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    Renovation of the Church: What Happens When a Seeker Church Discovers Spiritual Formation
    Unavailable
    Renovation of the Church: What Happens When a Seeker Church Discovers Spiritual Formation
    Unavailable
    Renovation of the Church: What Happens When a Seeker Church Discovers Spiritual Formation
    Ebook271 pages3 hours

    Renovation of the Church: What Happens When a Seeker Church Discovers Spiritual Formation

    By Kent Carlson, Mike Lueken and Dallas Willard

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Christianity Today Book Award winner

    Leadership Journal Top Book of the Year

    Copastors Kent Carlson and Mike Lueken tell the story of how God took their thriving, consumer-oriented church and transformed it into a modest congregation of unformed believers committed to the growth of the spirit--even when it meant a decline in numbers.

    As Kent and Mike found out, a decade of major change is not easy on a church. Oak Hills Church, from the pastoral staff to the congregation, had to confront addiction to personal ambition, resist consumerism and reorient their lives around the teachings of Jesus. Their renewed focus on spiritual formation over numerical growth triggered major changes in the content of their sermons, the tenor of their worship services, and the reason for their outreach. They lost members.

    But the health and spiritual depth of their church today is a testimony of God's transforming work and enduring faithfulness to the people he loves.

    Honest and humble, this is Kent and Mike's story of a church they love, written to inspire and challenge other churches to let God rewrite their stories as well. Read it for the church you love.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateNov 21, 2013
    ISBN9780830868582
    Unavailable
    Renovation of the Church: What Happens When a Seeker Church Discovers Spiritual Formation
    Author

    Kent Carlson

    Kent Carlson is vice president of leadership formation for the North American Baptist Conference, shepherding the spiritual formation of pastors, regional ministers, and Christian leaders throughout the conference. He is also pastor emeritus of Oak Hills Church of Folsom, California, which he founded in 1984. Kent is a graduate of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and lives with his family in the Sacramento, California, area.

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    Reviews for Renovation of the Church

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    • 3/5
      This book presents the story of two pastors as they move themselves and their church from a seeker oriented ministry to a church focused on spiritual formation.At the level of an anecdotal account of these men and the church they serve undergoing a radical change, and of the difficulties it entails, the book works. The pastors are forthright and honest about what they have gone through, what they have taken their church through, and the various problems that have occurred as a result. The book doesn’t, however, go much deeper than that.The authors remark on a few occasions that the seeker style of church ministry is insufficient and represents a problem in the whole of the North American church (an assertion that overstates the importance of this particular type of evangelical church), but they offer no well-formed theology of the church in place of what they have held, even while making the case for something deeper.The book presents ideas that are still presented seeker service/church growth style and language, with the use of many hackneyed phrases. Variations on “changing the church’s DNA” and “casting a vision” get workouts. The authors still come from a typical upper middle class, evangelical perspective, speaking of week-long training sessions, weekend retreats, and so forth as a part of their new church programs.The most disconcerting thing about this book is the major theme of the work; two pastors who have been in ministry for years, coming to a rather sudden realization that the church should be more than seeker oriented services. It’s a bit like an English literature professor suddenly realizing that there is more to it than Harry Potter books, or a physician being struck by the idea that medicine entails more than encouraging regular exercise and multi-vitamins. There is very much the sense that these men are late to the table.I think Renovation of the Church is an only fair book that will have limited appeal, specifically to those who have been in the seeker service movement who desire something more substantive. Those who still find the seeker/church growth methods valid and robust will, I imagine, hate this book very much. People who are in churches with an already more fully fleshed-out ecclesiology will probably feel some measure of “better late than never”, and, of course, non-Christians won’t care much either way.