How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community. The "New Parish" shows how believers can come together, both within the church and beyond, for the good of their communities.

I owned this book for a year or two before finally reading it. While I find much of the missional theology movement (Hirsch, Guder, et al) practically challenging, it often lacks theological depth and richness. This is not the case with this book. It's the rare book on ministry that I would recommend to normal lay Christians even more than pastors. ( )

I can criticize this book in places. I wish it was a little meatier in theology and more practical and less suggestive in practice. But some books find you when you need them. I attended the Parish Collective conference this year and picked up the book there. The conference was good for me. I was a crying mess through most of it because of the joy of being in a room with so many like-minded people. But they were practitioners, I was a pastoral candidate dreaming of ministry ahead.

As serendipity would have it, I was in conversation with a church in Florida. Now some months later I am their pastor. Some months after the conference, I finally cracked open my copy of the New Parish and read it cover-to-cover. This book describes the direction of where I would like our church to move and gave me some language around it. It also gave me some practical hooks for inhabiting place a little more.

A church within and in-with the community is a faithful presence integrating community, mission and formation. This is grand vision for church. One question I have is how to move a commuter church (which my congregation is partly) to this gently without alienating those who feel less connected. ( )

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