BÜX: THE YOUNGER EVANGELICALS.

Over the past few years, I've become more educated on what is being called the "emerging" Church. I want to say off the bat that I'm woefully ignorant of what is really going on in "emerging" churches around the world, but from what I have read in a few books and experienced through conversations with good friends and visiting churches that label themselves as emerging (like my buddy Trevor's church, Risen), I have found myself drawn to the honesty, authenticity, and commitment to living and loving in the way of Jesus exhibited in them. A few years ago, I read A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren, and although I really appreciated his honesty, transparency, and his heart for the purity and mission of the church in the world, his bitter criticism made it hard for me to take him seriously. In contrast, I found Robert Webber's The Younger Evangelicals to be a winsome and hopeful picture of how the Holy Spirit is moving across continents and denominations to call the Church to a renewal of heart in our world.

To avoid butchering Webber's analysis of how "The Younger Evangelicals" are making their own unique contribution to Christ's Church, I'll let him speak for himself:

"...the leadership of the younger evangelical will be distinctly different than that of the twentieth-century evangelical. It will be biblically informed by the Missio Dei to rescue the entire created order; it will be theological, rooted in the trinitarian and christological consciousness of the ancient creed; it will be spiritual, reflecting the purposes of God to restore the fullness of his image in us and to bring all creation to its redemption and reconciliation to God; and it will be conscious in its action in and to the world of the new cultural situation in which we live, taking into consideration the new realities of the twenty-first century." (p. 243)

If that was a bunch of gibberish for you, then ignore this post. But if you know a few of those longer words, you'll see that Webber has the ability and the desire to portray clearly how younger evangelicals are different from the predecessors, including Pragmatic and Traditional evangelicals, which he sucessfully does in a way that both encourages and challenges.

If you've got a little time and you want to have a better understanding of some of the hopeful and exciting strands that are emerging in the evangelical church, I found Webber's work to be academic but approachable. He incorporates a lot of interviews with "younger evangelicals," he looks at a few examples of churches which exemplify his findings, and there's even an essay by Rob Bell on preaching inside. His words on the value of the arts in the emerging church has struck a chord in me, being a musician, and having read his overview of the world of the "younger evangelicals," I feel more hopeful and expectant of the amazing work that God is continuing to do in our radically broken world through us, his people. See you soon.