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What our customer's say!

"North America is a mission field!", If I took away one thing from this book, it is that North America is a mission field, and we must treat it as such.
Ed Stetzer is an experienced church planter who did research for the North American Mission Board (NAMB) at the time that he wrote the book, and now does research for LifeWay Christian Resources and also consults with NAMB. David Putman is also an experienced church planter.
Stetzer and Putman challenge the reader to see North America as a mission field, and use the same techniques in North America that international missionaries use-- particularly understanding the culture and context of your environment and making sure that you do not allow cultural barriers to prevent you from getting the message to people. Too often, pastors have tried to imitate the methods of other successful pastors like Rick Warren or Bill Hybels, rather than trying to discover the unique culture of their own community (which is what they call "breaking the missional code") and then applying that knowledge to designing ministry for their own community. The authors stress that every community is different, and within each community there are different cultures that need different kinds of congregations. A truly missional church will recognize this and seek to plant other churches for other cultures, such as ethnic groups, postmoderns, multi-family housing dwellers, etc.
The authors stress that in today's culture that is changing from modern to postmodern, we should no longer see missions and evangelism as separate activities, nor should we see discipleship and evangelism as separate. To "break the missional code," we must see that postmodern people will often come to the gospel through a slow process, through building relationships and through Bible teaching, since they often come from a culture that is ignore of the Bible, although open to spiritual things. Postmoderns may actually worship, participate in community projects with a church, attend Bible study and listen to sermons for a year or two before being ready to make a commitment to Christ. Thus the missional church must see that missions and discipleship are part of the process of doing evangelism.
This was a thought-provoking and challenging book. Every church leader would benefit from reading this book.

"A serious and inspiring read with a movie related title", This book is a MUST READ for any pastor/church leader serious about reaching people for Christ and not content to just "play church".

"great job!", Book shipped fast, good price, book in great shape! Would use seller again.

"Recommended with Reservations", This book is about how we do church. More specifically, it is about the need to reinvent or change the church in order to make it more attractive and welcoming to the culture where it is planted.

The book contains some very challenging and helpful information for church planters/pastors/leaders and local church mission teams. For example, the authors begin with a helpful picture of the U.S. changing "glocal" (global/local reality) culture and practical steps to identify the unreached/unchurched people in their community. I also appreciate the emphasis on discipleship and the acknowledgement and warning that we an actually attract a crowd without having a church.

Every church should continually examine human imposed traditions and customs, which can cause a church to stagnate and die. The church must be willing to grow, adapt and try new things to stay healthy and effective. However, the book puts too much emphasis on style, technique and marketing know-how. The authors point to the many "successes" of other churches as a defense of the importance of being missional.

My concern is that while these successful churches have found a niche in their community and experienced growth, some grow as s a result of marketing rather than conversion. When we reinvent the church in order to attract the world, there is a tendency to eliminate or compromise the gospel, because it is divisive, offensive and even foolish to the world. Breaking the Missional Code touches on this fact but continues to advocate style and technique over the importance and power of the gospel itself. There is a great temptation for niche churches to offer another, more palatable, gospel in order to avoid offense. The result can be that many people stay and even invite others for relationships and become members of a Christian club rather than becoming followers of Christ.

The second thing that tends to be eliminated in these churches is the teaching of the whole counsel of God. This is done in an attempt to be relevant and to avoid the controversial truths of Scripture. I find this to be the greatest weakness of this book. It focuses on what people want rather than what God demands. The one area of greatest need in any church is the clear and bold preaching of God's Word.

It does not take cleverness or slick marketing strategies to grow a church or to make the gospel more attractive to the world. It takes authenticity in the life of believers that they meet. See the advise given by the Apostle Paul to Titus for his ministry to plant a healthy church on the island of Crete. Mission is not some hidden code to be broken. It is the work of God in the life of His Church (believers) and found in the power of the gospel. The Word of God, not the latest marketing book, is our best source for reaching the lost and it is Christ Himself who will grow His Church.

I recommend this book as a resource to help leaders examine church traditions that may be a barrier to reaching others and as a tool to think about specific mission strategies. However, read it with a careful and discerning mind being careful not to compromise the non-negotiable God ordained standards for an effective and healthy church.


"Amazing", His book maps out what it really means to be a missional church. Also read his other church planting book, Planting Missional Churches

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Add this book to your list", This is definitely one of the books you need in your arsenical of Missional knowledge. Combine the process described in this book with that of a few other good Missional books and individualize them to fit your situation.

"A Home Run", Combining studies on theology, ecclesiology and missiology with a vast array of quotes and insights, this book is a very important book for pastors attempting to transition churches from programmatic to missional or for planters seeking to learn the "code" of the culture where they are planting.

Stetzer and Putnam write, "A church that is incarnational is interested more in the harvest than in the barn."

"The answer is not to make all of our churches look alike. The answer is to have everyone seeking the same thing: to glorify God by being an indigenous expression of church life where they are."

"Over a decade ago, George Hunter began informing us that secular people had 'no Christian memory' and that the church no longer enjoyed a 'home court advantage.'"

"The key to breaking the code of a community is to have the heart of the Father for that community. The only way to do that is by spending serious amounts fo time with the one who loved Jerusalem deeply enough to weep over it."

This book could be described as a how-to manual to understand the people in each culture around a local church and developing a strategy to break those codes, since, using their memorable phrase, cultures in Opp, Alabama are different from those in Seattle, Washington. (I've been through Opp-definitely different.) This is a book that I wish I had had before we started our transition. It you are a pastor praying through the decision to transtion to reach your community, this book is perfect for your congregational leadership.

Other, important points include how the attempted by-the-book cross application of mega-church principles was doomed to fail on a large scale and a brief distinction of how emerging is not the same as missional and a 3 part breakdown of the former (Relevants, Reconstructionists and Revisionists).

"WoW!", This book is recommended to every pastor and their staff who wants to reach their community with the 'real' gospel. Every church staff should read this book, and go through it in honesty...

"Breaking the Missional Code", This was one of the best books I have read for a new church planter today!

"Brief Review: Breaking the Missional Code", Breaking The Missional Code is a balanced perspective on building a biblical church ministry and is must-reading for anyone striving to reach their communities for Christ while at the same time struggling to understand where they may be going wrong. It will also be helpful for those who are suspicious of contemporary church models and fear they are all watering down the faith or discarding critical doctrines. It is an important book that seeks to reach beyond our tendencies to expect everyone to do ministry the way one person or group thinks it should be done. With recommendations from such diverse leaders as Rick Warren, Dan Kimball, and Mark Driscoll, the authors have surveyed the landscape of evangelical America and pulled together biblical and missional components from both contemporary and traditional models of various denominations and geographies. And they demonstrate that reaching people for Christ doesn't have to be devoid of either sound theology or contemporary applications. Those who have done ministry by the Purpose Driven book or the Willow Creek book and failed will find encouragement in Stetzer and Putman's exhortations to do ministry by The Book, not by following fads and trends or by implementing church models that reach specific demographics in Barrington, Illinois, or Orange County, California, but by digging deeper into the community to determine the unique cultural obstacles in their respective communities and then communicating the gospel in a way that doesn't create non-biblical barriers to people receiving and understanding the gospel.