I'm a atheist, a former United Methodist with an extremely jaundiced view of that denomination (UMC). Still, I have a lingering, if sometimes malicious, interest in its fate.
George Hunter's contributions to the UMC have been numerous and helpful over the past several decades, but in this short book, Hunter hits a home run indeed when it comes to diagnosing the current condition of United Methodism and prescribing a potentially promising cure. As a part of the Adaptive Leadership series, one might expect Hunter to sign off less critically on the Call to Action, but instead he offers an insightful critique as to how the church got where it is, and why it will take more than administrative restructuring to bring it back to the place God has called us to be.
George Hunter has written a concise text that takes on what he sees as a failure of United Methodism in particular, and Mainline Christianity in general, to see the root of their dramatic and seemingly unstoppable decline.In the first of three chapters he paints a vivid picture of "Christianity According to the Wesleys.
This book left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, some really good ideas were expressed--that we need to be missional, we need to be willing to adapt to our cultural context, and that we need to stop being so inwardly-focused...
