Mark Driscoll, one of my favorite contemporary preachers and the pastor of Mars Hill - Seattle, recently released his second book. Titled Confessions of a Reformission Rev., the book chronicles Driscoll's exploits as he founded a church in one of the least churched cities in America. While I am only through a quarter of the book, it contains some gems of godly advice to church planters and emerging church leaders.
Here are just a few that stood out to me:
"From high school graduation to age 25 there is a 42% in weekly church attendance and a 58% decline from age 18 to 29. That represents about 8,000,000 twentysomethings alive today who were active church-goers as teenagers but who will no longer be active in a church by their 30th birthday."
"The emerging church welcomes the tension of holding in one closed hand the unchanging truth of evangelical Christian theology and holding in one open hand the many cultural ways of showing and speaking Christian truth as a missionary to America."
"I believe that the megachurch phenomenon is not over but rather just beginning, that the "experts" are simply wrong, and that the future trend will be toward the extremes of very small and very large churches."
"Leaders of emerging and missional churches must work from the conviction that comes from God and his Word instead of from the guilt that comes from people and their words. Leaders must frequently decide between offending Christ or a Christian, and Ghost-guided biblical conviction alone must determine the duties of church leaders."
"Dogs are idiotic ideas, stinky styles, stupid systems, failed facilities, terrible technologies, loser leaders, and pathetic people. Most churches know who and what their dogs are but simply lack the courage to pull the trigger and shoot their dogs."
"Nehemiah had his people carry a trowel in one hand to build and a sword in the other to defend their work. As we build our churches in a culture no less hostile than that of Nehemiah, we too must learn how to both build a missional church and defend it from Satan, demons and evildoers."
"Attractional churches need to transform their people from being consumers in the church to being missionaries outside of the church. Missional churches need to gather crowds to their church so that hard words of repentance can be preached in an effort to expose people's hearts."
"Pushing through the 350 barrier can also be very difficult, because it usually requires that the church transition to multiple pastors, multiple services, and multiple communities."
"As long as there are varying cultures of people, there will be multiple church forms."
