Future Growth

Church growth models have often been long on promises and short on disciple-making. We continue to watch consistent church attendance shrink, and our desire to reach the lost is infected with a need for self-validation by growing our numbers at any cost. If we believe that God wants his church to grow, where do we go from here? What is the future of the church?

We all know a visionary leader when we see one. They're bold and prophetic and at the same time pragmatic. They don't just promote change - they drive it, while inspiring and mobilizing others to do the same. Visionaries like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos possess a host of innate qualities that make them extraordinary, but what truly sets them apart is their ability to turn vision into action. Here, Innosight's Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz introduce a new way of thinking and managing, called "future-back", that enables any manager to become a practical visionary.

Growth is a fundamental human need. It is at the root of everything that gives us a feeling of accomplishment, satisfaction, meaning, and progress. Yet many people find their growth stalled at some point. In The Laws of Lifetime Growth, Dan Sullivan and Catherine Nomura offer 10 simple laws that everyone can use to keep a fresh, innovative perspective on their lives and the world around them.

Best-selling author Ryan Holiday, the acclaimed marketing guru for American Apparel and many bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians, explains the new rules and provides valuable examples and case studies for aspiring growth hackers. Whether you work for a tiny start-up or a Fortune 500 giant, if you're responsible for building awareness and buzz for a product or service, this is your road map.

Character is something intrinsic to us all; it forms and reveals who we are. Unbeknownst to many, character is foundational to our judgment, behavior, and leadership. As we tackle the grand challenges of our time, strength of character guides us to make better decisions, creates greater well-being, and contributes to human flourishing. For those who lead—whether in the public, private, not for profit, or education sectors—a greater understanding of character will challenge your thinking, inspire new ideas, and elevate your personal and professional performance.

Every day, another Millennial becomes an adult. For many young people, the transition is a bumpy one, fraught with opportunities to make mistakes and bad choices. The clear expectations they had at home or in school are gone, and they may feel unprepared to face what comes next. But sometimes we make it harder than it has to be. Combining entertaining stories from his own experience, insights from the Bible, and compelling evidence from research, "JP" Pokluda lays out a roadmap for how to navigate life as an adult.

The years since the Great Crisis of 2008 have seen slow growth, high unemployment, falling home values, chronic deficits, a deepening disaster in Europe - and a stale argument between two false solutions, “austerity” on one side and “stimulus” on the other. Both sides and practically all analyses of the crisis so far take for granted that the economic growth from the early 1950s until 2000 - interrupted only by the troubled 1970s - represented a normal performance.

The future of work swept in sooner than expected, accelerated by COVID-19, creating an urgent need for new maps, new mindsets, new strategies - and most importantly, a trusted guide to take us on this journey. That guide is Jeff Schwartz. A founding partner of Deloitte Consulting's Future of Work practice, Schwartz brings clarity, humor, wisdom, and practical advice to the future of work, a topic surrounded by misinformation, fear, and confusion.

Pages are turning on God's prophetic calendar, approaching that glorious day when his son will step once again into the world of time and space. What is the key to this timetable? The answer is Israel. And the controversy over her destiny affects every nation on Earth. In an urgent plea for prophetic watchmen, James W. Goll calls you to join the global prayer movement to remind God of his promises toward his ancient covenant people, according to a targeted biblical plan.

Growth hackers have thrown out the old playbook and replaced it with tools that are testable, trackable, and scalable. They believe that products and businesses should be modified repeatedly until they're primed to generate explosive reactions. Best-selling author Ryan Holiday, the acclaimed marketing guru for many successful brands, authors, and musicians, explains the new rules in a book that has become a marketing classic in Silicon Valley and around the world.

Do you feel like we’re in a permacrisis? Chances are you feel some anxiety about the state of the world right now. Mohamed, Michael and Gordon certainly did. These three friends – who between them have almost a century of expertise in international economics, business and global government – began talking over zoom at the start of the pandemic. They wanted to discuss the challenges the world was facing: unanticipated shocks, poor policy responses, struggling coordination. But the more they talked, the more they realised there was nothing pre-ordained about the gloomy path we’re on now.

What if the solution for the decline of today's church isn't more money, people, programs, innovation, or busyness? What if the answer is to stop and wait on God? In When Church Stops Working, ministry leaders Andrew Root and Blair Bertrand show how actively watching and listening for God can bring life out of death for churches in crisis today. Using clear steps and practices, they invite church leaders to stop the endless cycle of doing more and rather to simply "be" in God's presence.

You are the one who shapes your future! No matter how you’ve lived up until now, your past cannot derail your future because God’s potential lives in you! In Shaping Your Future, author and teacher Barry Bennett explains that God has entrusted each of us with the ability to grow our own future, but the future comes in the form of seeds. Every thought, word, action, attitude, and resource can be the seed of blessing or destruction. These seeds define our lives. 

In Laughing at the Days to Come, Tessa Thompson shares a poignant story of physical suffering and her journey to not only understand God's hand at work in it, but to face the future with laughter. This book is gospel centered and hope-filled. Chapter after chapter, the author directs our focus to Christ and his work for us. We all face suffering in this fallen world, but we are not without hope. In Laughing at the Days to Come, listeners are equipped to face their own stories of suffering with joy because of our present and future hope in Christ.

It's tempting to believe that the Christian faith is alive and well in our country today. Our politicians talk about God. Our mega-churches are filled. Christian schools dot our landscape. Brace yourself. It's an illusion. Believe it or not, only 8 percent of Americans profess and practice true evangelical Christian faith. There are more left-handed people than evangelical Christians in America.

We experience change in four phases. The first is panic. Then we adapt. Then we find a new normal. And then, finally, we reach the phase we could not have imagined in the beginning, the moment when we realize that we wouldn’t go back. Build for Tomorrow is designed to accelerate that process—to help you lessen your panic, adapt faster, define the new normal, and thrive going forward. And it arrives as we all, in some way, have felt a shift in our lives.

The world of contemplative Christianity has yielded to the same voices for far too long, many of whom are from centuries before our time, with lives unlike our own, and often from experiences disconnected from marginalization, oppression, and what it feels like to be an outsider. Cassidy Hall, an LGBTQIA+ Christian contemplative scholar and podcast host, takes us on a journey to queer the contemplative tradition.

Pursuing the "good life," as defined by the world, comes at a cost. We'll never find "more" or "better" traveling a road that deviates from God's will. But hope can be found even in the deepest pits we dig for ourselves, and that is what you'll find in Rebuilding the Ruins of Regret. In this candid, personal account of the harrowing consequences that followed a series of life-altering decisions, Dr. Finley boldly confronts the illusion of finding happiness in the pursuit of pleasure and leads us on a journey of self-forgiveness and course correction.

Disruption by digital technologies? That's not a new story. But what is new is the "wise pivot", a replicable strategy for harnessing disruption to survive, grow, and be relevant to the future. It's a strategy for perpetual reinvention across the old, now, and new elements of any business. Rapid recent advances in technology are forcing leaders in every business to rethink long-held beliefs about how to adapt to emerging technologies and new markets. What has become abundantly clear: in the digital age, conventional wisdom about business transformation no longer works, if it ever did.

This book aims to provide you with a step-by-step guide for personal, professional, and organizational growth. The author highlights how certain relationships enable a non-linear growth trajectory. These relationships, in addition to augmenting what we can accomplish, often shape who we become. These relationships are "curve benders," and this book will show you who and where they are, how to find and engage them, and, equally valuable, how you can become a curve bender to impact the lives and livelihoods of others profoundly.