Church Voices

I recently listened to the episode of Steve Brown Etc that included an interview with the authors of the book Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be).

Please note, this is not a book review, I have not yet read the book, but plan to at some point, this is instead a comment about the interview itself.

What I came away with in this interview is that these two guys, contrary to their book’s title, shouldn’t be emergent/emerging/post-evangelical, or anything other than a couple of guys who are Baby Boomer style, American Protestants in the Reformed tradition. They’re plenty happy and content with the culture, and theology of the tradition they grew up in. Which is fine. I’m happy for them and hope they continue to serve and bless their brothers, sisters and neighbors in their church and community.

But the reality is that there’s a large group of people who find the culture and theology of boomer style churches unsatisfactory to the point that its nearly incoherent (also, its another post for another day, but emerging/emergent churches/individuals are often hard to get a grasp on because its a group of disparate people who have in common very little other than the incoherency of boomer churches).

Though I haven’t read the book yet, I don’t have high hopes for it based on this interview because the authors come off as not understanding how their particular tradition has failed many, many people, especially when they seem to think what they’re writing about is a generation gap.

On a side note, Steve Brown’s program is excellent, even when you might disagree with him.