The Emerging Church by Dan Kimball

I've been crawling through this book for months and decided to start it again properly last night. It's all making much more sense now, especially when Ben's in the room and I can explain and question bits with him, makes it easier to take in.

The outline of it so far is how we're changing from a modern worldview to a postmodern worldview, and what impact that has on how we do church and how we evenagelise - how do we go about explaining the gospel to someone who believes that whatever makes you happy is good? It has a handy table summarising the ancient, medieval, modern and postmodern worldviews, with input from Brian McLaren's material in A New Kind of Christian.

The book hascomments from different authors and prominant Christians throughout. One that was particularly interesting was from Brian McLaren:

'We would be wise to really figure out what we and others mean when we use the term relativism. I find that few people really believe that all religions and viewpoints are equally valid, even though many people assert this, using these very words, and do so with vehemence. Sratch the paint and see what they really mean underneath is this: "I am desperately afraid of what happens when people become militant and arrogant about there beliefs and values, because htere is only a very fineline between militant and arrogant... and violent." Living in a world of terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and racial-ethnic-religious hatred, they feel that strong beliefs and values are dangerous. Rather than arguing about the absurdity of their statement (because saying that all religions areequally valid is, no doubt, absurd, we would be wiser to affirm their desire for peace and to encourage them to hold this belief or value in peace... strongly! We may gently be able to show them how Jesus takes this very course in the religious world of his day, and how the cross is a message to the world saying, "It is better to suffer violence for your beliefs than to inflict violence. This is the way of God's kingdom." '

All in all, it's an interesting read.