Continuing from the last post here are some thoughts and quotes from the book The Present Future.

“Churches that understand the realities of the present future are shifting the target of ministry efforts from church activity to community transformation. This is turning the church inside out.”

“Postmoderns are wildly spiritual. It is a spiritualism that reflects a hunger for meaning and connectedness. It is a spiritualism that seeks to unite people of faith (a shift from the modern era’s fracturing and splintering into denominations).”

“There is little tolerance for institutional-brand religion that focuses more on its own support and survival than on helping people.”

“Just when the church adopted a business model, the culture went looking for God. Just when the church began building recreation centres, the culture began a search for sacred space.”

The book starts to lose its way halfway through and begins to talk about vision, learning and leadership which seem less relevant. But as a whole it does a good job of explaining some of what is happening to the church and the culture and the hard questions the church needs to face up to.

I’ve been reading an interesting book called “The Present Future – six tough questions for the church” by Reggie McNeal, a leadership network publication. Some of the best quotes are below but it shows some of the challenges the church faces because the world has changed so much. Infact it’s not even about the church, it’s about people who are increasingly hungry for spiritual reality but are not looking in the church because they can no longer relate to it. You can read more at www.leadnet.org. Here are some of the quotes:

“We are witnessing the emergence of a new world. The church is moving into the postmodern world. Its expression is going to be more different than most people realise or may want to imagine. The scale of the shift will rank along with the epochal transitions of ancient church to medieval, from medieval to modern”

“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!”

“The point is, all the effort to fix the church misses the point. You can build the perfect church – and they still won’t come. People are not looking for a great church. The age in which institutional religion holds appeal is passing away – and in a hurry.”

“Church leaders seem unable to grasp this simple implication of the new world – people outside the church think church is for church people, not for them.”

“The collapse of institutional religion in the first century was accompanied by an upsurge in personal spiritual search for God and salvation…Jesus tapped into this widespread sentiment of disillisionment with religion but hunger for God with his teaching about the kingdom of God and how people could become a part of it”

More to follow tomorrow, if you have any thoughts please post them as comments.