Good Forces

At the risk of turning this blog into a book review, I'm going to tout yet another book that is impacting my thinking. "Forces for Good" by Leslie Crutchfield and Heather Grant is an outstanding book containing significant insights for churches being planted using "incarnational ministry" strategies. "Incarnational" strategies include any type of planting process that involves a parallel organization that meets a felt need or leverages an underutilized community resource to help make a community a better place to live. So we're talking after school programs (like Kid Care America), coffee houses, community development corporations, community centers, etc...anything an emerging church does that empowers it to build great relational connections to people in the community.

This book specifically addresses starting non-profit organizations that target community transformation. The sub-title is "The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits." This is a research based look at what makes the best non-profits work. The value of the book for the church planter include some of the following insights. 1. The list of 6 practices is priceless and can even inform the development of the church. 2. The ideas for community impacting activities are frequent and inspiring. You should be able to come away with at least one idea that would be strategic in your setting. 3. The insight that every healthy non-profit has a good strategy for developing people, developing funding streams and building infrastructure. Crutchfield and Grant make a strong point that it is dangerous to try to run any organization with no margin...money must be invested into organizational structures in order to ensure the ability of the organization to continue to move toward fulfillment of its God-given vision.

There are many other worthwhile insights in the book. If it's not in your budget to buy new books all the time, consider checking them out from the library! This one is worth the buy or the borrow whichever you are best suited to do!