What kind of church is your church? Who is welcome at your church? I mean really welcome. Would the gay activist, the muslim, the local thief or drunk? What behaviours do they have to conform to before they’re welcome?

John Burke sets out to help churches create genuinely welcoming church cultures that takes broken people and leads them to Christ and does a very good job in this helpful book.

I have to confess, I first started reading this book several years ago on my to hear John speak here in Stockholm. And then over the next few years, this book sat on my desk while I read dozens of other books that would get promoted to the top of the reading pile. Only recently, did I pick it up again and even then I read other books while trying to read this one. This is a shame, because this is a resource, I suspect, that I will turn to again and again.

There were a few things that have moved on a bit since this book was written. John refers regularly to the emerging church and includes his own Gateway Church, Austin and as a multi-site mega church that does video preaching and has its own marketing & human resources departments you can be fairly sure that what the author meant by emerging church is not what it means now.

It’s used to describe churches that are focused on reaching the post-modern generation the children of the 70s and 80s who grew up in an environment where the historical givens and certainties had been stripped away but nothing concrete had taken its place. As a result, it’s a generation that struggles with trust, tolerance, truth, brokenness and aloneness.

Taking each of those five issues in turn, he looks at how to create a come as you are culture but one in which people are changed by coming to Christ. It’s full of well-thought through responses, dozens of encouraging stories of life-change and a desire to see people made whole through knowing Christ.

As a large and growing church there was also a definite method to their responses – this church has a programme for everything! Struggling with addiction, join our addiction programme. Married, engaged, divorced, friendly with a Buddhist? We have a course for you.

What’s good is that this church has clearly mobilised the people they’ve helped and turned them into contributors to help other people in similar situations. However not every church can run, train or sustain so many courses, programmes and individual ministries.

And however challenging the multi-cultural, post-modern faith climate of Austin, Texas is – it’s still a world away from secular Europe. There’s a hefty amount of contextualising that needs to be done as you read this book.

Those points, notwithstanding, this is an excellent resource book that will be required reading for all future small group leaders, pastoral leaders and any other kind of leader that has contact with people.