Each week, the Flourish team would like to recommend resources that will help you on your journey of Church Renewal. While we don’t endorse every single idea from every single resource we are attempting to cultivate a useful resource list for you.
Resource: Simple Church, by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger
Background: Thom Rainer is a well known seminary professor, former ministry executive, and church consultant with a heart for seeing churches grow by the conversion of new believers who are then discipled. Eric Geiger combines years of pastoral experience with a heart for helping churches develop “trellis” that enables them to actually get discipleship done.
Take-aways: Jesus called His church to “make disciples”. To do so requires a couple of things. First, you have to know what a “made disciple” looks like. Because many churches don’t, they think they’re “making disciples” when in reality they are making teenage Christians who get awkwardly stuck in their discipleship. Second, you have to design a thoughtful process to move people along what Flourish calls the “Great Commission Continuum”. That is, you need to design ways in your church where people can move from unbelief to multiplying disciplers. Simple Church is the resource to help you do that. It will convince you that you need clarity, alignment, and focus in order to produce movement. This book helped the leadership in a church I pastored develop a new vision for our church focused around discipleship that enabled us to move ahead in renewal.
Bonus content: Katie Watson of Christ Covenant Church wrote a rather comprehensive and helpful summary of this book.
