Breakout Churches: Discover How to Make the Leap
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Overview
Breakout Churches ... what does it take for your church to break out of mediocrity?In search of answers, Thom Rainer and his research team conducted a landmark study on the church. Unfolding the findings of that study, Breakout Churches furnishes both principles and examples to show how you as a pastor or church leader can help your church break out of the status quo into unprecedented fruitfulness.
Of the thousands of churches examined in the study, thirteen met the criteria for a 'breakout church.' All of them experienced both a period of struggle and a time of sustained breakout growth under the same pastor's leadership. Transitioning from mediocrity to excellence over several years, they grew to have an impact on the entire community.
Breakout Churches tells the story of these churches and their pastors. And, using a statistical approach, it identifies key patterns and characteristics common to churches that experienced turnarounds.
Synopsis
In Thom Rainer's latest book, he sets out to discover how churches that were once healthy but had stagnated in growth have broken out to become great churches impacting lives and entire communities.
Publishers Weekly
From the subtitle to the research methods, this is a book-length, church-focused homage to Jim Collins's business bestseller Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't. Rainer, a dean at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and president of a church consulting firm, sent a Collins-inspired team of researchers to pore through previously collected data on "effective evangelistic churches." The team was looking for churches that had gone through a period of stagnation before experiencing a "breakout" period of vitality, measured largely through membership growth-while keeping the same pastoral leadership. These criteria excluded both churches that had grown consistently or churches that grew after changing pastors. Of the 50,000 churches in the seminary's database, only 13 qualified. Rainer seeks to identify the secret of those churches' success and draws some telling comparisons with similar churches that were in gradual decline (and persistent denial). But his conclusions are consistently tainted by what statisticians call "post hoc bias"-there is no way to prove that the factors he identifies, which track closely with Collins's conclusions, were responsible for these churches' growth. The real value of this book is the hope Rainer instills that even churches that appear moribund can see remarkable change-if their leaders are willing, in Rainer's words, to "confront reality." (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.