Switch By Chip Heath & Dan Heath I read a secular book like Switch with church eyes. Every lead pastor understands the difficulty of making the Switch in the culture of the church. Their subtitle of “How to change things when change is hard” says it all for most pastors. The astute change-agent pastor will want to read Switch. Switch asks the following question: Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives? I ask the question of why is it so hard in the church. The primary obstacle, according to the Heaths, is a conflict that is built into our brains. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems—the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants the church to grow; the emotional mind wants church the way we remember it from days gone by. This tension can doom a change effort—but if it is overcome, change can come quickly. In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people—employees and managers, parents and nurses—have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results: ● The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients. ● The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping. ● The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service My bet is that you have a change or two that could use this approach to overcoming these two sides of the church members’ brains. In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to your church. Our mission to reach the lost is too important not to make the Switch to a new way of doing church. *Review abridged from The Heath Brothers website www.heathbrothers.com/switch.