2 Books

Due to the lack of posting on our book review blog, I'm going to continue reviewing books on our blog...did you ever realize you have too many blogs and need to downsize? Ha ha. Anyway, my two latest reads were:

The Local Church Today - Bill Scheidler

and

Communicating for a Change - Andy Stanley

Local Church was really great. The importance of the local church is one of my life messages that's been passed down from spiritual fathers in my life. People ask me all the time why I'm so passionate about it and how I see it so clearly in scripture. This book by Bill Scheidler really sums it up well. The 1st half is a study of the church in scripture and the 2nd half is a biblical analysis of elders, deacons, and the 5 fold ministry. It's all straight bible.

If you wonder about MFI and what we believe about the local church, church government, and church offices - pick up this book.

Stanley's book was a fun read for a preacher. He's pretty confrontational and challenging in his assault on boring preaching. I liked it. I think he comes across a little bit strong in some areas. You get the feeling that you should abandon your preaching style and use his models or be doomed to poor preaching. I'm going to take some and leave some.

His main controversial point is that all messages should only have one point. I'm not buying that part completely. I believe that we should preach the way that God leads us to preach - and that may change from week to week. I believe that the Holy Spirit not only can give us content but He can give us communication technique. But if you applied Stanley's system as a basic foundation and let the Holy Spirit breath on it from week to week, you would have some good things going.

I especially enjoyed his comments to preachers who hide bad preaching behind the guise of "that's just my style" or "I need to be myself". He has some pretty great stuff to say about the necessity of engaging your audience and not being boring. I'm stirred to preach more focused messages that have a clear take away - yet I'm going to continue to allow God to groom my preaching style and seek Him for direction, content and style.