Book Recommendation

For any and all interested in what it might mean to "be church" in the changing city, I highly recommend Mark Gornik's "To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City." The book provides a vision of an integrative urban ecclesiology that is challenging and firmly routed in scripture.

If there's one book you read this fall, I think this should be it. Gornik's book is written out of the experience of planting the New Song community in Sandtown, one of Baltimore's roughest inner-city neighbourhoods.

For those of us thinking about church in our various neighbourhoods, whether rich or poor, sane or crazy, this book adeptly examines community building from the perspective of someone who has been engaged in that type of project for over ten years.

Church Planting Celebrity

Some thoughts from Pernell worth reposting here:

To all you young 'uns (and other assorted riff raff) who have ever thought about - or are thinking about - planting a church: Before you embark on your "rock-star-like" career, I think your perception of church planting may be a little clouded by the bull crap you see in the church, and on blogs, and at conferences.

Allow me to wipe that crap away: being a church planter will not make you cooler nor will it make you any more popular or more attractive to the opposite sex.

It will not make you any more spiritual and almost no one will respect you more for your courage, risk taking, or intrinsic motivation.

It will not make you braver or more disciplined.

It will not teach you to 'take it like a man' or 'be a real woman', it likely won't help you to get on TV and it won't allow you to buy nicer clothes, shoes, or hair gel either.

It won't allow you to finally be part of the perfect church, or to shed institutional politics, nor will it guarantee that people will accept you for who you are - authentic community.

It will, however, expose every limitation you have and defeat you at almost every turn.

It will bite you on the butt whenever it gets the opportunity, it will choke you, break you, wind you, bruise you, cut you and batter you, emptying any sense of self-sufficiency along the way. It'll wind you up like a clock until you feel like tearing your own face off and walking away in snivelling submission.

It's probably the most fun you'll ever have.

Or maybe it's just me.