How to Knock Over a 7-11: And Other Ministry Training (Cheshire, 2012) Michael Cheshire
The Facts: A church-planting manual disguised as a memoir. Michael Cheshire tells the remarkable story of how he and his unlikely team started a church in Colorado. Cheshire combines narrative and reflection—with plenty of laughs throughout—to appeal to pastors and church leaders, whether or not church planting is their thing. The book sometimes reads like a blog with short, cryptically titled chapters. He deviates regularly along the way to indulge interesting tangents about the unpredictable world of church planting.
The Slant: Not every church planter will connect with the author’s context or methods. Cheshire comes across as a larger-than-life personality, someone with a huge heart for people and the willingness to attempt almost anything to reach them. There is little here about how a church planter’s ecclesiology impacts their methodology. I pastor a new urban church, and I’m sure I have significantly different instincts when it comes to church-planting. Even so, each chapter provoked feelings of resonance with this fellow church-planter. More than once my imagination was stirred to consider new possibilities.
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