Here's a book to keep your eye on, due out April 2008 from Moody: Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be), by Kevin DeYoung and Tony Kluck. Here's a line from the book, that sums up their perspective pretty well: “You can be young, passionate about Jesus Christ, surrounded by diversity, engaged in a postmodern world, reared in evangelicalism and not be an emergent Christian. In fact, I want to argue that it would be better if you weren't."
Here is the table of contents:
Foreword (by David Wells)And here are some endorsements:
Introduction: Still Submergent After All These Years
Maybe—the New YesEpilogue: Listening to All the Churches of Revelation
- Journey: Are the Pilgrims Still Making Progress?
- Rebel without a Cause: Something Worth Submitting to
- Bible: Why I Love the Person and Propositions of Jesus
- Thank You for Smoking: On Dialogue, Futurism, and Hell
- Doctrine: The Drama Is in the Dogma
- A Funeral for a Friend: On Churches, Story, and Propositional Language
- Modernism: The Boogeyman Cometh
- Where Everyone Knows Your Name: Dialoguing for the Sake of Dialogue
- Jesus: Bringer of Peace, Bearer of Wrath
- Real Topeka People: In Search of Community
- Why I Don’t Want a Cool Pastor
This book is a pleasure to read, not least because it pricks so many pretensions. While it deals with an important subject, it manages to sustain a breezy style that draws you in. The subtitle tells you the stance of the authors: the emerging church movement, which taught an entire generation to rebel, is now old enough to find growing numbers of people learning to rebel against the rebellion.~ D. A. Carson
Trinity Evangelical Divinity SchoolWhy We’re Not Emergent crashes into the emerging conversation in a voice which hears “them” and talks back! This is a book we’ve been waiting for. With careful observation, faithful handling of Scripture, and an eye for the ironic and absurd, DeYoung and Kluck have given us a feel for what attracts some to emerging churches and thoughts about why that’s sometimes a very bad thing. Buy and read this book. You’ll enjoy it. And it could help you and the people you’ll tell about it.
~ Mark Dever
Pastor, Capitol Hill Baptist Church
Washington, DCFifteen years ago, in No Place for Truth, David Wells reminded us all that in our time, those who seem most relevant are in fact most irrelevant, and those who seem most irrelevant are in fact most relevant. That, as Gandalf would say, “is a very encouraging thought.” Indeed, as I encounter what has been called the “young, Reformed awakening,” for every young Christian who is convinced that in order to engage the culture that the church must embrace the emergent paradigm of truth and church, there are nineteen who understand (because they really care about what the Bible says) that faithfulness is relevance. DeYoung and Kluck tell you why.
~ Ligon Duncan
Senior Minister, First Presbyterian Church, Jackson, Mississippi
