Book Review: Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church by D. A. Carson

Having negatively reviewed McClaren’s book, I would like to consider Carson’s chapter dealing with the strengths of the emergent church “conversation.” This is covered in Chapter 2, “Emerging Church Strengths in Reading the Times.”

“The emerging church movement honestly tries to read the culture in which we find ourselves and to think through the implications of such a reading for our witness, our grasp of theology, our churchmanship, even our self-understanding” (45). All we have to do is open our eyes and we can see that our world is at a fast pace changing. This changing culture affects us, for better or for worse.

“We have not always grasped how much the culture in which we are embedded shapes our understanding and outlook” (47). He illustrates his point by considering how our language shapes our understanding and ability to communicate (even our illustrations and jokes). “To understand particular forms of discourse, it is necessary to have more than a superficial knowledge of the language of the discourse. One requires some grasp of the culture in which the language is embedded in addition to the language itself” (48).

The emergent church pushes for authenticity. This in and of itself is a good thing. But Carson goes on to say that “[w]e might wonder whether corporate worship is any more ‘authentic’ just because there are candles or centers for journaling” (49). Clearly, emergent church leaders recognize the inauthenticity of much of the church growth/megachurch movement and their worship services.

But does introducing different external practices to our worship “style” really make our worship authentic? Carson sums up the issue well when he says, “The issue is not gimmicks or entertainment, carefully orchestrated to attract a crowd addicted to entertainment, but a profound sense of reality, of authentic knowledge of God, manifested in goodness and transformed living” (50). This is the sort of authenticity we should all strive for in our own lives and in the lives of our churches.

We must also exhibit a desire for and a growth in evangelizing outsiders—those with whom we have may little in common in. We must have an interest in “evangelizing people who are often overlooked by the church, or at very least largely untouched by the church’s witness” (52). There are new postmodern assumptions that make it difficult for many in our culture to connect with our traditional evangelicalism.

This is a thrust the emergent church enjoys exploring. Carson compares them to the “Jesus People” of the sixties and seventies, and to the early years of the seeker-sensitive movement. One sought to evangelize thousands of hippies who were flocking into cities, the other attempted to reach heavily-populated suburban areas that the church was making little success in. Whatever is to be said about the success of these movements, one good thing is that they were directed to people-groups which were largely unaffected by evangelism prior to these movements.

Carson ends the chapter by explaining that other churches are capable of displaying “all the strengths of the emerging church movement while avoiding most of its weaknesses” (56). This is the irony of the movement: whatever strengths the emerging church has, none are exclusively limited to that movement.