“Alvin’s extensive experience and expertise in leading churches toward engaging in effective community transformation shine through in this work. He takes complex principles, tensions, and best practices and communicates them in accessible and practical ways. If you are seeking to see the church live out a transforming presence within communities of material poverty, you will find this book to be an essential tool. I am eager to get this book into the hands of every leader within the ministry I serve.” Ruth Evans Executive director, Unite Network
“Alvin Sanders has a heart for the urban poor and a passion for the church. He has planted and pastored a church in the heart of a community of urban poverty, trained and mentored urban ministry leaders, and now leads a ministry that is empowering urban leaders and partnering with local churches to reach their communities with the gospel. In his book Uncommon Church, he draws on the truth of the Scriptures and his personal experience to challenge local churches to be the foundation from which God’s people can pursue the common good in communities. His focus on personal holiness and justice, along with declaring and demonstrating the gospel, is both refreshing and powerful. If you love the local church and want to make an eternal difference in your community, his message is one you need to hear and put into practice.”
“Awake to the needs of the urban poor, Americans are ready to embrace solutions. With faith, wisdom, and experience, Alvin Sanders has one to offer: the healthy church in the hood. This book is everything that practical Christian theology ought to be: grounded in theology, clear-eyed about the real world, focused on godly outcomes, and expressed in plain language. There’s not a shred of nonsense in this book: no false pieties, no simplistic formulas, no sugarcoating what is inevitably an unremitting struggle. But there is a truckload of hope on every page. Here is an agenda for an American church that may have lost its way but dare not lose its hope. And here is a rejoinder to those who would try again (and fail again) to ‘fix’ the hood with anything less than the power of God.”
“Alvin Sanders has a heart for the urban poor and a passion for the church. He has planted and pastored a church in the heart of a community of urban poverty, trained and mentored urban ministry leaders, and now leads a ministry that is empowering urban leaders and partnering with local churches to reach their communities with the gospel. In his book Uncommon Church, he draws on the truth of the Scriptures and his personal experience to challenge local churches to be the foundation from which God’s people can pursue the common good in communities. His focus on personal holiness and justice, along with declaring and demonstrating the gospel, is both refreshing and powerful. If you love the local church and want to make an eternal difference in your community, his message is one you need to hear and put into practice.”
The local, urban church is the key to community transformation and plays three crucial roles of empowering, partnering, and reaching. Pastors and church planters interested in Christian community development in the context of urban neighborhoods will find practical insights into the power of the local church in the book Uncommon Church by Alvin Sanders. Order your copy wherever books are sold.
