Breakout Churches

If you are like me, you are always looking for a great book, particularly one that communicates information you find helpful that you have not seen before. On a couple of recent flights from Dallas to London to Amsterdam back to London on to Prague, I read Breakout Churches: Discover How To Make The Leap by Thom Rainer. It takes several of the principles from the business bestseller, "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't" and applies them to churches that have gone from plateaued or declining membership to significant growth over a period of several years.

Based on extensive research and analysis of several tens of thousands of congregations, Breakout Churches details how several congregations of different sizes, movements, and regions of the country experienced lasting turnaround. Director of the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism, and Church Growth at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, Rainer's obvious passion is to see churches increase numerically through conversion, not transfer, growth.

Every one of the churches he profiled broke out of their previous pattern without changing senior pastors. Perhaps above all else, Rainer's work points toward the necessity of a leader's willingness to not only persevere, but to also undergo deep, personal change in their life and methodology. Many other factors contributed to the tremendous, positive change each church experienced, but nothing was more important than the Senior Pastor's profound personal transformation.