The High Impact Church: A Fresh Approach to Reaching the Unchurched

by Linus John Morris

Book Overview

The cities of the world are desperately in need of churches that are Christ centered, spiritually vital, biblically based, grace oriented, outreach focused, small group structured, and culturally... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0830723528
• ISBN13: 9780830723522
• Release Date: July 1998
• Publisher: Gospel Light Pubns
• Length: 357 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Paradigm-shift book

You will not only enjoy reading this book but this book will bring you a paradigm shift on serving the Lord with a Kingdom heart and Kingdom eye. Evangelism and church growth is not just a matter of a church business but this is His Kingdom business. I use this book as a text book in my urban evangelism class.

"High Impact Church" excellent for Baby-Boomers

Having read a good number of books on the subject of church growth, I would consider Linus J. Morris' The High Impact Church to be the best of the genre. Linus manages to wed method, theology, and spirituality into his understanding of church growth and structure to produce the most well balanced synthesis of current boomer-based church growth thinking to date. That is both the strength and the weakness of Morris' work. His success at capturing the spirit of his generation ends up excluding much of his work from being applicable to succeeding generations. Morris' third chapter, entitled "Breakthrough Thinking", captures much of the spirit of this book. Unlike most churchmen, Morris doesn't try to tweak and modify a medieval institution that got stranded in the 19th century, but rather starts with sound theological principles, and builds a new church from the ground up. What he ends up with is a church that is able to maintain theological and spiritual heart and yet be adaptable to the specific culture it finds itself in. His model of a church that infiltrates the culture around it instead of separating itself and alienating itself from the very people it intends to reach is most refreshing. His focus on both qualitative and quantitative growth is also very sharp, but perhaps some of his best thinking is in his understanding that a church needs to be "Purpose Centred, Values Driven, and Vision Directed" for it to be truly effective. While other authors may blur these concepts, Morris' thinking is quite clear. One of the aspects of this book that sets Morris above many of the others is how he truly understands the nature of urban life. While many churchmen are still trying to apply rural concepts to an urban environment, Morris has a much better understanding of the city. For example, while many are still trying to define and reach out to "communities" based on geographical location, Morris understands that in cities, communities are defined, not by location, but by social networks. As a result of this understanding, Morris naturally crafts an outreach strategy and philosophy to capitalize on this social reality. Structurally, Morris leans on the cell group model for both evangelism and leadership development. Previously, I had assumed that this was commonly known and was pretty much a "no-brainer", however, this point needs to be made time and time again. The High Impact Church is almost a how-to manual for setting up a church plant or redesigning a church to effectively meet the challenges ahead. He covers everything from core values, core theology, practical methods, and workable church structures for meeting his generation. The limitations of this book are limited to taking the cultural attributes of the baby boomers and assuming they apply universally. Unfortunately, the exclusive attention paid to the boomers will make significant portions of this book irrelevant to the emerging x-ers be