Böcker av Lance Ford

Leaders often bear the weight of the church on their shoulders. But have we made leadership into something it was never meant to be?Most of us are familiar with Atlas, the mythological Greek figure condemned to hold up the heavens. If you have ever been a pastor, no doubt you have felt something similar. Being "the leader" often feels like an overwhelming burden.In an era plagued by the fall of influential pastors, it's time to reconsider our fundamental understanding and application of leadership. The Atlas Factor sheds light on the tragic mistake of replacing the God-ordained headship of Jesus with human-made systems and presents a way to realign the body of Christ with its true Head. Only when we shift leadership onto Jesus' shoulders can we become the beautiful, joyful, Spirit-filled expression of the church God intended us to be.

When Christ calls people, he invites them on a journey-a journey taken together in community. We have reached a point in history, however, when we think of the church as a fixed place where isolated individuals show up, consume a Christian message, drink some coffee, and get on with their lives. The times demand, and the gospel proclaims, that we recover our identity as a church that is a people on a quest for the kingdom of heaven, formed intimately by a loving God and called onto a long journey for the sake of our neighbors and our world. In The Missional Quest you?ll learn how to take your church on a long run, and how to sustain yourselves and one another along the way, through the power of God for the sake of the world.

Leveraging the metaphor Ori Brafman popularized in his NYT best-selling book, The Starfish and the Spider, Wegner, Ford, and Hirsch show why the distributed structures of starfish organizations are uniquely fit to the church. Seeding starfish networks inside today's churches will prepare the church of tomorrow to be agile and effective.