Our very own Brandon Hatmaker of Austin New Church was asked to review The Tangible Kingdom Primer for the Leadership Network book blog. Here’s a snippet:
A key element in sustaining the sentness of a church is not only to establish a missional DNA, but to ensure its ideals are manifest in its formation of structure. The key element is to form, organize, and seek new ways to discover incarnational community… and somehow keep it as organic as possible. The problem for most of us is that while there is a growing desire for this type of community, most of us don’t know where to start in creating it.
I think Hugh put it best on the Tangible Kingdom website, “Everyone’s talking about community. Everyone seems to want it, most complain if they don’t find it, but it’s harder to pull off than you’d think.”
So we’ve engaged culture and begun to form community. We may even gather for worship on the weekends (maybe you’ve done that for years). But how do we equip an entire church to strip away their preconceived ideas of what community looks like and replace it with gospel-centered relationships that emerge out of an intuitive lifestyle? How do we point our people outwards?
Read the rest of the review, along with some thoughts on ANC’s experience with it, on the Books @ Leadership Network blog.