The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier

by Tony Jones

Jossey-Bass, 2007, 257pp., $22.95, www.josseybass.com

Over the past decade many of us have asked: What is the Emergent movement all about? Some people feel emergent believers are pointing us to the future of the church. Others fear they are destroying the very foundations of the faith.

In The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier, Emergent leader Tony Jones provides a clear exposition of this movement.

Jones uses an accessible and engaging writing style that utilizes anecdotes (stories about church planters and conversations with the “unchurched”), allusions to popular culture (Jesse “The Body” Ventura and American Idol) and citations from some of the strongest names in philosophy and theology (Derrida and Moltmann) to tell his story.

The New Christians serves as a road map to the ideology of the Emergent movement through 20 “dispatches” that describe the movement’s key beliefs.

For example, Dispatch 6 reads: “Emergents see God’s activity in all aspects of culture and reject the sacred-secular divide.”

Some dispatches seem commonsensical, such as Dispatch 3: “The gospel is like lava: no matter how much crust has formed over it, it will always find a weak point and burst through.”

Others may provide fuel to critics who think the movement has stumbled into relativism, such as Dispatch 13: “Emergents believe that truth, like God, cannot be definitively articulated by finite human beings.”

The book also defines key terms and provides more detailed expositions of movement principles than earlier available. This should help clarify things. It should also help restrain some of the movement’s more virulent critics, some of whom have misstated the movement’s goals, generating more heat than light.

Ultimately, Jones portrays emergents not as crusaders or vigilantes but as reformers in a long line of reformers seeking to renew the church in their own time and place. This effort at reform is propelled by hope and motivated by the goal that Christians will become “ambassadors of reconciliation in the world.”

Jones calls pastors, youth ministry workers, and others involved in the work of the Kingdom of God to be constant agents of peace and love. A book such as this can assist those who are interested in ministry that reaches beyond the traditional boundaries of the church.

MOVIES THAT MATTER

by Craig Detweiler

See Through Cinema

YouTube envisions a future in which we all create and star in our personal network show. What a scary and invigorating notion! How will we sort through that avalanche of information? What will authentic Christian discipleship look like in a world full of actors casting themselves in their own life dramas?