What a blessing this book has been. If you want to read some fresh practical thinking about the church then you need to read this book. Floyd McClung writes with passion and clarity and certainly throws down a challenge to move towards reality. Thoroughly recommended.

You can read more comments in my blog. As a taster here's one of the comments.

How about this for a description of how the church should be working. "churches in their movement organised naturally around those who went from village to village preaching and baptising. Leaders in the movement were those who led people to Christ. The ones doing the baptising were the village workers and their mentors. The churches that were started were connected organically, as the believers told others about their new faith, moving from village to village - just as families are connected through cousins, nephews, aunts and uncles. This leader saw that his primary role was to recognise those who were already doing the work of ministry, select them for further training, and assist them as the movement grew" This comes from Floyd McClung's book You See Bones I See an Army. He is contrasting this type of spontaneous, out of control, growth, with what he calls command and control church government which tends to be a set command structures. These more rigid structures are good for maintainence and direction but lack spontaneous expansion. Floyd says "we have learned how to control the church, but we struggle to learn how to allow the Holy Spirit to be in control."

The thing I like about this book it the way that he talks a lot of sense, much of which seems to keep pointing back to the spontaneous growth of the first century church. Perhaps a time is coming when the church will once again need to meet from house to house centred around the teaching, breaking of bread, fellowship and prayer.