Outgrowing Church, Second Edition (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

Why are so many people drifting away from today's churches? John Killinger suggests that part of the problem is that they have personally outpaced the thinking and understanding of the church so that they no longer find it adequate as a social structure for the celebration of their faith. In their attempts to find Jesus and his teachings relevant within the new culture, they strike out on their own or adhere to para-Christian organizations that retain an allegiance to Jesus without the baggage of the traditional institution. Killinger, a former big-steeple minister and theologian, describes how he himself has been forced essentially to abandon the church in order to remain faithful to the beliefs and ideals that first drew him into it.

"With a pastor's heart and a theologian's mind, John Killinger voices the disappointment of many of his generation of retired clergy who feel they can no longer find a spiritually satisfying church home. His self-diagnosis: we haven't just left the church, we have actually outgrown it! And his remedies: 'some hard reconsiderations of the nature of God . . . inventing a whole new language with which to talk about this God and a brand new way of worshiping God . . . confronting transcendence and having our lives renewed and reoffered to God and to others.'"
--William R. Russell, retired Presbyterian minister and author of If Only I Had Known . . .

"John Killinger, in this second edition of Outgrowing Church, laments the loss of a church whose methodology seems destined for extinction, even as he hints at a coming season when incarnational community will succeed institutional church as the primary expression of spiritual connectivity. . . . This isn't just another book about the collapse of the ecclesial empire; it is a call to look for the seedlings emerging from the debris, an emerging faith community bound together, not by brick and mortar, or budgets and baptisms, but a fellowship that finds cohesion in grace, hospitality, and honest inquiry."
--Barry Howard, coach, consultant, and columnist at the Center for Healthy Churches

John Killinger pastored First Presbyterian Church of Lynchburg, Virginia, First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, and Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. He taught at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary, and was Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Samford University. He is the author of more than seventy books, including Ten Things I Learned Wrong from a Conservative Church (2002), The Changing Shape of Our Salvation (2007), and Hidden Mark (2010).