Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures Review

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Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures ReviewEddie Gibbs and Ryan K. Bolger's *Emerging Churches: Creating Community in Postmodern Cultures* (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005) is a much-needed book.
For all the antagonism and/or paranoia about the Emergent Movement or Conversation or Churches, Gibbs and Bolger give a 5 year researched-based presentation.
Guess what? Their book gives scant attention to Brian McLaren or any of his books. Shock of all shocks! What? I thought Brian McLaren WAS Emergent?? You mean there's more people involved than just Brian?? Over 50 leaders are interviewed and quoted and it's hard to find Brian McLaren among them. Shock of all shocks.
The nine (9) core practices of emerging churches are well-defined and illustrated with comments from those who are "practitioners" of contextualizing the gospel of the kingdom of God in the postmodern world.
The nine (9) core practices are:
1. Identifying with Jesus (and his way of life)
2. Transforming secular space (overcoming the secular/sacred split)
3. Living as community (not strangers in proximity at a church service)
4. Welcoming the stranger (radical and gentle hospitality that is inclusive)
5. Serving with generosity (not serving the institution called "church," but people)
6. Participating as producers (not widgets in the church program)
7. Creating as created beings (this is a great chapter!)
8. Leading as a body (beyond control and the CEO model of leadership)
9. Merging ancient and contemporary spiritualities.
"Emerging churches destroy the Christendom idea that church is a place, a meeting or a time. Church is a way of life, a rhythm, a community, a movement" (236).
For those who might be fearful of "the emerging church" and who want to learn about what the Spirit is up to in this global movement, then Emerging Churches is the book to read. If read with an open mind and a teachable heart, readers may just find themselves persuaded to "get in on" an epoch of change that gives Jesus Christ, community, the Bible, creation and other people back to them in fresh and exciting ways.
Gibbs and Bolger show that "modernity" began with the creation of the idea of secular space, that is, space where God does not reign or is not welcomed. With that idea the church was marginalized to the private sector and perpetuated the myth of secular space. Rather than the world and all in it belonging to God as the Psalms declare, the modern church create "God's house." The modern church is God nicely packaged and parceled out as the church sees fit. "Come in here, to us to find God."
Postmodern Christianity exposes the lie of "secular space" and celebrates the reign and imminence of God everywhere and at all times.
Get Gibbs and Bolger's book. Read it. Reflect and have fun thinking about it
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Finding Faith: A Self-Discovery Guide for Your Spiritual Quest Review

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Finding Faith: A Self-Discovery Guide for Your Spiritual Quest ReviewAs a rather progressive postmodern recovering-Evangelical I found this book to be a breath of fresh-air. While this book does fall into the category of apologetics, it is most certainly not an "Evidence That Demands a Verdict" or "Many Infallible Proofs for Christianity" style book. It's entire approach is radically different and immensely relevant to today's postmodern culture. Rather than focusing merely on cognitive arguments that are supposed to rationally convince people of the "absolute" truth of Christian beliefs, "Finding Faith" takes an existential approach that deals with the real life hang ups that postmodern individuals will have about Christianity. In other words, McLaren recognizes that postmoderns don't care so much whether Christianity is true as whether it is good.
Of course, postmoderns aren't entirely unconcerned about truth. They're not going to buy into something that is just obviously false. But what is much more important to them is whether our beliefs are livable, workable, and worthwhile. They want to know not "Is Christianity true?" but rather, "Will buying into the Christian faith make me into a better person?" And McLaren is brutally honest about the fact that when most non-Christians look at what Christians are like, what they see tends to repulse them. Too often we Christians present our worst face to the world: our bigotry, our arrogance, our legalism, our lack of cultural and social sensitivity, our tacky art, kitsch merchandise, and bad music, our lack of philosophical depth or intellectual nuance, our sexual or financial scandals, our abortion clinic bombers, our homophobic preachers, our aggressive culture wars and paranoid right-wing conservativism, and worst of all, our lack of visible unity and our inability to even love one another as Christ commanded. To be honest, there are times when I even wonder why I put up with it all and still claim the name "Christian", and I've been a Christian all my life. Can you imagine how someone seeing all this from the outside must perceive us? Can you think of any good reason why a decent, thoughtful, non-Christian person would want to risk taking on all that ugly baggage and even begin exploring Christianity? Well, Brian McLaren recognizes this huge risk that spiritual seekers take when approaching Christianity, and he has aimed "Finding Faith" at providing them with reasons to give Christian faith a second chance.
Don't get me wrong, McLaren doesn't skimp on the intellectual side of things either. He has whole chapters analyzing atheism, agnosticism, pluralism, etc. However, even his approach to these is atypical. McLaren doesn't make grandiose promises about logically and conclusively proving his point of view. He recognizes that as finite and fallen creatures it is impossible and absurd to claim absolute certainty about any of our beliefs. Rather he is up front about the short-comings of his arguments, but open about his own reasons for nevertheless maintaining Christian faith despite his lack of airtight proofs. This kind of honest vulnerability is a winning trait of this book, and one that I think would be very appealing to a non-Christian reader.
For me the bottom line is that this is one of the very few seeker-oriented Christian books that I wouldn't be embarrassed to give to a non-Christian friend. In fact, I plan to.Finding Faith: A Self-Discovery Guide for Your Spiritual Quest Overview

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Living the Story: Biblical Spirituality for Everyday Christians Review

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Living the Story: Biblical Spirituality for Everyday Christians ReviewIt is not for nothing that the authors of the book Living the Story: Biblical Spirituality for Everyday Christians named it thus, for it is a book that seeks to make everyday sense of a topic that is popularly perceived as a lofty and theological or worse, ethereal and unattainable. In fact it could just as easily be called Everyday Spirituality for Biblical Christians so clearly does it enunciate and demystify Christian Spirituality using language and expression that is easily grasped by the reader.
The book's form takes three parts. Understanding that Biblical spirituality is centred on love for and worship of a God of three persons it begins by exploring the nature of worship itself cultivating an understanding of how that worship is rightly directed towards Abba Father, how that worship is worked out in our lifestyles as disciples to Jesus Christ, and how our power to live that life of worship is accessible to us as temples of the Holy Spirit. Parts two and three of the book delve into the Old and the New Testaments exploring the spirituality as it was lived in the Bible and seeking to make it relevant to the reader for their life in the 21st century.
The history of man is a story, a great compelling story that cannot be told in its fullness unless it is told as part of the story of God. `Living the Story' recounts the chronicle of the `Great Story' through the narratives of the men and women of God in the books of the Old and the New Testaments drawing from their encounters lessons and instruction for us as to how to incorporate our lives into this greater narrative of the history of man. It draws also on the themes and revelations of the Biblical writers and the apostles to hand down ancient wisdom that has lost none of its potency in the intervening thousands of years.
In current society it appears to me that modern men and women lead compartmentalised lives allocating regulated space and time for the many facets of their world, family, career, social, emotional, financial and spiritual areas of life are attended to as and when they are at their most pressing. Clearly some press more often and harder than others and so get more attention and equally, some elements overlap each other and are attended to in concert but it is also my observation that spirituality is an element that is relegated to the least pressing of issues, or is brought out for special occasions or dusted off on Sundays. However, the intent of this book is to advocate an integrated approach to spirituality, one where life is infused with it rather than nodding to it on a Sunday in a `worship' service. Stevens and Green gently sacrifice the sacred cow of religiosity for the sake of practising the presence of God, living a life that experiences the power of God in a holistic, spiritually saturated way where man is walking with God daily and is involved in an authentic and rich relationship with Him, a relationship that infuses all areas of their life rather than one where life makes room for spirituality.
Critically, the authors examine the nature of Christian Spirituality in more than just the backdrop of the individual; they incorporate the quest, the story of the one into the context of the many, into the community of the people of God. For the journey of man, whether it is with God or without is a journey that is forged in community. Stevens and Green are not especially kind to the traditions and the routines that the body of Christ has slipped into as we fall more and more into the traps of modern life. They are particularly critical of the notion of fellowship as having been downgraded to watery tea and a biscuit after a Sunday Service, they urge us deeper into fellowship with each other, encouraging getting messy with each other's lives as did the apostles in the New Testament. Living in true fellowship where life is `done together' living an authentic Christianity. It is here that the biggest challenge lies for us in an individualistic urban society where there are schedules to keep, tasks to be completed and lives to be kept afloat in the face of stiff competition. It seems to me, and clearly, to the authors, that there has to be more to life than this. Christianity has to do more, it has to touch the sides as it goes down, or else it is no different than any other sop to spirituality that a guru or a master could concoct.
As a person who has been in and around church all my life I find it refreshing to read a spiritual guide that doesn't simply begin and end with pray and read your bible, go to church on Sunday and pay your tithe. Stevens and Green by no means leave these things out, nor do they pass over the sacraments of communion and baptism but they present all of these crucial elements of the Christian walk as part of the lifelong conversation between man and God.
The book is readable and applicable and for that it is of immense value. It doesn't preach and expound a set of religious rules and regulations that formulate a spiritual life. Instead, throughout its pages `Living the Story' introduces a loving and generous God, one who draws man to himself and elicits the worship he so richly deserves by his very nature, a nature of Love. The book achieves all this by putting in plain words the structure and manifesto of an authentic Christian life; a life that is enriched for the person living it and is attractive to those who live outside of its Christian context. Stevens and Green have accomplished a work that is more than a reference book for people exploring Christianity, it is a manual for those of us who want to (as Jonathan Swift once wrote) "...live all the days of our life".
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Divine Embrace, The: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Ancient-Future) Review

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Divine Embrace, The: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Ancient-Future) ReviewThough you wouldn't know it from the title, this is the fourth book in Robert E. Webber's excellent and highly acclaimed Ancient-Future series, one of the most significant contributions to the discussion of the relationship between postmodernism and Christianity. In light of that, emerging church leader Brian McLaren, an admitted fan of Webber's writing, considers THE DIVINE EMBRACE the author's "best and most important book to date." I fully agree, and given that his previous books were all good and important as well, that means McLaren and I place this one in the exceptional category.
One element that makes this book so important is Webber's clarification of the word "spirituality" --- specifically, Christian spirituality as defined and experienced by the ancient church. Webber rescues the word from its ambiguous, anemic use in contemporary society and restores to it all the vibrancy and God-centeredness that is inherent in genuine Christian spirituality. "God has put his arms around us in the divine embrace and has restored our fellowship to him," Webb writes. The book, he explains, is the Christian story of that embrace, "the spirituality that proceeds from it, and how this spirituality can be recovered in a relativistic, postmodern world where spirituality is viewed as a common, contentless experience of otherness." If that postmodern view of spirituality leaves you cold, dissatisfied and more restless than ever, THE DIVINE EMBRACE not only explains why that is but more importantly shows what you can do about it.
Part of Webber's genius lies in his ability to articulate a thorough study of spirituality in a warm, reflective tone. There is plenty of research and information here, particularly about how the Christian view of spirituality was manifested throughout history. But Webber speaks to the heart as well as the mind, and you're likely to find yourself worshiping God right smack in the middle of a section about the devastating effects of scholastic theology on medieval mysticism. And because the concept of the incarnation is central to the entire book, Webber keeps it real and down-to-earth by frequently reminding us that God came to us in the flesh and lived among us.
"Spirituality is grounded in God's embrace of our human condition and the reversal of human life accomplished by God's two hands [the incarnate Word and the Spirit] and modeled for us in Jesus," Webber writes. "Jesus is not only the sacrifice for our sin, the victor over death for us, he is also the perfect example of the one who lives in full union with the embrace of God." He emphasizes that the authentic Christian life is neither a superspiritual one nor a rejection of everyday life on earth: "It is, rather, an intentional living into the purposes of God."
Readers familiar with Webber's other books, including the groundbreaking THE YOUNGER EVANGELICALS, can rest assured that THE DIVINE EMBRACE measures up to the high standard those other books set. And new readers can't do better than to discover the richness of Webber's wisdom, knowledge and insight, as well as his considerable talent as a writer, in this latest volume in the Ancient-Future series.
--- Reviewed by Marcia FordDivine Embrace, The: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Ancient-Future) Overview

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The Gift of Death (Religion and Postmodernism Series) Review

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The Gift of Death (Religion and Postmodernism Series) ReviewYou can give someone life--or you can put someone to death. But you cannot "give" someone their own death. Death is a "gift" because it insures our irreplaceableness in God's eyes; it is ours and ours alone. No one can die in my place no more than I can die in theirs. Our willingness to acknowledge this relationship with our own deaths (which above all requires "responsibility," a term Derrida seems to prefer to "faith") in turn unites us with God and the self, with the giver and the receiver.
I'll admit I hadn't expected a deconstructionist to use terms like "absolute," "transcendant," "God," "self"--in profusion and in earnest. But perhaps Derrida has sufficiently exposed the instability, metaphoric basis and deceptive play of language to be able to employ it without qualifiers, disclaimers, and tedious textual self-referentiality. As is his custom, he represents his own work as a critique of others' works--Plato's "Phaedo," Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals," Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling," and the contemporary, politically executed Polish philosopher Jan Potocka. While he establishes his distance from Plato and Nietzsche, his re-visioning of Kierkegaard offers new angles without questioning or challenging the great Dane's existential reading of the Abraham-Isaac story. And his alignment with Potocka is so complete as to suggest more an apologia than a critique of the latter's work. Add to these texts numerous references to Heidegger and to both the Old and New Testaments as well as to stories by Poe and Hawthorne, and you'll have some idea of how richly allusive, not to mention dense, Derrida's discourse can be, even in a brief work such as this.
The primary requisite for reading "The Gift of Death" is some knowledge of its precursor, "Fear and Trembling." Like Kierkegaard, Derrida defines religion as access to the responsibility of a free self, which in turn is defined as a relationship consciously and secretly experienced by the individual subject who sees him or herself in the gaze of God. Truth is separated from Socrates' truth by its interiority, by its replacement of reason, ethics, and aesthetics with the sheer horror of the abyss. Compared to Kierkegaard, however, Derrida's account is less romantic, less inspiring, more disturbing. The leap of faith involves not a sacrifice of Isaac but of oneself, a secret and senseless meeting with one's own death. Derrida interprets the absence of woman in the Abraham and Bartleby stories as proof that the "knight of faith's" quest is not the "tragic hero's". Instead, it is beyond all knowledge, a confrontation with the abyss that marks the Absolute singularity of the self. (This latter observation is reminiscent of Marlowe's inability, or unwillingness, in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," to share the "truth" of Kurtz' final words, "The horror, the horror," with Kurtz' fiance.)
In the latter part of his critique, Derrida offers a paradoxical criticism of the technological, modern age. Far from becoming quantified or de-naturalized, we have returned to the demonic and orgiastic from which religion arose. Modern man has fallen into inauthenticity, becoming not a self or person but assuming the mask of a "role." Present-day democracy, in turn, is not about the equality of individuals but of roles. Hence the importance of discovering and accepting the gift of death that determines human uniqueness. Responsibility is the criterion; freedom is the result.
This is a work not to be read quickly or only once. Derrida moves slowly, taking two steps backward before moving one step forward, but his method insures the communication of his meanings. If it's any inducement to the reader, I would suggest that the fourth and final chapter, "Tout autre est tout autre," is anticlimactic and unhelpful. By then the attentive reader will already have located the gift.The Gift of Death (Religion and Postmodernism Series) Overview

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