I was recently asked to review Tony Jones' new book for the Academy of Parish Clergy. His publisher was kind enough to send me an advanced copy. I loved the book. It will be available in March 2008 but you can pre-order it through Amazon.com. Here is the short version of my review:

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The Emergent Church is a hot topic. Its critics have been struggling to nail down its definition and paint its leaders into a corner. Discussions about these new Christians are full of rumors, misconceptions, and urban legends. However, many people feel this movement could be the future of American Christianity.

Tony Jones is the national coordinator for Emergent Village and a doctoral fellow in practical theology at Princeton University. He lays everything about the Emergent phenomenon on the table in his new book “The New Christians: Dispatches From The Emergent Frontier”. For anyone interested in the Emergent Church, this book is a must read. Giving the reader an inside scoop on the origins of this movement, Tony Jones has taken a big step toward answering many questions of participants and critics alike. I’d like to thank Tony for sharing his journey with us.

These new Christians began as small group of Evangelicals asking a few deep questions. As the answers produced more questions and those questions took on a life of their own, it became obvious that their friendships were much more important than their agreement on all the details. These questions are not new. Most Christians have struggled with questions of faith at some point in their life. Churches of all varieties have to deal with questions regarding leadership structure, facilities, worship models, and culture, but something different happened in this conversation. Where past generations of Christians had often come to irreconcilable differences that severed relationships and fragmented Protestantism into a million pieces, these friends found a way to see past the division and savor the conversation.

The Christian community has been watching intensely as these new Christians have held a public brainstorming session for the past decade via blogs, magazine articles, and even a few controversial books. Few concrete answers have crystallized but publishing your work for the world to see makes you very vulnerable and vulnerability creates fertile ground for change. Most pastors and executives would rather iron out all the details, conduct a few market tests, and debug all the programs before going public. These new Christians resisted that temptation and dared to take another path. The result is not simply a new denomination or a different doctrinal statement, but it is a different kind of process. They have created a theology and ecclesiology developed through collaboration and community rather than any claims of divinely appointed superiority or exclusive access to tradition. Tony Jones compares Emergent to an open source software product or an online collaboration tool such as Wikipedia.com.

“Like Wikipedia, emergent churches harbor no great fear of failure. In fact, failures are a natural consequence of innovation and adventure”
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”However, when emergent churches open-source their worship environments, all sorts of people make themselves heard, leading to a richer experience for all, albeit one with some serious mistakes.” (p.193)

This book doesn’t gloss over the problems. Not all of the relationships made it through undamaged. For some, the questions were out of bounds and many answers spelled heresy. For the critics, the concrete answers were not materializing fast enough.

As more than a biographical sketch of Emergent, the book discloses the core values of these individual communities and provides a healthy dose of the terminology with in-depth definitions. Any attempts to heal the wounds of conflict would be futile without addressing the deep theological differences. When theology and practice become disconnected, there is a big problem.

“The emergent movement is robustly theological; the conviction is that theology and practice are inextricably related, and each invariably informs the other.” (p.104)

I suspect that this Emergent conversation may be the first glimpse into modern mainline theology for many Evangelicals. It might be fair to suggest that these young Evangelicals are just now catching up with scholars like Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Walter Brueggemann who have been willing to tackle tough theological questions and create dialogue for a long time. There is ample evidence of that trend. His friend and fellow Emergent author Brian McLaren, credits both Brueggemann and Crossan in his latest book “Everything Must Change”. However, Tony Jones is a bit critical of these scholars. He suggests that Borg, in particular, has missed the mark by rejecting orthodox beliefs in the resurrection and interpreting the bible’s miraculous stories as symbolic parables. (p.148, p.156) I feel Tony might have been too quick to make that judgment. Mainline scholars have long been the champions of fresh theological perspectives and he might be overlooking some worthwhile advocates in the journey ahead.

This conversation is happening all around the world in homes, coffee houses, bars, and maybe even a few Sunday school classes. Something wonderful happens when people are willing to become vulnerable, share their incomplete stories, doubts, and questions. These new Christians realize that the gospel is so much more than bulletproof answers to questions. The gospel comes to life during the process of accepting people who have questions to ask. For those of us interested in the Emergent journey and even those wishing to cut them off at the pass, this book offers much to learn for us all.