The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier

Following the intruiging ideas raised in Brian McLaren's bestselling A New Kind of Christian, Tony Jones has written an engaging exploration of what this new kind of Christianity looks like. Writing "dispatches" on the thought and practice of those within the Emerging Church, he offers an in-depth look at this new "third way" of faith - its origins, theology, and its views on truth, Scripture and interpretation, along with the movement's hopeful and life-giving sense of community. With the depth of theological expertise and broad perspective he has gained as a pastor, writer, and as a leader of this movement, Jones invites readers into the Emergent conversation and offers a new way forward for Christians in a postmodern world. With journalistic narrative as well as authoritative reflection, he provides fascinating examples and first hand stories that mark this new and revitalized incarnation of Christianity.

Jones (The Sacred Way) provides the single best introduction to the Emergent Church movement, of which he is a prominent leader. The mainline denominations are dying and the hyper-individualism of evangelicalism is unsatisfying, so many young evangelicals, Jones explains, have decided to recreate church for post-modern times. Jones credits Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian with raising important questions about sounding the Gospel in an era beset by questions about foundationalism, epistemology, and how to read Scripture. He passionately defends the emergent movement from criticism. In particular, critics are wrong to claim that emergents don’t really believe in the Bible; emergents passionately love the Bible, says Jones, but also know that finite human beings cannot definitively articulate truth. The strongest sections put flesh on these theoretical bones by taking readers into actual emergent churches, like Jacob’s Well in Kansas City, Mo., where the pastor draws on Catholic practice, engages the visual arts, and sees the church’s job as assisting people on their “pilgrimage” of faith. Jones’s writing is brisk and conversational, but the book gets poor marks for design. Call-out boxes, pull quotes, and frequent font changes, which might be thought to appeal to a younger audience, in fact make for distracting and disjointed reading. (Mar.) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

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