Product Description

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 relevantthat is, "high-impact" churches. The High-Impact Church presents an approach to the church that is both solidly biblical as well as contemporary and practical. Developed out of the authors extensive experience in church planting and church development in Europe and the U.S., the principles of the book are adaptable to a wide variety of cultural contexts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1110682 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 357 pages

Review
A book like this is the best thing that can happen to anyone who prays to see the church increase. -- Arnold Van Heusden, Director, National Assoc. of Evangelicals, The Netherlands

The High Impact Church describes the kind of church that we need to see multiplied all over our land and all over the world. -- Jim Montgomery, President, Dawn Ministries

The High-Impact Church will show you how to make the incredibly important switch from transfer growth to conversion growth. -- C. Peter Wagner, Professor, Fuller Theological Seminary

About the Author
Dr. Linus Morris has co-founded and pastored two churches in Europe and has been involved in evangelism, church planting and pastoral ministry for the past 34 years in Canada, Europe, the U.S. and the former Soviet Union.

Dr. Morris is the President of Christian Associates International a church planting organization that establishes contemporary, high-impact churches in major cities and trains others in the principles and strategy of the high-impact church.

The vision of CAI is to see entire cities brought into a genuine encounter with Christ- for every man, woman and child to have an opportunity to hear the gospel message and see it dynamically expressed through loving bodies of believers. Though short- and long-term teams, works are underway in a number of cities including Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, Geneva, The Hague, Lisbon, Moscow, Paris, Riga, Zagreb and Zurich.

Dr. Morris holds a M.C.S from Regent College in Vancouver, Canada and M.Div. and D.Min. degrees from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He has also studied at LAbri Christian Fellowship in Huemoz, Swizerland and has lived for four years in France and five years in Holland.

Married with six children, Linus and his wife Sharon reside in Southern California.

Customer Reviews

"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 between the ages of 20 and 35. Many boomers experienced formal, liturgical, and boring church services accompanied by theologically liberal, and therefore irrelevant, preaching during their childhood and left the church as soon as they became adults. Morris recognizes this, and recommends that the church move in the opposite direction (ie. becoming more cheery and contemporary) to demonstrate that there is something different here that needs to be checked out. While there is nothing particularly wrong with this approach, it is designed to match experiences quite alien to many gen x-ers. Unlike boomers, x-ers do not have these negative childhood experiences that need to be overcome - x-ers have simply never been to church at all and have no real opinion about the place. Liturgy is only predictable to those who have grown up with it.

I would also take issue with Morris' (and many like him) understanding on how to preach. Much of this seeker-targeted preaching comes across like a late-night infomercial. Here is a "real life" problem, and here is how our amazing new product can solve the problem. It's all cheery, and always has a happy ending. While this captures the spirit of the age for boomers (who are also the ones targeted by infomercials), it misses the boat for cynical x-ers who are turned off by such a "commercial" approach.

Another way in which Morris dates himself is in his approach to music. Morris proclaims the gospel of rock `n roll claiming that for the majority "born between 1946 and 1964 ...likes rock music". While this is true, there are a very significant number of people born between 1965 and 1985 that Morris never considers.

Rock `n roll isn't the issue I wish to raise with Morris. The problem is relevance. It's not that the baby boomers are an irrelevant group of people, but it's Morris' assumption that they are the only people that bothers me. At least Rick Warren concedes that, for the most part, when he speaks about culture, he speaks about a specific segment that he is focussing on. Morris' error is that he take boomer particulars and assumes that they are universals. Because of this, he never sifts between his ideas and separates those ideas which are truly universal, and those which are merely culturally specific. Someone once said that to be always current and relevant you must speak eternal truths. Morris does this some of the time, and does it well, especcialy on issues such as theology, spirituality, and church structure and principles. However, much of his work on preaching, programming, and worship is dated, only relevant to one segment of society, and becoming increasingly distant from the "cutting edge" of culture and society.

Overall, this is an excellent book, and the best in its class. If it had only been published in 1970 or even 1980 it would have been truly cutting edge. Unfortunately, for the pastor of the 21st century, Morris' work is in need of a serious update.

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.