Tony Jones on The New Christians
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008Tony Jones has published “The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier”, an insider set of observations on the Emergent movement in the USA. (Jossey Bass)
Tony is the national coordinator of Emergent Village and is working on a doctorate in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He’s known for his earlier books, Postmodern Youth Ministry and The Sacred Way: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Life.
Leaving the Old Country
I found the first chapter a bit hard going, to tell the truth. Tony sets out to explain why there’s a need for an alternative to the mainline denominations (Episcopalian, United Methodist, United Church of Christ and Presbyterian), and Evangelical protestantism (the loosely aligned born again Christians who tend towards literal interpretation of the Bible, emphasise personal conversion to Christ). No mention of Catholics here. Maybe the USA is more polarised than here downunder but my experience of the Uniting Church in Australia and Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand is that the tension between left and right is found within those denominations. In smaller countries there’s more likelihood that people will have attended conferences together, perhaps trained together at Bible College, or served together in an interdenominational organisation such as Scripture Union.
I appreciate Tony’s first two ‘dispatches’ from the Emergent Frontier:
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.
Dispatch 2: Emergents reject the politics and theologies of left versus right. Seeing both sides as a remnant of modernity, they look forward to a more complex reality.
I’m reminded of the behaviour of my third child as a toddler. The older two had the seating arranged for television. Kristen found that she had to push them to the left and to the right to get a seat in the middle.
The reality is that our formative heritage biases us, despite our discomfort with blanket generalisation. And so the “liberals” throughout the book are described by Tony (who comes from a Congregational background) as people who are all required to conform to a politically correct orthodoxy combined with conservative traditional liturgical worship. Although I’m living a long way away, I don’t believe that the mainline churches can be summarised through the writings of authors such as Marcus Borg or Stanley Hauerwas.
I did enjoy the inclusion of the Jon Stewart episode on CNN’s Crossfire show - which I’ve written up on my Propaganda blog.
After Objectivity: Beautiful Truth
One of the common critiques of the Emerging Church movement is the perception that these postmodernists have rejected the concept of truth. Tony responds by saying that Emergents embrace the whole Bible, the glory and the pathos. Emergents believe that truth, like God, cannot be definitively articulated by finite human beings. Emergents embrace paradox, especially those that are core components of the Christian story.
I enjoyed Tony’s personal reflections on the art of umpiring baseball and the difficulty of ‘calling’ and ‘naming’ what is true. I appreciated his consideration of the story of Jepthah’s sacrifice of his daughter. It’s a messy situation that calls us to consider our responsibility for our actions and God’s presence in great suffering. I like what Tony has to say about the way in which Christians qualify the word ‘truth’ with ‘absolute’ and other such adjectives. What Tony’s saying here resounds with my experience of attending a range of congregations in which the
Inside the Emergent Church
There are some great stories told here, with honesty. We’re taken behind the scenes at Jacob’s Well in Kansas City, Missouri, Journey in Dallas, Texas, Church of the Apostles in Seattle, Washington, and Solomon’s Porch in South Minneapolis.
Tony introduces us to the diversity found in these groups, the openness to newcomers, the commitment to dialogue, experimentation, and also the vulnerability found in small start up groups. Will they last? Does it matter? Will these groups get past the tentative dialogue stages and harden into something more definable such as Mars Hill Church (with Mark Driscoll) in Seattle?
Wikichurch
This is a brilliant analogy for the way any movement forms. Tony talks about the Emergent belief that church should function more like an open-source network and less like a heirarchy or bureacracy. He writes about attempts to move out of the clergy-dominated meeting structures found in most churches and develop an ‘Open Access’ approach to dialogue.
Tony points to the way Wikipedia trusts the collective editorial community to weed out abberations or rogue entries. In the same way he beloieves that the collected people of God, in community with the Spirit, will stay on track and engage with God’s work in the world. Two painful test cases are the issues of homosexuality and women in ministry. Already Mark Driscoll has parted ways with the Emergent crowd, now that it is clear that the Emergent crowd disagree with his hardline approaches.
Tony writes about the need for sustainability in response to criticism that the Emergent churches are not growing fast enough or making enough disciples. He suggests that the messiness of new startup groups can be a good alternative to highly ‘efficient’ congregations in which people burn out or are dominated by egomaniac pastors. Fear of failure is what stops movements like this starting or progressing.
Bloggers, leaders, writers mentioned in The New Christians include Postmodern Negro, Sivin Kit, Brad Cecil, Brian McLaren, Mark Driscoll, Doug Pagitt, Jonny Baker, Jason Clark, Scot McKnight, Andrew Jones (Tall Skinny Kiwi), Dan Kimball, (typo on page 59!), Len Sweet, Karen Ward.
Tony’s epilogue suggests that Emergent Christians are a bit like the feral camels in Australia, once domesticated, but now out in the wilderness pushing over fences, occasionally returning to bother the establishment.
Thumbs up Tony!
If you’d like to discuss the book further join the Facebook Group, administered by Sue McMahon-Jones and Doug Pagitt.
Tags: Emergent, Emerging Church, Reading, Tony Jones
This post-apocalyptic world combines elements of technology from today with a loss of standards of living. It’s hot in the UK - so hot that people have virtually given up wearing clothes. Modesty is a thing of the past. Turning up at a physical work space is a novelty. Trafford works for the government, in NatDat, finding new kinds of ‘degrees of separation’ between members of the population. 
I’m writing a paper on the impact of modernism on doctrines of atonement and making my way through a few texts. 
