Better Not Emergent

A new book Why We're Not Emergent (by Two Guys Who Should Be) is a great critique of the dangers of the Emergent movement and explains why it's even not necessary to evangelize and attract Millennials to church.  They explain why objective, propositional Truth (not just lower-case t truth) can be taught and preached and still communicate with Gen-Xers.  Both speak from their practical ministry experience.

You can be young, passionate about Jesus Christ, surrounded by diversity, engaged in a postmodern world, reared in evangelicalism and not be an emergent Christian. In fact, I want to argue that it would be better if you weren’t.

There's a great video interview with the authors on the right margin of the book site.

And here are some great endorsements of the book from people I highly respect.

Two thoughtful young guys with different styles, Kevin DeYoung (the pastor-theologian) and Ted Kluck (the journalist), have teamed up to write Why We’re Not Emergent. The result is a fair-minded, biblically grounded, insightful book. It’s clear that DeYoung and Kluck are not motivated by the desire to criticize, but rather by their love of the church as the body of Christ. This is now the first book I’d give someone who asks the question, “What is the emerging church?” Highly recommended!

~ Justin Taylor
Project Director, ESV Study Bible; blogger (Between Two Worlds)

This book is a pleasure to read, not least because it pricks so many pretensions. While it deals with an important subject, it manages to sustain a breezy style that draws you in. The subtitle tells you the stance of the authors: the emerging church movement, which taught an entire generation to rebel, is now old enough to find growing numbers of people learning to rebel against the rebellion.

~ D. A. Carson
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Why We’re Not Emergent crashes into the emerging conversation in a voice which hears “them” and talks back! This is a book we’ve been waiting for. With careful observation, faithful handling of Scripture, and an eye for the ironic and absurd, DeYoung and Kluck have given us a feel for what attracts some to emerging churches and thoughts about why that’s sometimes a very bad thing. Buy and read this book. You’ll enjoy it. And it could help you and the people you’ll tell about it.

~ Mark Dever
Pastor, Capitol Hill Baptist Church
Washington, DC

Comments

[Stephen McConnell]

Looking forward to reading this.

[Kevin Winters]

Why can't Evangelicals actually read the 'patron Saints' of so-called postmodernism--Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Nietzsche-- and the best literature on their thought and then criticize the Emergent Church for getting them wrong, which bad readings of their works is the cause of most of the philosophical problems with the movement? Put another way, why must Evangelicals who want to be respected as philosophically apt accept the bad readings of the Emergent Church and so-called postmodernism of the big philosophical names dropped as supposed support of Emergent or postmodern ideas? Just a question I continue to have as I read through what is supposed to be the best Evangelical works against so-called postmodernism...