The Shaping of Things Now: Emerging Church Mission and Innovation in 21st Century Melbourne

This is a ground-breaking piece of research which holds the reality of three Australian ?emerging missional churches? up against their rhetoric and draws important conclusions. Don't we all aspire to incarnational mission, empowering leadership and inclusive community? Cronshaw learns from the local. He demonstrates through careful congregational analysis that it is easier to aspire to these things than to achieve them. Everyone committed to bridging the huge gap between church as we know it and a Western society that is ?over church? will learn a great deal from The Shaping of Things Now. (Dr Ross Langmead, Dean and Professor of Missiology, Whitley College) ... Darren has established himself as one of the foremost interpreters of the emerging missional church in Australasia and given us a wonderful gift of painstaking research blended with loving insight into the nature of this historically significant new movement. I am both honored by him as well as indebted to him for this work ? and I think we should all be. (Alan Hirsch, co-author of The Shaping of Things to Come (with Michael Frost) and founder of Forge Mission Training Network)