I’ve been reading about ‘an unstoppable force’ by Erwin McManus, but hadn’t actually read it yet. It was recommended that I get on with it and read it! In fact, it was because of this book that I finally started up my blog. I started reading it without any structure for capturing ideas and only got about 4 pages before deciding that I HAD to start the blog for this…

Erwin McMannus is the lead pastor of Mosaic in L.A. The book is an unstoppable force – daring to become the church God had in mind.

“my failures are my gift to others. My successes are the gift of others to me.” ~ acknowledgements

“To get the most out of this book, pay close attention to the metaphors and stories. If you want to lead people, regardless of whether they are modern or post-modern, boomers, gen-Xers, or millennials, you must learn their metaphors,, use the right metaphors, and change the metaphors when necessary. If you can change the metaphors, you can change the world! …Every church is called to fulfill five eternal purposes that Jesus gave in the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. These purposes never change. But the styles and methods we use to fulfill these purposes MUST change with every generation and target. And how you say it makes a difference. Mosaic uses five elemental metaphors to represent the five New Testament purposes: Evangelism as “Wind,” Fellowship as “Water,” Service as “Wood,” Worship as “Fire,” and Discipleship as “Earth.” These images are poetic, deeply profound, and perfectly match the church’s target of reaching artists, cultural creatives, and those attracted by aesthetics and images in the Los Angeles basin. … For twenty-five years I’ve taught pastors that “the church is a Body, not a business. It is an organism, not an organization! It is a family to be loved, not a machine to be engineered, and not a company to be managed.” Pastoring is an art. It has nothing to do with being a CEO. It’s all about servant-hood and authenticity and taking risks in faith.” ~ Rick Warren in the forward

“An Unstoppable Force is an abrupt opening of the window shade, revealing that we’ve all been hitting the snooze button for decades. On the other side of this book is different faith, a new awareness, a new excitement, and a new burden that the need is even greater than we realized before. … We’ve worked so hard to get people inside the church and on a path to maturity; how do we now move them back outside of the church to serve in the marketplace, the community, and the world? Church growth and church health really don’t make sense without church dispersion; yet that may prove to be the most difficult task yet. We like comfort. We like safety. It is a daunting task to change church from a place that serves consumers to a place that creates servants. … In the last two decades, pastors have been told that they must be good preachers.. er, actually, we mean teachers, er, uh, more accurately, leaders.. what we really mean is a visionary CEO type.. wait that’s not it.. we really mean system builders and equippers. Now we see that church leaders must be spiritual directors: builders of the culture and creators of the soul of the church… This book is probably best read with a leadership team. It fosters challenging dialogue. It does not attempt to mechanize something that can only be achieved organically and spiritually.” ~ Brad Smith > Leadership Network - forward

Well, that’s all I can do for now > just barely got through the forwards and haven’t even gotten into the book, but it’s time for breakfast! I’m kind of getting a late start to the day & don’t usually eat breakfast, but we’re out of town, visiting family, and the whole routine gets changed. It’s refreshing. Maybe I’ll dig into the book again later this weekend…