Book of the Week: 11 Innovations in the Local Church

This week’s book of the week is 11 Innovations in the Local Church written by the uber-talented team of Elmer Towns, Ed Stetzer, and Warren Bird.  Each chapter focuses on different types of innovative churches.  This book contains great stories of how Jesus is using some pasotrs and churches to do some incredible things in this country for Christ.

This book gave me too many ideas to even process let alone utilize.  The hardest thing about this read was selecting the top 5 ideas.  So, I tried to isolate them to five ideas I could realisitally see in North Side’s future.

Top 5 Ideas:

  1. In writing on the logistics of multi-site churches, the team wrote, “The same team of pastors works together to develop sermon illustrations and biblical insights.  ‘We each preach the same sermon series, using the same text, but we each vary our outline and applications’” (71).
  2. In describing a city-reaching church, Falwell and Towns wrote prescribed that “one church could evangelize its town and that every church should have that as its goal” (113).
  3. In writing on community transformation churches, they wrote, “The mere presence of Christians in a community does not transform the culture, however.  Cultural transformation only takes place when Christians consistently practice their faith in their personal lives and allow their values to be shaped by biblical principles” (137).
  4. In the chapter on cyber-enhanced churches, the team explained that North Point Community Church started offering leadership training online because “people didn’t have time for an extra meeting during the week” (147).
  5. Describing intentionally multicultural churches, David Anderson stated, “Evidence of this country’s rich racial mix is all around us in our schools, our stores, our neighborhoods, our recreational facilities–everywhere except our churches.  Heaven may include every culture, tongue and tribe, but in the United States, Sunday morning remains one of the last bastions of ethnic separatism.  It’s time to stop merely talking about multicultural worship and start living it” (187).

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