Challenges,cultivates growth, boosts thinking, fun to read.

One of the Past Year's best!

Wilson points out that what so many churches are calling “contemporary” today is actually a model developed to reach 1980’s boomer-seekers. He provides a wealth of examples of churches that are innovating with preaching and worship in order to more effectively connect with today’s culture.

Michael Duduit, Preaching Magazine
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Well-crafted Analysis

Dr. Steve Echols, Associate Dean, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary
 

Mission More Important than Style

Whitney Hopler, Contributing Writer at crosswalk.com
 

 "Future Church is a book that instructs and illuminates without being pedantic.  It is a comfortable conversation that instructs and points in a right ministry direction."

 "We are at a critical time period in church history, where we must be rethinking almost everything we have presupposed in our modern philosophy and methodology to reach post-seeker generations.  Jim gives a portrait of the rising landscape that is forming in the Future Church."

  "Jim has captured the heart of postmodern ministry in a raw, compelling  glimpse into the reality of being God's Church in the new Millenium. It is honest, inspiring, and with each chapter there are new heroes of the Christian faith. You won't be able to put it down, and it will challenge
you to get real and get in on what God is doing in the world today and
tomorrow!" 

 "Finding our way into the future is too often like taking a trail, any  trail, and hoping it leads to the mountain top. Jim Wilson has given us in Future Church a trail guide to creating a church whose best days are ahead, not behind. Based not on theory but on actual case studies, Wilson takes us behind the scenes of churches that most of us would never discover otherwise. There we meet fearless leaders and focused congreagations who are influencing the world in which they live in ways that lift up the hope and the winsome nature of the real Gospel. I'm recommending Future Church, not only to all my pastor friends, but to the leadership teams within our congregation. With a guide to a preferrable future at hand, we hope to continue the process of shaping our church into one that shapes our
community for the better.

Read Readers Reviews, Amazon.com

It came imperceptibly, like a waft of first spring musk at the tired edge of winter:  barely distinguishable, yet blowing into the subconscious a sense of much-longed-for visitation.  Ah, something new, something that we did not create!

It arrived ­ unannounced and unstrategied.  How ironic. After two and some decades of trying to manufacture the new Church with the wind machines of formula and program.  It came anyway, and with it, a deep and humanly resonant re-examination of American Christendom. From theology, anthropology, and ecclesiology to praxis, nothing has escaped deconstruction.  We may not be ready, but I can assure you, God is.  And the reality is this:  the Future Church is already here, in seminal form, but here.  And it is this fresh reality - this untamed, messy genesis - that Jim Wilson describes in "The Future Church:  Ministry in a Post-Seeker Age."

In the past few years, the new Church has at least been recognized as existent.   Most often, it is viewed by established ministries as renegade overflow; an upstart rivulet trying to make a place for itself alongside the wide, placid banks of aging seeker-style ministries; an adolescent phase of "real" church.  Dismissed as either gen- erational identity crisis or philosophical fad, what is clear is that the new American Church has now grown from trickle in the mid-nineties to significant run-off at the turn of the millennium. What it will be in five or ten years is uncertain.  Yet, we would do well to take notice.  After all, the Grand Canyon was carved by one well- placed, persistent rivulet.

Many of us launched our boats on the Mississippi of church growth in the past two decades.  We dutifully set them afloat in the world of big and simple.  We followed those who had built massive riverboats, along with the equally massive paddlewheels of programs to propel them. But the landscape shifted beneath our feet. From big and simple, we entered the postmodern topography of small and complex, transform- ing American culture from homogenous demographies, seeker-believer compartments, easy answers, and fill-in-the blanks to diverse neighborhoods, ubiquitous spirituality, paradox, and tell-me-your- story.  The boats we need now are kayaks, but having spent our ministry years building and operating river boats, some of us find ourselves not only up a creek without a paddle, but without the expertise to use one if it were handed to us.

Into this crisis of change, Jim Wilson offers a journalist's crucial perspective: here's how otherwise ordinary leaders are navigating the unpredictable waterways of change.  A "Narratives From the Headwaters" for those of us on the delta.

There are, by now, scores of books on how the new waterways were formed. (Check for the word "postmodern" in the title.) There  are even a few books out on how to operate kayaks.  But here¹s one about the new navigators themselves: those self-taught kayakers who were upstart enough to say, "Hey, we¹re not on the Mississippi anymore!"

The Future Church is here.  After you read these stories, you just may want to grab a paddle ­ any paddle ­ and get wet.