Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones and then manage the resulting distress.

The missional church is not a new trend or the latest new technique for reaching postmodern people.

More data is not always the answer.

If we can embrace the adventure and risk and equip our churches to lay down their lives and abandon their inherent loss-aversion, who knows what innovation, what freshness, what new insights from the Spirit will emerge.

Interestingly, it's as though the gospel story of Jesus is the archetypal heroic journey, the embodiment of the very adventure that all people in every epoch have desired.

Put simply, the church finds itself in a post-Christendom era, and it had better do some serious reflection or face increasing decline and eventual irrelevance.

Unless the church is equipping believers to embrace the values and vision of the kingdom of God and turn away from the materialism, consumerism, greed, and power of the present age, it not only abandons its biblical mandate, it is rendered missionally ineffective.