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Make Room for the Boom...or Bust: Six Church Models for Reaching Three Generations
Church Growth specialist Gary L. McIntosh explores six different church models designed to reach yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's generations for Christ.
192 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1997
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September 30, 2024
Changing Your Church
28 August 2024
So, the Bible College where my church meets has a couple of tables full of free books. I’m wondering whether they are books that the library no longer wants, or whether it is one of those book exchanges that you see except for Christian books (it turns out that it is the first, though I wouldn’t be surprised to find books landing back up here). Anyway, for some reason I picked up this book – I have no idea why – and when I started reading it I realised why it ended up there – it is quite dated.
I remember talking to the vicar once about Christian writing and he said that one of the biggest problems is that what is written can become dated quite quickly – especially sermons. The thing is that sermons are generally written in the context of the era that it was delivered, meaning that reading them, or delivering them now, makes no sense. Okay, I know that pastors recycle their sermons – writing sermons is an incredibly time-consuming task, and one pastor I knew who lead a multicultural church had the added difficulty of making sure that everybody understood it – there were a lot of people in the church whose primary language was not English.
Anyway, this book was written in 1997 and it shows. At the time churches were struggling with reaching the younger generations – namely the boomers and Gen X (they call gen-X busters, which irritated me, but then again it just goes to show how out of touch a lot of pastors actually are – the idea is that you have one generation that builds the wealth, the next generation who enjoys the wealth, and the next generation who blows the wealth, so referring to gen-X as busters is quite insulting).
So, the thing is that this book was written before 9/11, before the great recession, and also before the church was tarnished with sexual abuse allegations. Further, this was just as the church was starting to become politicised, where punishing gays and banning abortions are the number one focus (though they had been attempting to infiltrate the political establishment for the previous fifteen years). Mind you, this is not what this book is about, and further, it isn’t a book that is targeted at non-Christians or laypeople – it is targeted as church leaders.
Taking it in that context I can’t really criticise it, with the exception of their references to gen-X, and also the section at the front where he attempts to tell us what makes Boomers and Gen-X tick. However, he leaves it at that and then moves toward different church models and gives us some examples of these church models. Mind you, this was 1997, so a lot of churches were still pretty traditional, and his suggestion was that we needed to move away from this model and start looking at newer models that would appeal to the younger generations.
Mind you, in 2024, the so-called Builder generation (the one that comes before the boomers) has mostly died out and they have been replaced with the boomers. Gen-X have replaced the boomers, and the millennials have replaced gen-X, and there seems to be a huge war between the millennials and the boomers (with Gen-X just sitting on the sidelines).
I guess the thing here is that the book isn’t about how to run the church service, but rather six models that a pastor can use to change the church so that, at the time, it would be more relevant to the younger generations. That isn’t really the case now, especially since churches are of many different varieties. This means that the style of service is no longer an issue but rather other issues that turn people off from Christianity, such as supporting certain political candidates, spreading misinformation, and of course pastors hording wealth siphoned from the congregations and flying around in private jets. However, that is beyond the scope of this book.
In any case, keeping the narrow focus, and ignoring the first section, it is interesting to read about the different strategies and the churches that have used it, however, as I mentioned previously, it is pretty dated.
28 August 2024
So, the Bible College where my church meets has a couple of tables full of free books. I’m wondering whether they are books that the library no longer wants, or whether it is one of those book exchanges that you see except for Christian books (it turns out that it is the first, though I wouldn’t be surprised to find books landing back up here). Anyway, for some reason I picked up this book – I have no idea why – and when I started reading it I realised why it ended up there – it is quite dated.
I remember talking to the vicar once about Christian writing and he said that one of the biggest problems is that what is written can become dated quite quickly – especially sermons. The thing is that sermons are generally written in the context of the era that it was delivered, meaning that reading them, or delivering them now, makes no sense. Okay, I know that pastors recycle their sermons – writing sermons is an incredibly time-consuming task, and one pastor I knew who lead a multicultural church had the added difficulty of making sure that everybody understood it – there were a lot of people in the church whose primary language was not English.
Anyway, this book was written in 1997 and it shows. At the time churches were struggling with reaching the younger generations – namely the boomers and Gen X (they call gen-X busters, which irritated me, but then again it just goes to show how out of touch a lot of pastors actually are – the idea is that you have one generation that builds the wealth, the next generation who enjoys the wealth, and the next generation who blows the wealth, so referring to gen-X as busters is quite insulting).
So, the thing is that this book was written before 9/11, before the great recession, and also before the church was tarnished with sexual abuse allegations. Further, this was just as the church was starting to become politicised, where punishing gays and banning abortions are the number one focus (though they had been attempting to infiltrate the political establishment for the previous fifteen years). Mind you, this is not what this book is about, and further, it isn’t a book that is targeted at non-Christians or laypeople – it is targeted as church leaders.
Taking it in that context I can’t really criticise it, with the exception of their references to gen-X, and also the section at the front where he attempts to tell us what makes Boomers and Gen-X tick. However, he leaves it at that and then moves toward different church models and gives us some examples of these church models. Mind you, this was 1997, so a lot of churches were still pretty traditional, and his suggestion was that we needed to move away from this model and start looking at newer models that would appeal to the younger generations.
Mind you, in 2024, the so-called Builder generation (the one that comes before the boomers) has mostly died out and they have been replaced with the boomers. Gen-X have replaced the boomers, and the millennials have replaced gen-X, and there seems to be a huge war between the millennials and the boomers (with Gen-X just sitting on the sidelines).
I guess the thing here is that the book isn’t about how to run the church service, but rather six models that a pastor can use to change the church so that, at the time, it would be more relevant to the younger generations. That isn’t really the case now, especially since churches are of many different varieties. This means that the style of service is no longer an issue but rather other issues that turn people off from Christianity, such as supporting certain political candidates, spreading misinformation, and of course pastors hording wealth siphoned from the congregations and flying around in private jets. However, that is beyond the scope of this book.
In any case, keeping the narrow focus, and ignoring the first section, it is interesting to read about the different strategies and the churches that have used it, however, as I mentioned previously, it is pretty dated.
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