Right now, the Church is taking a beating and instead of learning the lesson a good beating can teach us, we’re building bigger barns and drifting farther from the mission of Jesus.

This is the premise for the new title from Peyton Jones, veteran church planter and church-planting coach for the NAMB. Jones goes on to observe that everything we’re doing to reverse the decline of the Western Church isn’t working. In Cracking the Whip, Peyton channels his love of Indiana Jones movies and uses familiar imagery to urge church leaders to go back to the Book of Acts and learn how to take new ground for the Kingdom. He points out that our post-Christian world is very much like the apostles’ pre-Christian world.

“If the challenges are the same, then so are the solutions,” he says. “Rediscovering the first-century tactics will lead to first-century results.”

From there, Peyton challenges church leaders to go on a new adventure of reaching the unreached, stressing that just like Jesus cracked the whip in the Temple to stop the moneychangers from keeping seekers from finding God, He might very well crack the whip to get today’s Church to mobilize and go.

Revealing what he has discovered as “the hidden power within our churches,” Peyton thoroughly explores what it looks like to lead people on an adventure to search out genuine opportunities that lead to genuine relationships and genuine gospel conversation—disciple multiplication that ultimately, results in new churches reaching the unreached.

“Why let your people settle for the classroom when the adventure of mission lies outside it?” Peyton asks. “Don’t tell them about the wonders of archaeology and never let them raid any temples.”

Reader Takeaways

• Why church planters that pursue fortune and glory are in for a real beating.
• The mistake that silver-bullet seminars and pastors’ conferences are making.
• Why people actually like “real evangelism.”
• Why Jesus said we’d be His “witnesses,” not His “evangelists” to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8).
• The first stage of mobilization that births movements.
• The three practices the early Church pursued that we can apply today.
• The questions church planters aren’t asking about their city.
• Why Peyton no longer believes that people are “called” to leadership.
• The five key areas in life that provide genuine relationship-building opportunities.
• The change you’ll need to lead to multiply at a new level.