Move: What 1000 Churches Reveal about Spiritual Growth

Written by Greg L. Hawkins and Cally Parkinson

Narrated by Adam Black

One of the church’s primary responsibilities is to foster genuine spiritual growth in people’s lives. Today’s pastors bring tremendous effort and passion to this task, but they are often disappointed by people who sit in the pews for years, knowing about Jesus but never really knowing him. In 2004, Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago undertook a three-year study to measure spiritual growth called the REVEAL Spiritual Life Survey. Over the next six years, additional data was collected from over a quarter million people in well over a thousand churches of every size, denomination, and geographic area. Move presents verifiable, fact-based, and somewhat startling findings from the latest REVEAL research, drawing on compelling stories from actual people—congregation members of varying spiritual maturity, as well as pastors who are equally candid as they share their disappointments and their successes. It provides a new lens through which church leaders can see and measure the evidence of spiritual growth. The local church is uniquely equipped to foster spiritual growth and challenge people to pursue a life of full devotion to Christ. Move helps pastors and church leaders inspire and direct that challenge with confidence as they lead their congregations to move closer to Christ.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Aug 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9780310548027

Greg L. Hawkins

Greg L. Hawkins is executive pastor of Willow Creek Community Church. He is also co-creator of REVEAL, an initiative that utilizes research tools and discoveries to help churches better understand spiritual growth in their congregations. Greg and his wife, Lynn, live in the Chicago suburbs with their three children.

Reviews for Move

[tcarter_77 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's great that a church the size of Willow Creek has the honesty and vulnerability to say that they've needed to revisit their ideas about what the best way to help people follow Jesus is. It's even better that they've been willing to resource some serious research and share the learning. Whilst the lessons that are shared are helpful, I'm not sure that there is actually much new here. Anyone familiar with Christian Schwarz's work on Natural Church Development or Fowler's stages of faith may experience a sense of deja vu on reading this. I also suspect that the framing of the research questions and the research base, heavily weighted towards North American protestantism, restricts the applicability of some of the conclusions of the research.At the heart of it, though, there is a sincere and well founded desire to help church leaders to think about how the churches they serve can more adequately encourage people in their walk with Jesus. Even if you don't agree with all the conclusions this is a vital issue for church leaders to grapple with and this book does give us some tools to do that.