On the Verge: A Journey Into the Apostolic Future of the Church
The fact that this book is the defining document of the Exponential 2011: On the Verge conference, the largest gathering of church planters and pioneering church practitioners in the Western world, is very significant because for the first time, the frontier idea of missional movements as it relates to the multisite and church-planting movement is being main-staged. But when one considers that this conference is actually a fusion with Verge (one of the new, highly energetic, missionally oriented gatherings in North America), it further demonstrates that something momentous is happening in our day.
But this isn’t about big-staged events and theoretical writing: this book represents an effort by Alan and Dave to articulate a dynamic learning journey called Future Travelers. Future Travelers is a two-year learning cohort initially composed of 12 megachurches (representing more than 80,000 people) committed to seriously factoring missional movements into their current equation of church. For many of these churches, this journey is not just tinkering on the side; it involves a major commitment to somehow reframe their relative churches as high-impact, exponentially reproducing, missional movements. In many ways, these pioneering churches represent the widespread interest, in evangelical church circles, in becoming more genuinely missional in approach. Because of these reasons, Future Travelers will provide a window into the future of the church in the West. In many ways, we will be weaving this book around the stories, experiments, learnings, and best practices of the innovative, frontline churches in this forum.
