Hybrid Church: The Fusion Of Intimacy And Impact

The Church Of The Future is going to look a lot like the church of the past. The early church was both small and big. It met house-to-house and in the temple courts. Today we also have both forms, the mega and the micro, and the possibility of a hybrid that capitalizes on the best features of both.

Hybrid Church is a practical guide for clergy and leaders who want to have the intimacy of small "house church" groups and the impact of very large megachurches. Pastor Dave Browning should know. He leads Christ the King Community Church in the Seattle area, a nondenominational, multilocation church with thousands of members organized in small house groups. Based on what he has learned from Christ the King, which has been cited as one of America's fastest growing and most innovative churches, this groundbreaking book shows what it takes for a church to embrace the best practices, forms, and organizing principles of the mega- and micro- church models to become a hybrid and capitalize on the unique strengths of both.

As Browning explains, the small church has the advantage of harnessing the power of prayer in intimate groups, focusing on Christcenteredness, and offering comfortableness, while megachurches tap into the strength of faith, momentum, and creativity. By combining all these advantages into a hybrid church, leaders and their churches can reach more people more effectively. Ultimately, this vision of a hybrid church is not about numbers, it is about people. It is about fulfilling the great commission and bringing people out of darkness into God's marvelous light.

Dave Browning is a visionary minimalist and the founder of Christ the King Community Church, International (CTK). CTK is a nondenominational, multilocation church that has been noted as one of the "fastest growing" and "most innovative" churches in America by employing the K.I.S.S method: "keep it simple and scalable." It involves 17,000 people in several countries. He is the author of Deliberate Simplicity: How the Church Does More by Doing Less.