Andrew Root - The Church after Innovation--Questioning Our Obsession with Work, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship

This book will help you to consider the possible costs of chasing innovation and entrepreneurshipfor you and your church. By tracing their origins, Andrew Root invites readers to examine the ends and aims of both innovation and entrepreneurship. Rather than helping the church and its congregants to thrive, unreflective practices of innovation and entrepreneurship can shift values and loyalties, and along the way contribute to anxiety, depression, and an overinflation of the self which works against genuine formation of the self in Christ. The Church after Innovation provides significant insights and questions regarding some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Angela Williams Gorrell , Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University

Theres something satisfying about a story that is this big, bold, and revealing about how our cultural presumptions came to beespecially when so beautifully told. Roots grand narrative offers the significant benefit of showing in fine-grain detail why Christians who do not account for the shaping effects of our economic practices evacuate the content of the Christian confession. When Christians fall in love with ideas of leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship, we can be sure they have ignored for too long the secular economic context in which they live and breathe. A timely wake-up call.

Brian Brock , University of Aberdeen

This perceptive and engaging book is a godsend for leaders and pastors seeking to cultivate the life of the church in a contemporary Western context. In a market saturated with quick-fix, innovate-or-die polemics on church growth, Root weaves a more nuanced philosophical and cultural critique of the captivity of innovation in capitalist culture with the theological insights to liberate the creativity we actually need. The tongue-in-cheek real-life stories of people like us struggling with this task humorously but effectively emphasize the real-world need for such a view of innovation and change. This book offers a richer path to help realize a transcendent creativity of epiphany (over innovation) that values people, nurtures personhood, and promotes flourishing for the church in a secular age.

Nick Shepherd , FRSA, Archbishops Council of the Church of England

With penetrating analysis and prophetic force, Root exposes how the false idols of capitalism are being smuggled into the church through the Trojan horses of innovation and entrepreneurialism. Fashionable trends touting church growth are fueling self-absorption and drawing us away from the cross of Christ. This is a bold, necessary, and urgent book.

Richard Beck , Abilene Christian University; author of Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age

Have you ever read a book and thought, This is on point, and I wish I wrote it? Thats what happened to me when I finished The Church after Innovation . Ministers hear so many leadership mantras today: Innovate! Be efficient! Get creative! Time to pivot! Find your voice! Be authentic! In this book, Root reveals these mantras and the engine that generates them to be the problem. They are not the jewelry but the chains that keep the church captive to a soul-sucking culture. Seminaries need to assign this book. Ministers need to read this book. Im grateful to Root for so powerfully articulating the biggest problem facing the churchnamely, our supposed need to innovate.

Tripp Fuller , founder and host of the Homebrewed Christianity podcast

Peppered with real-life examples, The Church after Innovation opens up innumerable pathways of faithful thought and action for our exhausting times. Root is especially adept at exposing and probing the cultural contradictions of neoliberal capitalism, exploring how they have shaped (and warped) the mission of the church and our very selves. Come for that critique and stay for fascinating dives into management theory, the promise of nothingness, the mystics behind Martin Luther, and so much more. This important book is worthy of reading and rereading.

Rodney Clapp , author of Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age