Launching the Church Out Into Deep Water is . . .

. . . the only prophetic way for The Church of the Perfect Storm to effectively address one of the greatest Culturestorms in history. At least that is according to Leonard Sweet and the voices of multiple writers in a new book he edited and Abingdon Press released two months ago.

This book provides a dramatic image of the conflict and challenge facing Christianity if it is to successfully navigate the waters of post-Christendom. The reward is not in the harbor. The reward is in the midst of the storm. The reward is in the deep water. The reward may follow the storm as God displays a special rainbow.

The church cannot stay in the harbor just as the early church could not stay in Jerusalem. But once again it might take persecution to get the church to leave the harbor and to see the opportunities of God in the midst of the perfect storm.

It has been 500 years since the last perfect storm for Christianity. We called it the Reformation. The forces of the Counter-Reformation sought to undermine it, but it could not. The Church of the Perfect Storm paints a clear picture of the challenges that most be faced in the current post-Christendom storm.

At a time such as this some of the Israelites wanted to return to Egypt rather than cross the Red Sea. In the same way many modern Christians are afraid to face the perfect storm present in the midst of post-modernity. They prefer the harbor or, as Stephen Joubert says on page 50, the religious aquarium which some know as churches.

As I shared when I formally endorsed this book for Len and Abingdon Press: "Just as during a hurricane the safest place for ships is not the harbor, but the deep water, so Christianity in a post-modern era must launch out into deep water and face head-on the perfect storm created by the convergence of post-modernity, religious pluralism, institutionalized Christianity, and militant atheism."

Go forth and become storm chasers. Join The Church of the Perfect Storm as shown to us in this book by writers Len Sweet, Greg Glatz, Stephan Joubert, Alan Jamieson, Dries Lombaard, Younglae Kim, Earl Pierce, Bill Easum, Michael Blewett, Mark Batterson, Tom Bandy, and Peter Walker.

--provided by George Bullard at www.BullardJournal.org