book review vol. four; part two; section a

If you can remember back all the way to the post before last (thiiiink... or scroll down), I threw out some thoughts about the Emerging Church Movement and told you that I'd give you a little more info soon. Well good news, soon has come. I'm in the delightful process of reading this book shown above, "Confessions of a Reformission Rev.: hard lessons from an emerging missional church." It's a long title with at least three questionable terms. "Reformission" (this isn't a typo) is a word that Driscoll coined and the idea is basically taking the traditional missionary mindset and applying it to the culture in which we live. I find "missional" and "reformission" to be synonymous, and I don't think Driscoll would disagree. The third word that ought to catch your eye is "emerging."

I feel like I've learned more about the Emerging Church Movement from the intro to this book than I did from reading the entire book from McLaren ("A New Kind of Christian" - below). Mark Driscoll says in his book that he used to be closely associated with the emergent church but had to distance himself do to theological differences. He makes a distinction between the emerging church and the emergent church. Note the differences in the suffixes. The emergent movement is technically under the banner of emerging, but seems to be the more theologically liberal sect. In other words, all things emerging (as far as I see it right now) are not bad or false teachings. However, as with any teachings, we must be solid in knowing what we believe so as to discern what is true and what isn't. That said, here is what Driscoll says that helped me a lot. Note: He's kind of sarcastic... be warned. (p. 22, Zondervan, Copyright 2006, other legal stuff...)

"I am particularly concerned, however, with some growing trends among some people: the rejection of Jesus' death on the cross as a penal substitute for our sins; resistance to openly denouncing homosexual acts as sinful; the questioning of a literal eternal torment in hell, which is denial that holds up only until, in an ironic bummer, you die and find yourself in hell; the rejection of God's sovereignty over and knowledge of the future, as if God were a junior-college professor who knows only bits and pieces of trivia; the rejection of biblically defined gender roles, thereby contributing to the 'mantropy' epidemic among young guys now fretting over the best kind of looffah for their skin type and the number of women in the military dying to save their Bed, Bath and Beyond from terrorist attacks; and the rejection of biblical names for God, such as Father, which is essentially apologizing before the unbelieving world for the prayer life of the flamboyantly heterosexual Jesus, who uttered the horrendously politically incorrect 'Our Father' without ever having the decency to apologize for being a misogynist patriarchal meanie."

So there's that. I liked it, I hope you like it. Maybe it will be helpful for you. If nothing else I hope you at least giggled or smiled or something. This has been a very long post. Time for some very long (and numerous?) comments. Go!