Thursday, January 20, 2005

Vintage Christianity for New Generations

Tab lent me this book while we were in Warrnambool, and we both think that it would be really good for explaining what the emerging church is about to people who want to keep doing church in the modern paradigm (there's still a lot of moderns out there) but also want to understand what we're doing. In the first part of the book, Dan Kimball explains why we need to be the church differently, and the second part explores different ways of doing stuff like church services, discipleship, evangelism, prayer, et cetera.
But while I think this book would be real good for modern Christians who want to understand, I think a lot of what Kimball talks about is still very modern. For example, all of the churches he talks about at length throughout the book still meet in special church builings, and it appears that seekers still have to come to them. (This might be because the modern church is still doing reasonably well in the US, in comparison to Australia and Europe.) For people who are interested in becoming more involved in the emerging church, I think that The Shaping of Things to Come is a much better starting point.

2 comments:

Tab said...

Yes, I agree with that Chris, It's still very structured,lead by a specific person, and is definatly attractional. I still think that it is a good bridge for those modern people, who want to understand but have little concept of post modinity. I think over all it is better at explaining post-modinity, than it is in decribing the EC. but it still has much merit. I would definatly recomend Shaping of things to Come to most people.

Christop said...

Yeah. Part 1 is the go, Part 2 probably isn't.