I won a free copy of Tony Jones’ fancy new book, “The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier” a few weeks ago from Adam, and since Jones’ publicist sent the free copy all the way to Scotland, I figured it deserves a nice long post. (Actually, I won it in a contest at pomomusings, so many thanks to Adam and his blog that gets so many more hits than mine.)

I’ll begin with what has been noted by most reviewers: if you want to read one book on the emergent church, The New Christians is by far the best value for your time and money. No doubt about it: TNC is worth reading.

I most appreciated the description in the early chapters explaining how the emergent church movement developed. Quick summary: some top-notch post-modern evangelical types became uncomfortable with the direction the evangelical leadership was heading and happened upon a church movement that dovetailed with the post-modernism they lived and breathed, and the connectivity and community provided by the internet (you could also say the Holy Spirit helped out, but Jones does take a more academic approach).

Though I’ve been quite aware of emergent the past few years, I didn’t know the full story behind the beginning and was fascinated–probably my favorite part of the book. I knew emergent had evangelical roots, but I didn’t know that some of their first brainstorming sessions were funded by evangelical groups, who, later by the way, pulled the money quick.

Jones’ goes on to describe the ethos, theology, and practicality of the movement in the remaining chapters. He keeps things very approachable for non-churchy folk, or for church folk who are not familiar with discussions of post-modernity. Interlacing the entire work with stories of people touched by emergent, and with “dispatches from the trenches” meant to describe particular characteristics of the emergent church, Jones covers a lot of ground in his 220 pages. You can tell he’s a pastor, in that he’s a good communicator and addresses his intended audience well.

Before I get to my critique, here’s some of the dispatches:

Dispatch 1: Emergents find little importance in the differences between various flavors of Christianity. Instead, they practice a generous orthodoxy that appreciates the contributions of all Christian movements.

Dispatch 6: Emergents see God’s activity in all aspects of culture and reject the sacred-secular divide.

Dispatch 8: Emergents find the biblical call to community more compelling than the democratic call to individual rights. The challenge lies in being faithful to both ideals.

Dispatch 11: Emergents believe that awareness of our relative position–to God, to one another, and to history–breeds biblical humility, not relativistic apathy.

Dispatch 16: Emergents believe that church should function more like an open-source network and less like a hierarchy.

Dispatch 18: Emergents firmly hold that God’s Spirit–not their own efforts–is responsible for the good in the world. The human task is to cooperate with God in what God is already doing.

Dispatch 19: Emergents downplay–or downright reject–the difference between clergy and laity.

Jones pops these dispatches in throughout the work, and they work well as talking points or pointed descriptors of emergent.

Critique:

Here’s my main critique, and where I think Jones could have done a bit more. Because of the context of emergent’s emerging–namely, the mainly American Evangelical church movement–Jones seems to focus on distinguishing emergent from evangelical Christianity, he discusses conversations and battles between emergent and evangelicalism with little discussion of emergent and mainline denominations.

Sure, mainline talk sometimes comes up–e.g. at the end of the book, Jones describes his visits to four emergent churches, one of them being Church of the Apostles in Seattle which has Lutheran and Episcopal connections.

But what I kept yearning for–and writing in the margins, again and again–is the acknowledgment and analysis of the fact that basically every single dispatch describing the emergent church applies to my liberal mainline fairly traditional church founded in 1832. Ok, Jones can’t speak to my particular context of Old First Church Tallahassee. And sure, not every dispatch fits perfectly–not many people on the congregational care committee would describe it as “open-source” or “wiki” (though it certainly has many of the characteristics)–but I felt like Jones was leaning his writing too much in the direction of evangelicals to the detriment of mainline conversation.

This problem jumps out at you in the public relations write-up that came with my copy. The PR person says TNC explores emergent, and that “It’s a total re-examination of the gospel that has resulted in a mash-up of old and new, of theory and practice, and of mainline, evangelical, and increasingly, Roman Catholic Christians.” Come again: “total re-examination of the gospel”? Say what? If almost every member of my mainline congregation would affirm every dispatch from the trenches–or further–if almost every member of my mainline congregation could read a re-worded dispatch and think it was written about my congregation, then the “total re-examination” description is lacking something.

Emergent is not quite a “total re-examination of the gospel,” it’s a re-examination of the gospel out of one flavor of Christianity, and it has taken on many characteristics of other flavors of Christianity.

I don’t want to be too hard on Jones. He’s a great guy, a fine theologian, a strong blogger, a twin cities man, and has written a fantastic book. But I feel like he skews too much towards the evangelical conversation to the detriment of a deeper and a bit more complicated conversation with both the evangelical and mainline.

Here’s a few other ponderings the book brought up:

• The emergent community tends to be pretty darn young, as Jones notes. Why? What happens in twenty years? And why aren’t emergent churches which thrive in diversity seeking to broaden the conversation to older generations?
• I loved Jones’ description of the problem of fideism of the right (Piper) and the left (Borg) and the call for dialogue and faith in between. [p. 154-5]
• Jones’ format is really well done–it’s in six chapters, but has several threads that run through and color each chapter, as well as the dispatches mixed-in. He makes a linear and logical progression from page 1 to 220, but there’s helpful and non-disrupting stops along the way that add depth and breadth to the work. Either his editor or Jones did very well.
• Love what a member of Jacob’s Well says of his community, “I like it when Tim says, ‘People experience God emotionally, intellectually, relationally, and aesthetically,’ and this church aims to make every one of those experiences available to people.”
• My final question relates to my main critique above. It’s a bit contextual, but here it is: Is St. John’s Lutheran Church in Atlanta emergent? It’s a bit older than most emergent, but it’s fairly hip. It’s all about emergent’s inclusivism, call for community, problems with hiearchy (tends to happen when the denomination says your pastor isn’t your pastor), worship is innovative and free, and it’s all about the dispatches. Can a church be emergent without knowing it, or trying to be. Does emergent have to stem from this evangelical break-up, or can it include an even broader community?

Thoughts?