I admit it … I’m a fan of Andy Stanley and North Point Ministries.  I still remember the first time I visited their Alpharetta, GA campus nearly 10 years ago.  It was one of those perspective shaping experiences.  I came away from that interaction with North Point looking at “church” in a totally different way.

I think Andy’s new book “Deep & Wide” has the potential to shift many church leaders thinking and behavior in a similar way … and you don’t even need the hassle of travelling through the Atlanta airport!  (Of course … you would miss all those great Chick Fil A sandwiches down south!)

[Click here to purchase a copy of Andy’s new book for you and your entire team.]

Quotable Quotes from Andy Stanley’s Deep and Wide

• “any given weekend, 10 percent of our adult audiences identify themselves as guests (a guest being someone who has attended five times or less).”
  • The thrust of the book is “creating churches that unchurch people love to attend” and Andy is backing up the fact that North Point is actually doing that.  In the appendix of the book he even opens up the stats so you can poke around under the hood a little bit.
• “While it’s amazing that the church survived the persecution of the first century, it may be more amazing that it survived the institutionalization and corruption of the centuries that followed. But it did survive. Jesus promised it would. As it turned out, the kirche of man could not contain the ekklesia of Jesus.”
  • Andy spends a bunch of time in the early part of the book looking at church history and how the “church” degenerated from being a vibrant movement to meaning a building or place or worship.  It’s so refreshing to see a forward thinking leader so grounded in where the church has come from.
• “People are far more interested in what works than what’s true. I hate to burst your bubble, but virtually nobody in your church is on a truth quest. Including your spouse. They are on happiness quests.”
  • When I read this … I literally had to stop and re-read it three or four times.  Andy is shooting from the hip for people who are involved in teaching and communications at church.  He’s pushing us to teach with application as the purpose of communication. Love it.
• “The reason more people aren’t engaged with the local church is … we aren’t all that engaging!”
  • Ouch, that hurt. (But it’s true.)
• “Is the setting appealing? Is the presentation engaging? Is the content helpful?”
  • This is the core of a section on how North Point creates irresistible environments for people.  It’s so simple … but these three questions are incredibly powerful in creating leverage in our evaluation of what our ministries actually do.
• “since everyone likes to win, chances are people will consider their areas of ministry successful whether they are or not.”
  • Again – ouch, that hurts.  In what area of my ministry am I self delusional about it winning when it really isn’t? I sat and thought about that for a long time.
• “Every innovation has an expiration date.”
  • This idea has crawled up under my skin recently.  I look around at a lot of what we do at Liquid and I feel like it was innovative at a time … but when will those ideas actually work against what we are attempting to do?
• “When institutions fail to distinguish between current practices and the enduring principles of their success, and mistakenly fossilize around their practices, they’ve set themselves up for decline.”
  • In what areas am I looking at our current practices and mistaking them for enduring principles? Am I an agent of fossilization?

These are just a few of the quotes that I pulled out when reading this book … hopefully to whet your appetite to actually pick up a copy and read it yourself.  [Click here to get your copy now.] I really do think it’s the most important church leadership book in a very long time maybe since “Purpose Driven Church” was published in 1995.  Get some copies of it and read it together with your leadership team.