The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier

by Tony Jones

Overview

What the emergent church movement is all about and why it matters to the future of Christianity

Following on the questions raised by Brian McLaren in A New Kind of Christian, Tony Jones has written an engaging exploration of what this new kind of Christianity looks like. Writing dispatches about the thinking and practices of adventurous emergent Christians across the country, he offers an in-depth view of this new "third way" of faith--its origins, its theology, its views of truth, Scripture, and interpretation, and its hopeful and life-giving sense of community. With the depth of theological expertise and broad perspective he has gained as a pastor, writer, and leader of the movement, Jones initiates readers into the emergent conversation and offers a new way forward for Christians in a post-Christian world. With journalistic narrative as well as authoritative reflection, he draws upon on-site research to provide fascinating examples and firsthand stories of who is doing what, where, and why it matters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781506454962
Publisher:	Augsburg Fortress, Publishers
Publication date:	03/01/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Tony Jones is an outdoorsman, theologian, professor, and writer. His most recent book is Did God Kill Jesus? Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution. He teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary and is an editor at Fortress Press. Tony has written a dozen books on Christian ministry, spirituality, prayer, and new church movements. He lives in Minnesota with his wife, kids, and dogs.

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Table of Contents

"A Living Way: Emergent Visions" Series Foreword     xiii
Preface     xv
Introduction: What Is "Emergent"?     xvii
Leaving the Old Country     1
"Church Is Dead"     4
Signs of Death-and Life     5
The Problem on the Left     7
A Case Study: Go Where I Send Thee     10
The Problem on the Right     11
A Case Study: Don't Ask Us About the Chickens     13
The Real Problem: Left Versus Right     18
Caught in the Crossfire     21
Dispatch from the Blogosphere: Musings of a Postmodern Negro     24
Dispatches from the Frontier of the American Church     31
An Allegory     31
An Alternative Ending     33
Geological Musings     35
What Exactly Is Emerging?     37
The Beginnings     41
"The Bible Is Propaganda"     43
The New Kind of Christian Effect     49
Meanwhile, Across the Pond     52
Then till Now     55
The Church's Choice     57
Dispatch from the Rocky Mountains: Katie and Kristen     60
Who Are the Emergent Christians?     67
Hunches and Intuitions     68
Influencing Culture or Influenced by Culture?     72
An "Envelope of Friendship"     76
An Emergent Voters' Guide     80
Dispatch from I-35: The Terrific Tale of Trucker Frank     86
The Theology, Stupid     95
Dartmouth Days     96
What, Exactly, Is Theology?     104
Theology on the Rise     106
Going Deep     111
Skiing the Slippery Slope     115
So, a Biblicist and a Relativist Walk into a Pastors' Conference ...     123
The Expurgated Lectionary     130
Dispatch from Seminary: Legalisms of the Left     134
After Objectivity: Beautiful Truth     139
The Thrill of Interpretation     140
Reading the Whole Bible     143
"Sonny, It Ain't Nothing till I Call It"     148
Truth (a.k.a. God)     152
After Objectivity: Dialogue     155
Beautiful, Messy, Incarnational Truth     157
Paradoxes     162
Dispatch from the End of a Three-Mile Dirt Road: Recovering "Church"     170
Inside the Emergent Church     175
It's a Great Day at Jacob's Well!     175
Wikichurch     180
Tightly Knit: Journey      192
Binitarians     201
The People's Liturgy: Church of the Apostles     203
Time to Rethink Seminary     209
MyChurch: A Paean to Solomon's Porch     210
Epilogue: Feral Christians     219
Appendices     221
"Emergent Village Values and Practices"     222
"A Response to Our Critics"     227
"Disastrous Statements"     233
Notes     237
Acknowledgments     253
The Author     255
Index     257

Editorial Reviews

Jones (The Sacred Way) provides the single best introduction to the Emergent Church movement, of which he is a prominent leader. The mainline denominations are dying, and the hyperindividualism of evangelicalism is unsatisfying, so many young evangelicals, Jones explains, have decided to recreate church for postmodern times. Jones credits Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christianwith raising important questions about sounding the Gospel in an era beset by questions about foundationalism, epistemology and how to read Scripture. He passionately defends the emergent movement from criticism. In particular, critics are wrong to claim that emergents don't really believe in the Bible; emergents passionately love the Bible, says Jones, but also know that finite human beings cannot definitively articulate truth. The strongest sections put flesh on these theoretical bones by taking readers into actual emergent churches, like Jacob's Well in Kansas City, Mo., where the pastor draws on Catholic practice, engages the visual arts and sees the church's job as assisting people on their "pilgrimage" of faith. Jones's writing is brisk and conversational, but the book gets poor marks for design. Call-out boxes, pull quotes and frequent font changes, which might be thought to appeal to a younger audience, in fact make for distracting and disjointed reading. (Mar.)

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Publishers Weekly

A doctoral and research fellow at Princeton Theological Seminary, Jones currently serves as the national coordinator of Emergent Village, a nonprofit organization of the Emergent movement, an ecumenical and postmodern form of American Christianity. The Emergent movement values inclusion; rejects the secular/sacred dichotomy, finding God active in all of life; believes friendship and reconciliation to be more important than doctrinal agreement; and gives greater weight to the biblical call to community than to the democratic assertion of individual rights. It values orthopraxis (doing the Gospel) over orthodoxy (believing the Gospel) and often engages in social and/or political activism without attaching to a particular political party. Here, Jones analyzes the movement in 21-sentence dispatches that describe its chief characteristics and follows each dispatch with narrative illustration and discussion that successfully help clarify and amplify the movement's features. Highly recommended for public and seminary libraries.
—Carolyn M. Craft

Library Journal

"This intelligent and informative book is the only insider story from one of the leading lights of the more progressive wing of the emerging movement, the former national coordinator of Emergent Village." -Christianity Today (October 2009)

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