“THE GREAT GIVEAWAY”: PASTOR EXAMINES HOW EVANGELICALISM HAS GIVEN AWAY BEING THE CHURCH

Pastor David Fitch examines how the North American church can reclaim its mission

Grand Rapids, Mich., Oct. 15, 2005—“North American evangelicals learned to do church in relation to modernity,” asserts David Fitch, author of The Great Giveaway (Baker Books, October), a provocative and timely book that is a call to rediscover, reclaim, and in a sense receive back from God the basic practices for being his church in a fragmented, postmodern North American culture.

The book’s subtitle, Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism, and Other Modern Maladies, encompasses Fitch’s thesis on the status of the North American church.

Evangelicals model their ministries after the secular sciences or farm out functions of the church whenever it seems more efficient, Fitch says. As a result, the church has too often stopped being the church. “It is our own modernism that has allowed us to individualize, commodify, and package Christianity so much that the evangelical church is often barely distinguishable from other goods and services providers, self-help groups, and social organizations that make up the landscape of modern American life,” Fitch writes.

In The Great Giveaway, Fitch examines various church practices and shows how and why each function has been compromised by modernity. Discussing such ministries as evangelism, physical healing and spiritual formation, Fitch challenges Christians to reclaim these lost practices so that the church can regain its influence in a world that is swiftly abandoning modernity in preference of postmodernity. Pastors, leaders, and students who minister to the postmodern world will find in this book fresh insight that will stir the hearts of many and spark much-needed discussion about the evangelical church.

David Fitch (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is the lead pastor of Life on the Vine Christian Community in Long Grove, Illinois and an adjunct professor at Northern Seminary.