If any of you church leaders out there are feeling discouraged read this....it is compliments of Third Day Churches
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On several occasions, history has provided the needed critical mass and the synergistic inertia to thrust the church into breaking out of its’ box and becoming the force in culture and society that God intended it to be. Today, the church, at the dawning of the 21st Century, has once again reached this "critical mass." It is something so big and so obvious that the winds of change demand we look hard at our forms and face the reality that a different church must provide a different response to a postmodern age. And it is something so simple, that it is like presenting the Gospel message on a restaurant napkin. This Third Millennium ("a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day," 2 Peter 3:8; Psalm 90:4), or this "Third Day" requires a "Third Way" of doing and being the church.

Christian Schwartz, a German church-growth researcher suggests that we are in the era of a third Reformation. The first Reformation took place in the sixteenth century when Martin Luther rediscovered the core of the gospel: salvation by faith, the centrality of grace and of Scripture. It was seen as a reformation of theology. The second Reformation occurred in the eighteenth century when personal intimacy with Christ was rediscovered. It was, according to Schwartz, a reformation of spirituality. But when it was all said and done, we were still trying to pour new wine into old wineskins. The third Reformation is now upon us. It is a reformation of structure of how we actually "do" church.

For too many years, our forms, structures and traditions have led the way, with those forms remaining painfully predictable from generation to generation, ever diminishing in their effectiveness. It is now time for change! The forms of the "first day church" must be reevaluated, and those lifeless programs and traditions of men be allowed to die in the "second day church" so that the resurrected "third day church" can be expressed and enjoyed.

It now appears that there exists a growing fraternity of churches, leaders, and ministries who are ready to obey the wind of the Spirit. They are ready to inhale the wind of change and welcome an experimentation of radical, new, and creative ways of "doing" and "being" the church in the third millennium.