Static

I received for review and started a few days ago Ron Martoia's latest book, Static: Tune Out the "Christian Noise" and Experience the Real Message of Jesus

I'm just a couple chapters in, but digging it- the basic premise is that the way we talk about Jesus and our reductionistic take on the Gospel hinders greatly the spread of the real good news.

I think this book followed by McLaren's More Ready Than You Realize or perhaps The Insider: Bringing the Kingdom of God into Your Everyday World would give a great foundation for talking about (and actually doing) evangelism in an emerging church context.

iMonk has done a thorough and thoughtful job of reviewing the book, so rather than spend a lot of time giving you my take, I'll point you to his.

He says "Books that translate the insights of N.T. Wright into the language of non-scholars are proliferating. Ron Martoia’s Static joins that conversation with one of the most readable books you’ll find on the intersection of recent New Testament backgrounds, the meaning of key Biblical concepts and the missional, evangelistic ministry of Christians in a world where fewer and fewer westerners are listening to the claims of Christianity at all.

For someone not aware that there is a serious conversation going on about how to “re-lexicon” and “re-vocalize” the Christian vocabulary, Martoia may sound like heresy 101. For those who know that the work of Wright and other contemporary scholars is exposing the weaknesses in contemporary popular understandings of key Biblical concepts, Martoia won’t be saying a lot new, but he says it very well. In fact, as a beginning book for a person ready to move into some fairly radical examinations of the way we describe Christianity, Static is excellent."

And Bob says it's worth checking out :)

 

Comments

[Jeff]

How do you end up on these review lists? I want free books!

Uh...to review. Yeah. Free books to review.