10 books like Church 3.0

In the 1950s, Robert Coleman, then a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, was assigned to teach a class on evangelism. But he had a problem: he had no idea what to say. So he decided to pore over the four Gospels to discern Jesus’ strategy for winning people to his message. His lecture notes became The Master Plan of Evangelism.

The reach of The Master Plan since its publication in 1963 has been enormous. Billy Graham even wrote the foreword. But Jesus’ model of training a few was so alien to the operating systems of 20th-century churches and traveling evangelists that generations had no idea how to implement it. Not many books have been so widely read and so little applied. Yet if you only read one book on this subject, make this the one. And if you’ve already read it long ago, read it again.

Thirty-five years after Coleman’s publication, the late USC philosophy professor and spirituality maven Dallas Willard wrote his most influential work. The Divine Conspiracy is nothing less than a sober attempt to turn upside down—or perhaps right-side up—everything most people, including Christians, think Christianity is.

Along the way, however, Willard composed a trenchant manifesto for making disciples as Jesus intended. This remark is typical: “The fact is that there now is lacking a serious and expectant intention to bring Jesus’ people into obedience and abundance through training. That would be discipleship as he gave it to us.”

Addison’s book lengthens and broadens Coleman’s Master Plan. While Coleman focuses on Jesus’ selection, training, and sending of his twelve closest disciples, Addison also examines what Jesus did before he named the Twelve, including rich historical background of his ministry context in first-century Palestine. In this way, Addison sheds light on how to engage unreached people who are still far from committing themselves to learn from Jesus.

Addison discerns a recurring six-step pattern in Jesus’ activity, in the early Palestinian church, in Paul’s Mediterranean travels, and in global disciple-making movements today. Importantly, he lays out these steps in a way that contemporary Western Christians unused to Jesus’ method can begin practicing them together.

What are the stages of a disciple’s optimal development? The theoretical path starts with a person not following Jesus and ends with that person helping their own disciples make disciples of Jesus. Having a reliable model that traces the course of a disciple’s development benefits a disciple maker practically, because people have different capacities, needs, and challenges at different stages as they grow.

The most persuasive and useful model yet proposed might be found in this brief book by Harrington and Wiens, who adapt to individuals the Exponential organization’s five-level typology of churches.

This book is for pastors, lay leaders and professional church educators, and students who want to model congregational life on the kingdom of God instead of marketing strategies designed to appeal to generational narcissism based on individual preference. This is one book that will both encourage and equip congregations to be less 'conformed to the world,' less prone to say, 'I have no need for you.' This is a book that argues persuasively from solid research, as well as the biblical mandate, for congregations to really 'love one another.' This book is honest about the costly demands of intentional intergenerational development as well as its rich rewards.

Even committed Christians lose heart sometimes. We all need a breath of God’s fresh wind, the fresh fire of His Spirit moving in our lives. I picked up this book at a time when I needed just such encouragement. 

Like Joseph, we all face devastating trials, heartbreak, emotional struggles. It’s part of the human condition. And I’d bet I’m not alone when I say I’ve known what hopelessness feels like.

I loved this quote from the book: “In the same way, God does His most stunning work where things seem hopeless. Wherever there is pain, suffering, and desperation, Jesus is.”

We may not realize it, but everyone everywhere desperately needs Jesus. Joseph needed Him in the pit and the prison. We need Him in our private pits and prisons too.

This is one of my all-time favorite books! Raised in India by missionary parents, Dr. Brand saw firsthand the effects of leprosy on the body. He trained as a doctor in England and returned to India where he pioneered the concept of the “gift of pain”—the idea that lepers’ “rotting” extremities resulted from the loss of sensation and subsequent infection, not the disease itself. A renowned surgeon, he was the first in the world to use reconstructive surgery on lepers, techniques he later applied to diabetics.

The book goes through the body, system by system, relating the physical body to the body of Christ. My favorite parts are Dr. Brand’s vivid stories of treating the “outcasts” society shuns but God does not.

This generational read opens with an encounter with suicide that took a supernatural occurrence to escape. From there, readers travel through pages of a child’s near-death experience, surviving flames of a house fire that left her with third-degree burns to encounters that only she can explain. As the author chronicles her process of facing elementary taunts of bullies, to the 30 reconstructive surgeries she endured to regain her mobility, readers uncover a story of the father’s love and the family ties that we can all relate to.

See His Glory, unravels the broken pieces of this burn survivor’s past to reveal a most beautiful work…her story. What I really love the most about this author and the story is how she highlights the love she experienced from different people through her suffering. She described one of the lessons she has learned along her journey is the universal language of love… show more.

Miley does similar things in Becoming Fire as Miller does in Friendship with Jesus but with her own flavor.

Every week, she camps on a different story of the Bible.

You walk a mile in the sandals of a different character each day. That way, you develop a deeper understanding of the passage than you would if you just read it once and connected with the characters you naturally understand. 

Take the story about the sisters, Mary and Martha. Everyone relates to Martha who's super busy. That's our culture these days, right? But not as many people relate to Mary who camps at Jesus’ feet wanting to take in everything He has to say. 

I certainly didn't until God Mary'd me so much so that I ended up writing a book about it.

Through Becoming Fire, God will personalize the Scriptures for you, too!

A well-written, well researched book by a prominent American archeologist and New Testament scholar that examines what we can now reliably know about the Jesus of history. Tabor carefully sifts through the conflicting evidence in the gospels, written 40-70 years after the death of Jesus, and illuminates his discussion with contemporary archeological finds. A paradigm changer in our search for the historical Jesus, not the Christ of faith.