The Reason for Church: Why the Body of Christ Still Matters in an Age of Anxiety, Division, and Radical Individualism

Winner of the 2025 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award and Church and Pastoral Leadership category; Winner of The Gospel Coalition's award for First-Time Author in 2025

The evangelical church is hemorrhaging. Over 40 million Americans have dechurched in the last 25 years alone, and multiple generations have been raised to believe the most spiritual thing they can do is follow God by following their heart - right out of the church. Yet, this shift is happening right as society is hitting record levels of loneliness, stress, and anxiety. In The Reason for Church, pastor Brad Edwards connects the dots of our current church crisis and provides compelling reasons to come back.

In part 1, Edwards shows how individualistic beliefs make church implausible and compromise our spiritual formation:

• Marketplace logic and consumeristic approaches to discipleship
• Intuitional spirituality and therapy speak
• Social media's distortion of what is true, good, and beautiful
• Performative politics and culture wars
• Virtuous victimhood, the decline of trust, and the rise of power

These chapters show why individualism won't satisfy and can't provide the refuge it promises.

In part 2, Edwards uses personal examples, church history, non-Western expressions of faith, and Scripture to show how the church is our existentially satisfying alternative to individualism. Equipped with an institutionally robust vision, we will rediscover the church as God's spiritual greenhouse where soul-tired sojourners and lonely exiles are restored and repurposed for life in the world.

The Reason for Church offers an honest-yet-hopeful vision for church as a necessary institution. With radical individualism tearing us apart, we need compelling reasons to fall back in love with Christ's bride, now more than ever.