Book Review: Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures

There are a number of books out on the market about the Emerging Church. There are ones written by Emergent Authors (McLaren, Padgitt, Jones, etc..) and then there are books about Emergent. Having read a wide range of both categories, none compares to Emerging Churches by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan K. Bolger in actually talking about, attempting to define and laying a framework for understand Emergent. One of the tricky aspects of talking about Emergent is that everybody wants to avoid labels and definitions. Emergent has deconstructed so much (Evangelicalism. Protestantism, Church Planting, Gen-X) that it is frustrating to even have a conversation about what is going on and how it was birthed. Gibbs and Bolger do a great job of tracing the emergence of these church not only in the US but also in the UK. There work on the history of the club culture churches on UK, such as NOS, was very enlightening and showed how emergent churches have very different looks depending on their surrounding cultures. They also spent a good amount of time looking at uniting theologies and common threads and characteristics of Emerging Churches. Their thorough work also made it quite obvious that it is way too early to know the impact of Emergent and the outcome. They talk about the story of Dieter Zander who went from Gen-X, to Church within a Church, to House Churches and now to Emergent. Is there a next for Dieter? Are all of these small intentional communities that aren’t strongly ecumenically tied going to grow beyond their intentions, are they going to prove sustainable? Are a generation of church planters who aren’t concerned about having their salaries paid by the church going to burn out? Will the conversation become a catalyst for some other theological shift from the struggles of modern people entering postmodernity? Those answers remain to be seen, but what is captured in this book is the organic beginnings of Emergent amongst many people, in very different places, amongst very different denominations and backgrounds. The story of Emergent isn’t finished but it has already had such and impact on the lives of so many people who felt ignored, marginalized, and burned out by the church. I am proud to be part of the conversation.