Becoming a Future-Ready Church

Adelle Banks is the projects editor and a national reporter for Religion News Service, covering topics including religion and race, congregational issues, and research on faith and society. An award- winning journalist, Banks joined RNS in 1995. She previously was the religion reporter at the Orlando Sentinel and a reporter at The Providence Journal and newspapers in the upstate New York communities of Syracuse and Binghamton. She also is co-author of the forthcoming book Becoming a Future-Ready Church: 8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower the Next Generation of Leaders. Banks’s freelance work includes, over the last decade, dozens of interviews with experts on leadership of congregations, colleges, and universities. Banks was honored in 2024 with the Religion News Association’s lifetime achievement award, in 2023 at The Unsung She-Roes Awards: Centering and Celebrating Black Women in Ministry for outstanding media coverage, and in 2022 with the Washington Association of Black Journalists’s inaugural lifetime achievement award. Banks also spearheaded RNS projects that won Wilbur Awards from the Religion Communicators Council in 2021 and 2014. Banks has received first-place Associated Church Press awards and was the third-place winner of the 2021 Best In-Depth Newswriting on Religion Award from the American Academy of Religion. A Mount Holyoke College graduate, she has also been the religion reporter for two regional newspapers. Banks is a speaker on religion and journalism at gatherings of faith leaders, students, scholars, and communicators.

Daniel Yang serves as the National Director of Churches of Welcome for World Relief. Prior to that he was the director of the Church Multiplication Institute at the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center. Daniel has been a pastor, church planter, engineer and technology consultant. He has planted churches in Detroit, Dallas, Toronto, and Chicago, either as the lead planter or through recruiting, training, assessing, and mentoring church planters. Daniel is a sought-after conference speaker, missional strategist, consultant, and co-author of Inalienable: How Marginalized Kingdom Voices Can Help Save the American Church (InterVarsity, May 2022) and Becoming a Future-Ready Church: 8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower the Next Generation of Leaders (Zondervan, October 2024).

Warren Bird, Ph.D. is author/co-author of 34 books including Hero Maker (theme book of the year for Exponential 2020) and Better Together Healthy Mergers (the leading guidebook on how to do a merger well). His latest co-authored book is on 8 big trends that all churches will face: Becoming a Future-Ready Church.   He is one of the nation’s most widely quoted researchers about the health and growth of today’s church, cited by both mainstream and Christian media. He’s written the “Leadership from the Global Church” column for Outreach magazine since 2014.   Warren serves as senior vice president of research and equipping for ECFA (the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability), where he oversaw the nation’s largest-ever cross-denominational study of church planters, “The New Faces of Church Planting and Multisiting” (ECFA.org/surveys).