Ancient-Future Community

Emerging Resources

The Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives, ed. Leonard Sweet (Zondervan, 2003) might be the best place to begin for anyone needing an introduction to the emerging phenomenon. Talbot professors Gary McIntosh and Garry DeWeese have review essays of this book in Christian Education Journal 2:2 (2005) (http://www.biola.edu/cej/freearticles).

Books by Brian McLaren are must-reads for anyone interested in the emerging church. Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to give a theological basis to the movement is his A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/ Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN (Zondervan, 2004).

Talbot philosophy professor R. Douglas Geivett has a short review of McLaren’s book at http://www.talbot.edu/academics/programs/ma_phil/ downloads/newsletters/spring06.pdf.

Talbot grad and Biola professor (Christian Apologetics) R. Scott Smith identifies some of the more troubling aspects of a postmodern view of truth advocated by McLaren and others: Truth and the New Kind of Christian: The Emerging Effect of Postmodernism in the Church (Crossway, 2005).

New Testament scholar D. A. Carson is critical of the theological weakness of the movement: Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications (Zondervan, 2005).

Of course the web is full of sites both promoting and critiquing the emerging movement, but—and this probably doesn’t need to be said— exercise healthy skepticism (critical judgment, if you prefer) when reading anything on the web!