The Unchurched Next Door: Understanding Faith Stages as Keys to Sharing Your Faith

Extremely helpful to read before going on mission doing surveys and witnessing door to door. Helped to understand where people are in the process of receiving a witness about Jesus Christ, and to not feel discouraged when they "rejected" our offer to hear the gospel. It helped us know how to pray for certain people knowing that they are either resistant, neutral, seeker, or just waiting to hear the gospel.

Rainer did a great research on the unchurched, and in the process, developed a grading on where to place people, i.e. the Rainer Scale of U5 to U1 where U5 are the most resistant and U1 the most receptive. Rainer goes beyond what people are resistant about to show that, often times, there is history and past experiences that give people a certain perception. He also offers some approaches towards reaching and building relationships with the different categories of people. One of the important results of the study is that most people whould go to church if they were invited. Some young Christians (those who just had a relationship with Jesus) wondered why their Christian colleges, friends and neighbors never opened their mouths to invite them if having a personal relationship with Jesus is a matter of life and death, heaven or hell. People tend to feel intimidated walking into a church, and so by inviting friends there, and helping them to know their way and meet people, greatly helps. Also, some Christians have bad experiences with U5s (which constitute only about 5%) and gets turned off from inviting the unchurched or in sharing the gospel. Christians need to look to the other 95% and get over their bad experiences. Even as culture and society changes, the results in the future may change from what is presented in this book, but as for now, this research shows that there is a window of opportunity to invite the unchurched to church and leading them to a personal relationship with Jesus.

The Unchurched Next Door is an admirable attempt to understand why people don't attend a Christian church and how best to lead them to a relationship with Christ that includes church attendance. This monumental task was undertaken by surveying people around the United States to get their answers to multiple questions (statistical results are presented in an appendix). From the results of these questionnaires author Thom S. Rainer divides unchurched people into five distinct groups. These groups run the range from those who would attend if someone would invite them to those who are openly hostile to the gospel and people who attend church. Thom S. Rainer is a dean at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a fact that he reminds the reader of on a regular basis throughout the text. Other than that one minor annoyance, the information is extremely valuable to anyone involved in church growth and outreach. I found some of the numbers to be surprising and some pretty much what I expected. Either way, the analysis was consistently insightful. The Unchurched Next Door is a highly recommended book for anyone charged with growing their church and its influence in the surrounding area.

This book gives us all a glimpse of what the unchurced really think about Christians, church, and a relationship with God in their own life, as well as perspectives about reaching them at different places on a spiritual receptivity scale developed by Ranier and his team. Laden with statistics, but written with a pastors heart, Ranier uses story after story to demonstrate that people far from God are genuinely interested in knowing more about the God we serve and follow. Ranier justifies with hard evidence from the field that many are waiting for a warm friendship with a Christian or someone who is willing to share with them in order to move up in receptivity about Christ. This book is what I would call encouragement and reminder for many, as well as equipping the reader with an understanding of the unchurched that might be previously unknown. The insights will suprise you! What I learned: The average profile of the unchurced was suprising, as well as the information about each stage of spirtitual receptivity, from the most antagonistic to the most ready to ask Jesus to be the leader and director of their lives.

As one of the privileged research team members for "The Unchurched Next Door," I would like to say that the book only covers half of what we actually did to research this work. Dr. Rainer did a great job of condensing our research, feelings, and attitidues into a book length work, and the conclusions he arrives at are solidly based in real, live, interviews. On occaision, we researchers had to endure criticism, scolding, tears, cussing, and other generally nasty behavior, along with some true blessed events, such as hearing people ask, "What must I do to be saved?" Each of us was assigned several states and we each had to "discover" our own interviews. That in itself was an educational effort. Some traveled, others utilized the telephone, while others still demonstrated great creativity in many ways to meet the unchurched. Each of us discovered, personally, the unchurched persons that we interviewed.Ultimately, as a pastor, I highly commend this work to both the pastor's library and the average church members's library as a reminder of God's Great Commission; to seek and disciple God's lost sheep. It is easy to read, easy to understand, and with dilligence, easy to do!