Read more at location 703 • Delete this highlight
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The assumption is that only people interested in church (the way we do it) are genuinely interested in God.Read more at location 705 • Delete this highlight
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Church leaders mostly whine about how the church is suffering under this cultural shift rather than making serious adjustments to make the church more available to people who are not a part of the church culture lifestyle anymore.Read more at location 711 • Delete this highlight
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The call to take the gospel to the streets is more than the call to think up some new evangelism or outreach program. The church's efforts at these generally fall way short because the approaches are devised by a bunch of church members trying to come up with ideas that will entice unchurched people to want to come to church.Read more at location 715 • Delete this highlight
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"We'll do an outreach project, but we expect that the end result is that people who choose to follow Jesus will follow him back to our church (or at least, some church)." Or I run into this attitude all the time: "We'll do this community stuff after we've handled all our internal needs, staffed all our programs, funded the services for club members, and paid salaries for ministers who spend their time almost exclusively on church members."Read more at location 724 • Delete this highlight
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In the future the church that "gets it" will staff to and spend its resources on strategies for community transformation.Read more at location 732 • Delete this highlight
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The consumer church sees resources plowed into community transformation as "diverted" from the church (read: institutional needs and programs for members). Many pastors trying to reorient church focus and resources to the needs of those outside the church run into resistance from church members who view this as a reduction of member services.Read more at location 735 • Delete this highlight
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We will see more and more people, in the church and out, who have the call, the ability, and the finances to resource their own ministry passions in the community.Read more at location 748 • Delete this highlight
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How many "evangelism programs" have you encountered in which sharing the gospel assumes no relationship with the customer and Jesus is sold like soap?Read more at location 800 • Delete this highlight
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They listened because the New Yorkers were persuaded that Cathy and her fellow cleaners believed something so strongly that it had caused them to inconvenience themselves in service to people.Read more at location 814 • Delete this highlight
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We feel we need to convict people of their sin and cause them to repent and change their lives. WeRead more at location 830 • Delete this highlight
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Club members prefer to bullhorn people rather than engage them personally and up close. This approach fails to earn the privilege to challenge people with the truth because we haven't proved we are their champions. Instead, we have played the Pharisee role of accusing and location 843

This is what evangelism sounds like in conversation with pre-Christians. "I don't know this Jesus you are talking about, but the way you talk about him, he must be a great piece of work."Read more at location 876

How hard is it to talk about the people we love? location 878

we must nurture the relationship side of our faith. Fundamentally this is what will capture the curiosity

There are many more but his is all I have the space for in this review...