Becoming Conversant with Emergent

Don Carson’s new book, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications, is due out next week. Zondervan has posted onto their website an excerpt, containing the table of contents, the intro, and part of chapter one. Here is a helpful excerpt:

I have tried to avoid too much technical discussion. The flavor of the lecture series has not been entirely removed. In reality that means this book will probably frustrate some readers in opposite ways: some will find the treatment of postmodernism to be too elementary, and perhaps others will find parts of it heavy going. The notes will help the former, and I hope that rereading will help the latter. But the book is several times longer than the manuscript of the lectures. The brevity of the latter meant that I could not indulge in detailed documentation or introduce a lot of nuances and exceptions. Owing not least to the fact that some emerging church leaders have criticized the lectures, in various blogs, for such omissions, I have tried in this book to fill that gap as much as possible.

Whenever a Christian movement comes along that presents itself as reformist, it should not be summarily dismissed. Even if one ultimately decides that the movement embraces a number of worrying weaknesses, it may also have some important things to say that the rest of the Christian world needs to hear. So I have tried to listen respectfully and carefully; I hope and pray that the leaders of this “movement” will similarly listen to what I have to say.

Ironically, just the other day, one of those bloggers—Andrew Jones—wrote An Open Blog Post for Don Carson 1.0. Instead of waiting for the book to appear and allowing Carson the public opportunity to offer clarifications and further nuance, he wrote the open post with a number of points in questions. This weekend, I wrote a paragraph-by-paragraph interaction with the whole thing, but decided to scrap it. Instead, I’ll highlight just two things that may be of interest to others.

Jones begins his open letter like this: “Hi Don.” Even though I’m probably younger than Jones, I’m still from the “old school” where you don’t address a research professor of international acclaim whom you don’t know in this way. I’m sure Jones intended no disrespect—he even writes “Please do not assume disrespect in this blog posting.” But I’d encourage him to read Stephen Carter’s CT article, Rudeness Has a First Name: Instant Informality Actually Sabotages True Friendship.

In response to Carson’s Cedarville lectures Jones writes:

We admit that some of our churches suck. And there are thousands of them around the globe, many of them brand new, immature, unwise and adolescent, so finding the ones that suck is not that difficult. But you have not yet given us a good model of church to compare ourselves to, or a direction to take if we choose NOT to start emerging churches out of our new believers instead of traditional churches. Please bear in mind that many of us in global ministry are starting churches in VERY non-Christian countries, and often with no budget or support, and therefore buying a building or renting one is not always an option – neither is paying a full time pastor, or paying for a seminary education. So . . .
before we tell our emerging house churches to look for real estate, and
before we tell our front line missionaries to leave the drug addicts on the streets and return to the suburbs, and
before we shut down our web-sites and move back to books and articles, and
before we retool our simple church training at festivals and drum up funding to rent conference centers and hotels, and
before we take ministry out of believers homes and place it in an A-Frame building with a big parking lot . . .
please tell us about the local church you give leadership to and why you think it would make a better model than the churches we are starting.

It’s a legitimate question, but I find it surprising, given that Carson already answered this in his lectures. The church he held up as a model is Redeemer Presbyterian Church, pastored by Tim Keller, in the heart of Manhattan. They are ministering not mainly to disenfranchised evangelicals, but to secular postmodenists in the city. Their purpose: “Seeking to Renew the City Socially, Spiritually & Culturally.” Emergent folks might be interested in Keller’s articles on The Missional Church and Preaching in a Post-modern City; Part 2.