This past week I while I was flying I was able to read through Tony’s new book, The New Christians - Dispatches from the emergent frontier. While I will not call myself emergent I have been watching and learning from this movement for several years now. The lessons learned have greatly impacted my ministry and opened the door to the way that I look at life, church and the bible. So, I was excited to hear that this book was out and wasted no time at all to hurry out and get it. So, here are my thoughts as I continue to be challenged by this movement.

“the desire of the emergents is to live Christianly, to build something wonderful for the future on the legacy of the past.”

Why is it that we get so afraid of a movement that has a few differences from what we normally think that we write them off all together. I love this quote becasue it is the beginning of me thinking that I may truly be emergent in some of my practices. Just prior to this Tony talks about how the modern church is characterized by buildings, professional clergy and even the development of programming. We determine a churches value on these things.

While the emergent is simply wanting to do life with people in a manner that it opens the door for them to understand what it means to follow Christ. This may take time and lots of questionable situations (at least in the Christian church realm) that some of us shy away from. If this is how we should do evangelism, much like Brian McClaren talked about in his book Evangelism as Dance, then we may need to reevaluate the buildings, program, professional clergy. However, this is where my modernistic view starts to seep in. How can we measure the success of this? Maybe that question needs to go unanswered at least for now.

Through out the book Tony insert 20 dispatches. Little insights into what the emergent movement really thinks and believes. The first one is:

Dispatch 1:Emergents find little importance in the discrete differences between the various flavors of Christianity. Instead, they practice a generous orthodoxy that appreciates the contributions of all Christian movements.

I will share one more quote that ties into the dispatch above from page 17. “the church that doesn’t challenge its members to face the core ethical issues that confront them every day at work is the church that has abdicated its responsibility.” He goes on to share that the church at large has done a great job of emphasizing the “just-me-and-Jesus” relationship to the exclusion of the horizontal relationship between two people. While our relationship with Jesus is extremely important we still need to not forget the very reason that we exist. That is too worship God and share the Gospel message with those around us.

Share your thoughts…