Becoming a Future-Ready Church

  • Are we building institutions that will meaningfully serve the next generation of believers and their leaders?
  • How does a church thrive in a culture where we have to earn credibility?
  • How do we create a sense of belonging to the body of Christ and a strong sense of identity for the next generation?

Becoming a Future-Ready Church is a blueprint to guide you through eight critical shifts to help lead your church into the future with wisdom and hope. It describes several major converging trends that will greatly impact the church in America over the next few decades: the Great Resignation of Boomer leaders from churches, the shrinking percentage of Christians in America, and the change in felt needs among rising generations shaped heavily by anxiety, skepticism, and fragmentation.

Missiologist and pastor Daniel Yang, religion journalist Adelle Banks, and church researcher Warren Bird have come together in Becoming a Future-Ready Church to help church leaders evaluate whether their ministries are entrenched in strategies that worked well in the past but need to be adapted for the future. By helping us ask better questions about the issues and needs facing the church, they reveal practical ways in which the next generation of church leaders can gain a sturdier foothold as they navigate into the future.

Daniel Yang
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).
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Adelle Banks
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 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.
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Warren Bird
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).
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