lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Archive of "books" Category
Where Do You Live?
Just caught this short video from a favorite author of mine, Andy Couch. A while back I took the time to review his latest book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. See what he has to say about the link between idolatry and the questions which define us.
Reviewing Deep Church by Jim Belcher
Jim Belcher, the author of Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional, and I have much in common.
We both did masters degrees at Fuller Theological Seminary.
We both have a heart for church planting.
I teach a class on the Emerging Church based on the intensive that he references in his book. (35)
We get frustrated when people talk past one another, defaulting to caricatured stereotypes rather than embracing a posture of openness.
And we both value looking for a “third way” to approach dichotomistic thinking.
He is right when he says,
It seems that every time someone criticizes the emerging church, they pick the worst-case scenario or the most extreme statements. (49)
He is also correct in noting,
It seems the emerging church, for rhetorical purposes, uses sweeping generalizations about the traditional church that are unfair. (76)
The larger Body of Christ would indeed be served well by discourse that is deeper, more specific, and marked by a sense of humble openness. Belcher’s chapters on Deep: Truth, Evangelism, Gospel, Worship, Preaching, Ecclesiology, and Culture, are essentially his attempts to facilitate just that – a worthwhile enterprise in my opinion.
While Belcher’s book is truly helpful in this regard, I’m not sure he really hits the mark in terms of articulating a true “third way” as a means of engaging these topics. Very often, his conclusions in these chapters are a combination of a chastened version of the EC position he articulates and an expanded version of the traditional position he articulates (usually w/ reference to Tim Keller and his church!). I suppose this is a kind of “third way,” maybe even precisely the one Belcher desires, but I’m not certain it’s the most helpful kind of third way for the Church to pursue.
The mistake, I believe, comes in the assumption that one can simply pit the positions of the EC against the positions of the traditional church. The main problem here is that many in the EC camp are themselves trying to articulate and maneuver a “third way” between the modern categories of conservatism and liberalism, a feature that Belcher seems to either overlook or discount w/o comment. An indication of this is his quick dismissal of the Anabaptist tradition from which many in the EC draw as one which is able to circumvent many of the dichotomies addressed in this book on account of its fundamentally, Christendom-rejecting, stance. Belcher never seems to ask, “How might people in the EC camp already be searching for a third way in response to classic approaches to these issues?,” but assumes that their positions are simply reactions against the positions of traditional churches.
Belcher sets himself on this course in stating,
We need to define it [the emerging church] as a movement, particularly its theology. The best way to do this is to look at what the emerging church movement is against – the things they are protesting and the rasons why they are calling for change. (38)
For the life of me, I can’t grasp why someone would want to define a movement by what they are against (even it it is a protest movement) rather than what they are for. We certainly regard what the classic reformers were for as far more more important than what they were against! But more than this, Belcher fails to identify missiology as a core motif for the EC. For many, if not most, in the global EC movement, it is an attempt to participate with God and God’s mission in the world that is reshaping how they understand the sorts of topics that Belcher raises in his book, not vice versa.
These criticisms notwithstanding, I am glad that Jim wrote this book and don’t doubt for a second that it has an will continue to help many.
**Jim has recently decided to resign from his position as lead pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, CA. You can read a letter he wrote to the congregation regarding this transition here and some additional discussion about this sort of trend here.
Discussing Church, Christ, and Community
While Amy was away I had the chance to read some books that has been on my hitlist for a while.
Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional by Jim Belcher
Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge by Dallas Wilard
Free for All: Rediscovering the Bible in Community by Tim Conder and Daniel Rhodes
I plan to offer some thoughts on all three eventually, but I was wondering if there might be some lifeasmission readers out there who have read any of these and were anxious to have some discussion on one in particular.
(Books link to BetterWorldBooks.com, my book supplier of choice).
Viral Hope: Good News from the Urbs to the Burbs (and everything in between)
Almost a year ago to the day, my friend JR Woodward asked me to contribute a post to a series he was doing on his blog.
I was asked to answer the question,
If your local city newspaper asked you to describe the ‘Good News,’ what would you write?
I was living and pastoring in Memphis, TN at the time, a city broken and divided in many ways, so I was more than happy to participate.
A year later, that series has morphed into a book, Viral Hope: Good News from the Urbs to the Burbs (and everything in between).
The most exciting thing about the book, to me anyway, is that as I read these essays, I realize that I am privileged to personally know about 1/2 of these men and women who have a deep gospel hope for the place in which they live. I’m almost as excited that this book marks the debut of Ecclesia Press, a new publishing division of the Ecclesia Network that I think has the potential to be a huge resource to missional church leaders by giving voice to those who are in the missional trenches, seeking to cultivate disciples and communities that join in God’s mission in the world.
Here’s a blog post with links to the 50 authors of the book and their original posts.
If you are looking to pick up 1-4 copies of the book, you’ll need to go to Amazon. But, if you’d like to pick up 5 or more, be sure to go to the Ecclesia Press site to get discounts based on the quantity of your order.
You can follow ViralHopeBook, EcclesiaPress, and EcclesiaNet on twitter. Or, if you really wanna get crazy, you can follow me
Tending to Eden: An Interview with Author, Scott Sabin
About a month ago I offered a book review of Tending to Eden: Environmental Stewardship for God’s People by Scott Sabin. Scott is the Executive director of Plant with Purpose.
Plant With Purpose is an international environmental organization that transforms lives in rural areas where poverty is caused by deforestation. For over 25 years, Plant With Purpose has provided lasting solutions to heal the relationship between people and their environment by planting trees, revitalizing farms, and offering loans to create economic opportunity.
Yesterday, I had the chance to actually interview Scott and ask him a few questions about the book. Besides providing an overview of Plant with Purpose and the book, Tending to Eden, we spend some talking about the devastation in Haiti, one of the places where they serve, the vicious cycle of poverty and environmental degradation, and the relationship between creation care and the gospel. The whole interview (~ 22 mins.) is worth the selection of the book that Scott reads toward the end.
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If you buy the book through the Amazon link on this page, a portion of the proceeds will directly benefit the rural poor.
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Book Review – Tending to Eden: Environmental Stewardship for God’s People
I was fortunate enough to receive a pre-release copy of Tending to Eden: Environmental Stewardship for God’s People by Scott C. Sabin from Judson Press.
Sabin is the Executive Director of Plant with Purpose, a Christian relief and development agency.
Christians have a responsibility to love and care for our environment as part of God’s creation and Sabin gets that for sure, but that’s not the genius of the book. The real beauty of this book comes in the author’s ability to explain to readers, with remarkable insight and simplicity, the inherent connection between caring for the environment and caring for the poor and oppressed. He does so by providing a relational framework for understanding the issues throughout the book. Through first-hand stories and lessons learned from years of experience, Sabin unmasks the naivete and ignorance of the brand of evangelicals for whom creation care is auxiliary to (their version of) the gospel. He suggests – at times more implicitly than explicitly, that all the challenges we face, as well as the solutions to those problems, are relational in nature
Throughout the book, the author tackles issues such as deforestation, sustainable agriculture, sanitation, grassroots enterprise, and climate change. In each case, his aim is to point out how our engagement with these issues has everything to do with out concern for those who are most globally at-risk.
For Sabin,
…without God, all the development and environmental restoration in the world will not bring transformation.
At the same time, he is able to articulate that transformation is not something other than God-infused labors of development and environmental restoration.
As someone who believes that one of the hallmarks of the missional church is listening to voices from the margins, I was struck by this comment from the author.
The idea that stewardship and conservation are part of a liberal agenda seems ludicrous in much of the developing world. I remember the shock on the face of our Dominican director when I tried to explain the suspicion with which many U.S. churches regarded the environmental aspects of our work. It was a horrifying thought to him that American Christians would be less than enthusiastic about caring for the earth. Many of our brothers and sisters in the developing world are way ahead of us in their understanding of stewardship, and there is much that we can learn from them.
For anyone wishing they could find a book that offers a global view of some of the most pressing environmental challenges without getting lost and confused in technical jargon, this book is an excellent resource. The book even features a discussion guide at the end for each chapter making it an excellent choice for groups interested in studying and talking about these issues together. Through raising our awareness and offering practical suggestions, Sabin offers readers a hope for the future that is rooted not in our ability to affect change, but in God’s invitation to join him in his mission of the reconciliation of all things.
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