When I received this book last week, I couldn’t wait to read it. Over the last 10 years I have not only watched young adults disconnect from the church, but even struggled with the same sentiments that I know exists among my generation. As someone who has dedicated his life to serving people who desire to have an engaging and maturing faith in Jesus, I can’t help but feel my heart break as I watch my peers and the generations that surround them become more and more ambivalent (or even turned off completely) towards Jesus and the people that represent Him.
As I began to read this book, I quickly realized that this was the perfect companion to a book I had reviewed called UnChristian. If UnChristian is a book about how unchurched people view Christians and how Christians represent the faith they follow, then this book is about the practical ways (and proven) that fellowships of believers can reach people far from Christ and far from the church with intentionality.
I am not going to lie. The first 2 sections (a total of 7 chapters) was a tough one to go through without feeling like your brain was going to explode. There are so many statistics and analysis that the human brain can handle in one setting. To the books help, they did a great job of breaking the numbers down in visual ways that “connected the dots.”
The last section of this book broke down how churches were effectively reaching young unchurched people. This section was a little easier to read, as it was both encouraging and challenging. It was encouraging because you felt as though you were gaining some really good input into how things could be done at your local fellowship to foster an environment where the unchurched can be reached. But it was also challenging because even though the book didn’t outright say-so, the change that is needed to reach a generation of unchurched people requires intentional and strategic changes in the lives of the people who lead churches – pastors.
The book is HUGE on content, and there are more sentences underlined in this book than any I have read to date, but here are the ones that I think you’d appreciate.
- Christianity will not die out in this generation or any other, but this generation is not connecting well to the current expression of Christianity. And that should concern us.
- …you should not just read this book. You should spend some time listening to and talking to unchurched young people.
- Exposure (to church) as a child was not a positive enough experience to encourage attendance as an adult. For many, the probably had negative experiences…Poor attitudes toward the church that are established as children may be insurmountable, even with the natural curiosity about spirituality.
- …the younger unchurched are not more upset at the church than the older unchurched
- The younger unchurched are more open to hearing about Christ (than the older unchurched).
- Groups seeking to build relationships among young adults will not be short-term study groups but rather long term commitments before becoming true communities with trust and intimacy.
- …we are in a day that is “postmodern,” a day when people are tired of the modern belief that everything can be answered by science and reason.
- They (young unchurched) like to study the “hard-to-talk-about” topics. They love tough questions and despise pat answers.
- In years past a church served those they wanted to reach…Now the church has the opportunity of reaching people for Christ by allowing those people to serve with them.
- …we’d rather have messy relationships with lost people than not know them at all.
- (On the topic of expositional versus topical teaching) “We are going to have this mix (of both) because we know that Jesus preached topically. Jesus never preached an expositional sermon in His life…He always preached topical and He used illustrations and stories.
- Technology must always be a servant to the Gospel.
- Technology doesn’t make bad preaching good and it doesn’t make a bad worship leader a good musician, and technology doesn’t make people who don’t want to connect, connect.”
Obviously, these quotes WILL be misunderstood outside of the context of this book. When UnChristian came out, I passed it along to my key leaders who were serving with me. I will be doing the same with this book.
[…] the coffee shop now has on believers. For those who are followers of UnChristian or Ed Setzers Lost and Found, you would probably see this not as a truly positive […]
[…] the coffee shop now has on believers. For those who are followers of UnChristian or Ed Setzers Lost and Found, you would probably see this not as a truly positive story. So what are the good things? Glad you […]