Greg Hawkins

It's great that a church the size of Willow Creek has the honesty and vulnerability to say that they've needed to revisit their ideas about what the best way to help people follow Jesus is. It's even better that they've been willing to resource some serious research and share the learning.

Whilst the lessons that are shared are helpful, I'm not sure that there is actually much new here. Anyone familiar with Christian Schwarz's work on Natural Church Development or Fowler's stages of faith may experience a sense of deja vu on reading this. I also suspect that the framing of the research questions and the research base, heavily weighted towards North American protestantism, restricts the applicability of some of the conclusions of the research.

At the heart of it, though, there is a sincere and well founded desire to help church leaders to think about how the churches they serve can more adequately encourage people in their walk with Jesus. Even if you don't agree with all the conclusions this is a vital issue for church leaders to grapple with and this book does give us some tools to do that.… (mehr)