The Church in Emerging Culture

From Neoredemptive

Synopsis

Position papers by the authors on the church's rightful place against, beside, amid, without, within, beneath and above culture, each sprinkled with the comments, challenges, "amen"s, and occasional jokes of the other authors.

Doc's Take

My favorite chapters have to be Horton's and Matthewes-Green's, who subject the post-modern paradigm and its uncritical acceptance by many in the emergent movement to searing historical, sociological, and theological criticism.

The "conversational" structure of the book is much better implemented than in Wilson and Moore's Digital Storytellers or McLaren and Campolo's Adventures in Missing the Point, which suffer from a monovision that keeps the "conversations" uninteresting. There is genuine agreement and disagreement between these authors, and they are (for the most part) very effective at calling out these differences and the reasons for them. My only complaint is with McLaren's seemingly obsessive need to have the first, middle, last, and every other word on every subject; it felt like he was consistently attempting to either hijack or derail the conversation by dictating its terms from the sidelines, or maybe he was just trying to impress us with his wit, humor, open-mindedness, and willingness to allow the other sides in a dialog to be heard clearly with an uninterrupted voice (D'oh!).