The first in the Deep Church series, this book is an enquiry into the culture of revivalism and the urgent need to retrieve core ministry practices of the church.
Charismatic Renewal has at the core of its ideology an aspiration for revival. This is a laudable aspiration, but in recent years, in the absence of a large-scale evangelistic impact, it has encouraged a faddist mentality among church leaders. The Gospel Driven Church documents this development and the numerous theological and pastoral distortions that take place when genuine revival fervour transmutes into revivalism. Moreover, Stackhouse aims to show how a retrieval of some of the core practices of the church, such as preaching, sacraments, the laying of hands and prayer is essential at this crucial stage in the trajectory of the renewal movement in the UK. He commends to church leaders a recovery of these means of grace - including Spirit baptism - as a way of keeping the church centred on gospel rather than mere pragmatic concerns about size and numbers.