Book Review: On the Verge by Alan Hirsch and Dave Ferguson

I rarely write book reviews.  Come to think of it, since leaving school the only review I’ve ever done was of a Stephen King book on this blog over a year ago.  So this is new territory for me.  I’m venturing into this strange new land because I was offered a shinny new copy of the book if I promised to review it.

Hirsch and Ferguson say the purpose of the book is “to help birth a paradigm shift.” (p11)   They believe the American church is in decline and needs to take drastic measures to save it from irrelevancy.    Through the book they seek to describe the shift and then give church leaders practical advice on how to make the shift a reality.

There have been lots of summaries put out about the book.  A lot of people are reviewing On the Verge right now.  If you are on twitter you can find many of the reviews at @OntheVergeBook.  I recommend checking them out.  I’m not going to add to that pile.

The book is sweeping in scope and covers a huge amount of issues.  I feel as though I could knock out 15 pages of thoughts and reflections on it.  I’m not going to do that either.  Instead I’m going to tell you two things I loved about the book, one paradox that I respect and fear, and a theme that frustrated me.  Finally I’ll put a big fat concluding bow on it.  I might write other reflections later.

ONE THING I LOVED: Their Heart and Passion!

Ferguson is the lead pastor of a multi-site mega-monster-church based in Chicago which has grown into a church planting network.  He also plays a major role in the Exponential conference (a gigantic annual gathering geared toward church planters) and is somehow connected to Leadership Network (I think…but I could be mistaken).  In the face of statistics showing national decline it would be easy for him (and the rest of the Future Travelers – a group of mega-church pastors pursuing change together on whom the book is founded) to declare that they are fine.  That while the majority of churches in the country might be falling apart and in a slow spiral decent toward death, there are thousands of people participating in their stuff, their churches are growing, and outside of the economic downturn they have more to celebrate than be concerned about.  I’m sure there is a great temptation for these pastors to say, “This is not my problem.”  And no one would blame them for that.

But with this book they fight that temptation and instead declare, “Not on our shift!  Not if we can help it!” (p11)  They make bold statements like…

• “What got us here won’t get us there if ‘there’ is missional movements in the West.” (p23)
• “Like all paradigm shifts it will likely also require repentance from us if we are to progress healthily into the Verge Paradigm.” (p71)
• “It’s relatively easy to come up with new ideas; the really hard part is letting go of what worked two (or four, or eight) years ago but will soon be out-of-date.” (p79)

This attitude brought joy to my heart.  It is exciting to see leaders at the top of their game lead the charge for change.  These same sentiments are what led Wendy and I a few years ago to leave our job with an attractional church and go in pursuit of innovation with a small team of leaders.  The author’s attitude to take the hill and bring a “shift” is inspirational.

ANOTHER THING I LOVE: The Discussion of Organizational Change!

Those of you that know me and/or read this blog routinely know that I’m a little obsessed with church systems…okay, okay…that’s not entirely accurate…I’ve got real addiction issues when it comes to studying and debating church models.  I seriously need some professional help.  On the Verge does a phenominal job of explaining how to bring about systematic change.  The book divides all organizations into three pieces:

• Paradigms – the DNA theoretical beliefs that fuel everything in the organization.
• Ethos – the culture of the organization: its language, stories, heroes, values, symbols, rituals, etc…
• Practices – how the organization displays the ethos to the world: its programs, behaviors, habits, and rhythms.

The authors explain how in an organization the paradigm determines the ethos which determines the practices.  Therefore, they explain, it is not enough to simply attack practices.  We need to dig into our paradigms and discover what they are and how they need to be changed.  The authors then go on to encourage replacing your current church paradigms with the mDNA Hirsch laid out in Forgotten Ways.  They give tons and tons of leadership strategies and methods to go about this (way to many to get into here…go buy the book).

I’ve had the privileged in my professional life of participating in the transformation of three churches.  I wish I had this book in hand twelve years ago when all that began.  There is so much to learn about change from its pages.  There are some amazing diagnostic tools in it.  It’s full of fantastic leadership strategies.  Even if the motivation for the book (the call to innovate and save the American church from decline) was removed from its pages, it would still stand as a fantastic work on how to bring change to an institutional system.   I will go so far as to say that anyone fighting to bring transformation within a system should struggle with the concepts in this book.

A PARADOX THAT I RESPECT AND FEAR:  ”NOT YET BUT DEFINITELY US”

The authors are clear throughout the text that the American church has not arrived, that the transformation is just beginning, that there is a lot of innovating to do.  But at the same time, they hold up the Future Travelers as examples of success, and they consistently refer readers to “Verge churches” as the pattern to follow.  In this language I was surprised by the assumption that the outcome of these churches is already determined – they will succeed on their current path and bring about the movement.   While I recognize this unwavering faith in one’s future as a needed leadership strategy within an organization (it is one-half of Jim Collin’s Stockdale Paradox), I was surprised to find it in the pages of this text.

Stay with me here.

If we are facing a problem with our current models of church that demands we question everything down to our very paradigms, if this shift is going to bring about a movement in West like we’ve never seen, and if no one right now has successfully made the shift or knows what the end product will look like… then how can you be sure that the inaugural steps you are taking through changing your practice and examining your paradigms will be the ones that bring about the movement you hope for?  My fear is that by declaring victory before the battle is won we will end up determining the finish line of innovation as “whatever we become.”   It is as if through the book the authors are saying, “We don’t know where we are going, but it’s name is Awesomeness!”

I have respect for this attitude.  It is not one that comes to me easily.  The team I’m a part of has been innovating for two years.  We (accidentally) started by questioning all our paradigms.  We have since been experimenting with different ethos and practices.  Our goal from the beginning has been to redefine how to be the church in a way that will bring transformation to the world around us.  I wish I was as certain of our future success as the authors of On the Verge are of theirs.  In this light I respect their attitude.

On the other hand, when we left the attractional church to innovate we faced criticism and ridicule from those who continued to pursue the attractional/mega-church dream.  At several points pastors I knew from other churches even staged interventions and tried to “talk sense into me.”  Over the last three years the culture has changed and innovation is now cool.  I’m excited and thankful about this shift and recognize it is due to the hard work of men like Alan Hirsch.  But at the same time, because of paradoxical attitudes like the one I heard underlying On the Verge, I fear that if my teams’ innovations don’t end up looking like the cool guys innovations that again we will find ourselves on the outside.

A THEME THAT FRUSTRATED ME: The Defense of the Both/And

Through out the book there is a recurring defense of the Both/And approach to church innovation.  I felt like it was unnecessary and out of place, and it frustrated me.

For those that aren’t up on modern church lingo, let fill you in briefly.  (Disclaimer: I’m no church sociologist.  This is simply how I experienced the conversation.  It is my perspective from my small corner of the world.)  In 2006 Alan Hirsch published an amazing work (it completely changed my thinking) entitled The Forgotten Ways.  The book begins by challenging what Hirsch called the “attractional” model of church (what I knew as the Seeker Sensitive model).   It is the model most American mega-churches were built on.  Hirsch called churches to put aside the attractional model and pursue innovation by rethinking church through new/ancient paradigms (these are recapped in On the Verge).  From this book (and a few others that came out around the same time like Organic Church or Missional Rennisance or The Tangible Kingdom) a debate began about what the American church should be like.  A whole ton of very diverse people who were dissatisfied with the attractional model took on the title “Missional”.   This was confusing because they seemed to be only united in their dislike of the attractional style.  Then somewhere in the conversation people started calling for Both/And.  (The first place I saw it was from Hugh Halter’s work but I’m not sure if this is where it began.)  The Both/And argument claimed that there was a lot of good stuff in the attractional model.  That instead of tossing it out, church innovators should look to build on it by trying to make it more missional.

Throughout On the Verge this Both/And perspective is championed.  Here is the clearest example:

“But let us be clear: we believe church can be attractional and missional at the same time only if the organizational genetics, our core ideas, the pradigmatic brain at the center, legitimizes both impulses as important and justifiable expressions of what it means to contextualize the gospel in the Western World…Verge churches will be those that have somehow found the necessary intellectual freedom and imaginative space to be able to overcome the captivity to their own prevailing ideologies – and, in light of that, are willing to reframe their core paradigm from being a church to being a movement.  One of the main ways to do this is to get over the impasse of either/or and imagine a church that embraces both/and.” (p30)

The combination of calling for innovation while defending what currently exists was a weird duality.  Hirsch explains it on page 171,

“This doesn’t mean we should abandon what we’re doing now, but it does mean we must learn what we don’t know now and not just use the same tools, approaches, and methods that work in the red ocean.”

Or later again on page 187,

“Most innovation theorists now understand that innovation doesn’t necessarily mean concocting something radically new, seemingly out of nowhere, but that new ideas and products arise out of combining different ideas from seemingly disparate areas of concern.  The real key to innovation, then, comes from combining ideas drawn from a tumult of already existing, if separate, developments and ideas.”

The authors’ believe the route of the future is to take the best of “Church Growth Practices”, “Exponential Systems”, and “Incarnational Mission” (p31) and mesh them together into one big ball.  Their hope is that this will allow them to continue to reach the 40% of people who are open to the attractional model (the red ocean) and begin reaching the 60% of people who aren’t (the blue ocean).

Each time this argument is raised in the book it felt out of place to me.  The strength of the book was the call for innovation around the Forgotten Ways.  In my opinion it could have been left at that.  There was no need to presuppose the starting place of innovation had to be the attractional model.  It seemed to me as though the authors only want us to “unleash the power of imagination” and “allow ourselves to explore possibilities we have never thought of” (p48) as long as we fully embrace the practices that currently exist.  If we don’t start on that foundation are we doomed to failure?

I found the defense of Both/And frustrating as well.  The attractional model is practice and ethos that has been birthed from paradigms.  There is some seriously broken crap in those paradigms (the elevation of specific giftings over others through the practice of ordination, success being defined as more bodies rather than sent disciples, or the primacy of worship and the large group gathering in the model’s heart… to name a few I’ve learned from reading and listening to Hirsch).  Some aspects of the attractional paradigm I consider to be in direct contradiction to the paradigms in the Forgotten Ways.  I found it frustrating in a book calling for innovation that the authors would champion a specific ethos and practice without devoting real time to look at the paradigms that underline the model.  I do concede that this frustration is birthed from my personal experience with the model; and that it is possible the authors felt the attractional model has been beat up enough (I disagree).

MY CONCLUSION: The Big Fat Bow

The book is definitely worth reading.  If you like church stuff I recommend you go buy it.  The Both/And perspective of the book frustrated me, but at the same time I am thankful that the Future Travelers are now calling for innovation because of the huge national platforms they each have.

Are we really “on the verge” of some huge change?  Sadly, I don’t think so.  I think as a whole we are still in love with who we are now.  I think we have a long way to go.  I think it is going to get worst before it gets better.