Categories
Book Review Faith

Book review: The Organic Church

The Organic Church coverThis week, I finished reading The Organic Church, a book about church planting. Neil Cole writes about “growing faith where life happens.” I think that’s one of the problems the American church is facing today. For so many people, what they experience on Sunday has nothing to do with what they live on Monday. Even so, this book was a tough read, largely becase Cole says some hard to hear things for church leaders that I think are accurate but still no fun to hear.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that what most churches do on Sundays isn’t really what the church is about. It’s more like the city wide gatherings talked about in the New Testament, where we come together in unity and encourage each other through our numbers. However, the real church is what happens when small groups of believers get together for the common purpose of doing life together.

Churches as we know them tend to remove the power from the people in a way that weakens the whole church. I picked up a lot that I’m going to put into practice about empowering individuals to be the church and to multiply the kingdom of God through their lives. This book is a great and challenging read for church leaders, small group leaders, and anyone interested in planting churches.

I decided to order and read the book after reading about it on You Can Know God. The pdf at the bottom of the post about the book is an excellent summary and is what convinced me to read it.