This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Culture, Podcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Pages:
Feeds
Categories:
- Administration (6)
- Apologetics (22)
- be a bad consumer (5)
- Church Growth (14)
- Culture (141)
- Devotional (24)
- Media (10)
- Misc. (32)
- Philosophy (19)
- Podcasts (22)
- Question (11)
- Scripture (23)
- Testimony (6)
- The Church (77)
- The Outlaw Church (3)
- Theology (83)
- Uncategorized (194)
Archives:
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
Meta:
They shouldn’t be…..
07.24.2008 by Tim Reed
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.
July 24th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
good observation
July 29th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
If you base your opinion of De Young/Kluck on the SBE interview you will have a warped opinion. The interview was horrible, and I generally adore SBE. His producer interrupted obnoxiously and continually, and I didn’t think either author got to dive deeply into their subject.
While I will agree with you that DeYoung, especially, is content with his theology, he is far from content with how it is being disseminated. And neither author is a baby boomer.
I read the book and found it informative and readable. I hope you’ll give it a shot, too. (And no, I’m not related to either guy – I just really appreciated the book.)
July 29th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Christy,
You make some fair points including your strongest point which is that the book isn’t the interview. I plan to read it, and I’ll do my best to give it a fair read.
The point I think is the strongest that I make is that these two guys who are claiming they should be emergent, really have no reason to be. The basic structure of baby boomer churches satisfy them with how they operate, but many people aren’t. The authors essentially came off as individuals who don’t understand the dissatisfaction in the least.
I also understand that they’re not baby boomers, but they are operating from a baby boomeresque worldview, at least theologically and relationally.
Anyway, I hope you’ll stick around for when I do a book review to keep my opinions a bit kosher ;).