Review: Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches

Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches
Five Perspectives
Robert E. Webber

You know you've been reading a book too long when your Facebook virtual bookshelf sends you an email to ask whether you are really still reading the book. I kid you not.

This is a good book, and it does pretty much what the title says. Each of five thinkers - or, more accurately, pastors - writes an essay on what they and their respective churches believe, and then each of the others writes a critique/commentary/feedback.

The perspectives come from quite a broad range: from Driscoll (who seems to have taken on the role lately of the emerging church's favourite bogeyman) who stridently holds to a traditional and conventional reformed theology, through to Ward, whom ... I find it much harder to sum up (but whose communitarian approach to theology is summed up by the fact that her chapter includes many excerpts from her group's blog). I liked them all.

Of course, for a group of people who tend to stress the need to do theology and practice hand-in-hand, to concentrate only on belief is perhaps artificial: and several of the contributors comment upon this. It leads Driscoll to give us a kind of mini-systematic-theology, with a couple of hundred proof texts. Some of the others concentrate on their distinctives, leading their peers to ask whether this is a real summary of belief. But if there had been too rigid a template, the result would have been turgid, whereas the free-form for each chapter allows its author's individual character to come through.

The authors are all American, so some of their perspective fails to connect for me: but that's reasonable enough. An internationally-drawn volume would be quite a different proposition. You could always suggest other people to throw into the mix, but if you want to get the beginning of a perspective of where these kind of writers are coming from -and what they think of one another - this is a good place to start.

There is something slightly cute and cuddly about the contributors: keen to emphasise the spirit of loving correction/discussion they go to some lengths to tell us how much they respect each other, have bathed one another's children, and so on. I could have done with a little less of this, but in a sense it is a nice touch: if one is to emphasise that emerging theology is inherently relational, how better to do so than by underlining the strength of the relationships among the authors.