Surprising Insights from the Unchurched - Introduction

I'm going to offer potted summaries of each chapter as I go along. The point is to present the book as it is, and save my comments and reflections for the end. 


In the Introduction Rainer outlines the parameters of the  research project, which I began to describe in the post below, and provides a high-level summary of findings.  This is the key chart: What factors led you to choose this church?  The percentages are of the total pool of 353 formerly unchurched who were surveyed. 

Pastor/ preaching	___________________________________90%
Doctrines	_________________________________88%
Friendliness of members	________________49%
Other issues	_____________42%
Someone from the church witnessed to me	____________41%
Family member attends	__________38%
Sense God’s presence/ atmosphere of the church	_________37%

Rainer says, "This simple graph alone could speak volumes to a strategy for reaching the unchurched". 


In fact, the study revealed that pastors, preaching and doctrine were such a significant factor that the project went on to interview 101 pastors of evangelistically effective churches.  The entire latter half of the book is devoted to describing these results.  A group of the same number of pastors from 'comparison churches', that is churches that did not meet the criteria of 'evangelistically effective', were also interviewed.  


In a similar vein, a comparison group of 'transfer churched' were also interviewed. These were people who had joined a church, not because of conversion, but from another church.  

I like the methodological premise of the study. It seems to me that to better understand the reasons why people have actually chosen to join is a very fruitful exercise.  And the comparisons with 'transfer churched' and pastors of 'comparison churches' should be extremely interesting.  


At least one person has asked me where they can get this book. If you click on the title above, it will take you to www.bookdepository.co.uk which I'm a fan of: free delivery worldwide, very competitive prices, often the same or better than our local retailers.