I was given a book recently called “Faith Undone: The emerging church – a new reformation or an end-time deception” by Roger Oakland. This is an “anti” book. By that I mean its sole purpose is to tell you, with a good amount of hyperbole, about the many, many things the author is against. In this case, all of those things are related to what the author sees as the “Emerging Church” (EC).
I have actually seen this book before, and I did a deep skimming of it and saw it for what it is: a tabloid-style, pick-and-choose hatchet job on people who, while not executing perfectly, are valuable leaders in today’s North American church.
Books like this are basically supermarket tabloid gossip rags without the pictures. To put it more bluntly:
This is a strange sort of theological pornography for people who see their calling as hunting heresy by identifying leaders with theological weaknesses (some perceived, some real) and telling others about what they’ve found.
That itself is not an unbiblical pursuit, but taken to the level of out-of-context tabloid journalism it becomes sin.
This is not to say there is no truth in Oakland’s book. I can agree with and affirm many of the things in the book; the problem is that there is page after page after page of short quotes followed by commentary. There are even quotes of reporters who say something about somebody and these are taken as damning evidence against the person who is the target.
Rick Warren in particular (not surprisingly) takes a beating throughout the book. As a side note, in the way that Oakland perceives the EC, grouping Rick Warren in with the EC is a bit ridiculous, kind of like claiming that John Piper and Joel Osteen are kindred spirits and are going to be sharing a pulpit at some point in the near future. Rick Warren does big; the EC is mostly about regionalized, contextualized solutions. Rick Warren works on a global scale; the EC is about incarnational witness. The EC is (mostly) anti-megachurch; Rick Warren IS the megachurch.
But I’m with Ed Stetzer on this; we need both. We need big solutions and big churches and small solutions and small churches. Which is why in one sense the EC can be very broadly defined as every church that is not dying due to lack of activity.
Even Dan Kimball, who apparently committed the sin of asking non-believers what their perception of “church” is is mocked for daring to suggest that the American church might be able to have a more authentic testimony. Gasp. How can he say this?!?! I can’t think of any examples of American Christian leaders who have disgraced the name of Christ in very visible ways. This is the type of behavior, mostly on a smaller scale, that Kimball explores.
I’ll close with a quote from C.S. Lewis. In Mere Christianity (p. 118):
Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.
Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?
If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
I think that a book like this is exactly what the Lewis quote above is about.
