The New Christians

     

And now, in non-Pagan Christianity news...

I'm really enjoying Tony Jones' new book The New Christians. I had a bit of trepidation on picking this up- I wasn't sure if I'd get treated to another late 90's, early 2000's version of "Here's what the post-modern shift is all about!" And while there are elements of that here, it's really the next stage in that discussion- describing the Left-Right polarity in America ad in Western Christianity and how emerging church folk are trying to work past that:

"So these two boxers, "Liberal" and "Conservative," tired, bedraggled and lacking enough power to land any more punches, come back to the center of the ring for the next round of their eternal match, and they can do little more than grasp at each other, wrap each other up. There's a lot of clutching and grabbing, and an occasional shouting match on Larry King Live, or Hardball with Chris Matthews. The referee can't separate them, and neither of them has enough strength to land the winning blow. But they keep fighting.
Meanwhile, a generation of Christians aren't even boxing anymore. They're flying kites. They've entered an entirely different conception of what game we're really playing. They've opted out of the boxing match between liberal and conservative. They're finding a third way between the bipolar strife that has racked our churches and our society."

It's good writing, some good storytelling and some good challenges to those on both sides of the Left/Right spectrum, followed by discussions of theology, post-objectivity and truth.

The only thing that bothers me (and Tony and I have been around this bush before, so I won't go into it too much) is that with this book all vestiges of "emerging" are gone. It's now "Emergents," "Emergent Christianity" and "Emergent Church."
I've often thought that a too-strong tie between Emergent Village (the organization) and the emerging church (the overall movement) was a net-negative in that it made a small group of folks the de-facto spokespeople for us all, and subjected everyone who wanted to be along for the ride to endless confusion between EV and everyone else and between what we actually thought and what critics thought Brian McLaren (and others) thought.
Whew.
My hope was that Emergent Village would change their name, or at least settle for talking about the "emerging church" so as to avoid the appearance of branding, but...

Anyway- it seems like a really engaging book, one that I'm looking forward to working through.

I think you should check it out.