TWO STARS: One church’s journey, but not all

This is a book about the success journey of one mega church—Gateway Church in Dallas, Texas (http://gatewaypeople.com/).

Author and Pastor Robert Morris outlines in five sections what he believes it takes for a church to be successful:

1. A vision

2. Church shepherds

3. Church leaders

4. Church government

5.Church culture

As a pastor, I particularly found the church shepherd’s section valuable.  Morris also includes helpful reminder chapters that church leaders need to do like keeping the Sabbath and not putting one’s family on the back burner.

But while there were a few tasty morsels found throughout the book, I finished feeling underfed.  This book is not a “how-to” book, so it doesn’t give detailed instructions on how to grow your church but rather tells Gateway’s story and their principles.  Also, the section on church government did not apply to me as I belong to a denomination that already has a “church government” in place and does not have the freedom to create its own like Gateway does.  So that whole section was not very useful.  Additionally, I missed throughout the book talk of female leadership at his church.  After doing some research on the internet I discovered the church’s position paper on women in leadership says that while women are welcome to serve in ministry, they are not to hold position of Senior Pastor or Elder.  This may explain the lack of women mentioned.  Since I am a female pastor, I found this unfortunate.

While there were some things I found useful and highlighted in the book, overall after reading I felt undernourished.

*I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this unbiased review.