This past April, I visited Minneapolis to conduct some research for my MSOLE Capstone project. I was spending some time with Tony and while we were talking about An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, he told me about the book he was working on at the time and I am excited to review it here on this blog. The book we discussed, The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier, recently hit bookstores.

A few weeks back, Tony emailed out the first chapter of The New Christians and also made it available on his blog for download. I downloaded the first chapter and opened up the PDF expecting to glance at it, but instead I found myself reading it to completion. I bought the book the next day, and when I finally sat down to read it, I wasn’t disappointed.

Let me start by saying that I finished this book in 3 days. If you know me at all, you know that is amazingly fast! It isn’t that I read slowly, it is that so few authors hold my attention so well and I find myself losing interest after three or four chapters (I probably have 40 books like this on my bookshelf). Perhaps I tore through this book so quickly because I was able to imagine Tony’s voice behind the words, but I think it is more likely because of what The New Christians presents to its readers.

Tony articulates the need to for us (Christians) to rise above the polarities to which we often find ourselves beholden, and then he proceeds to offer examples of how emergent Christians are doing this through twenty “dispatches.” What most readers should take away from these dispatches is that both the dispatches and emerging Christians are full of hope. Tony does a great job of describing the emergent movement, offering definitions, and providing an insider’s perspective of the development of Emergent Village.

Emergent-friendly and Emergent-curious alike will benefit from reading this book. As evidenced by the book’s dispatches, Tony has captured in a thoughtful, articulate way what many of us who call ourselves “Friends of Emergent Village” regularly observe. Just like A New Kind of Christian gave voice to thoughts I was having and conversations I longed to have, The New Christians gives voice to the stories of many emergent Christians, and in doing so, gives voice to my own story. I know that Tony’s observations and assertions are based on his experience, but readers should recognize that they represent the experiences of many of us who have been out on the front lines ourselves, and others who listen to, learn from, and repeat the stories of others who explore this new frontier - this is the particular genius that Tony displays in The New Christians. In describing Emergent Village,  Tony is a participant-observer who stands as a herald practicing the “designing, displaying, describing, and recording” of the Emergent coat of arms.

In the future, if I encounter someone who is questioning their understanding of Christianity and their world seems shaky because they sense the deep epistemological shift that has taken place in our culture(s), I will still hand them a copy of A New Kind of Christian. If, however, someone wants to understand about Emergent Village, emergent Christians, and where we are all coming from, I will give them a copy of The New Christians.

In The New Christians Tony Jones has offered friendly observers and critics of the Emergent conversation alike an invitation to dialogue with us in book form, “Anyone, anytime, anyplace” (113).   Let’s hope they accept…

To give you a better feel for the book itself, here a few of my favorite parts:

• “Dispatch 6: Emergents see God’s activity in all aspects of culture and reject the sacred-secular divide.” (75).
• “Dispatch 17: Emergents start new church to save their own faith, not necessarily as an outreach strategy.” (197).
• “Jesus can’t be domesticated. Every time someone tries to house-train him he breaks off the leash and starts causing trouble.” (37).
• “The God about whom we theologize is transcendent, but our human musings about God are not.” (112).
• “On both the left and the right of modern American Christianity, the cut-and-paste approach to the Bible is a disservice to the people of God. Emergents, for their part, are trying to embrace the whole text.” (132).
• “ ‘I’m humble,’ an emergent might tell you, ‘because I don’t know what I’m wrong about today. I’ll speak with confidence, and I’ll speak with passion, but I won’t speak with certainty.’” (140).
• “Proper confidence, by contrast, lends itself to persuasion, not imposition.” (141).
• “We’ve got to figure out a way to be robustly and distinctly who we are yet authentically open to and respectful of the other.” (157).
• Special Note: The conversation Tony and Doug Pagitt have with another Twin Cities pastor (has to be John Piper) was priceless. (77).

Here a couple of things that bugged me, but just a little:

• The use of the phrase “envelope of friendship” made me think of some sort of ancient relic that you might find in The Legend of Zelda, every time I read it. I wish there was a more helpful metaphor.
• In pointing out that editors’ decisions proclaim particular perspectives, I am curious about the choice that the designers of this book made to include quotes from the text itself in the margins. It makes it seem almost magazine-like. What is that trying to communicate? Or was it purely an attempt to make the aesthetics of the text more interesting? If so, why?