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Here is my essay for a new book titled "The Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives." It just came out from Zondervan and was edited by Leonard Sweet.
Its an interesting story. The original concept was "...Four Perspectives," and those perspectives had to do with how the church presents itself to the culture: should we change, or preserve, our message? should we change, or preserve, our method?
They wanted me to take the corner "preserve both" but I kept making a ruckus. I said I didn't agree with the whole concept. I didn't define either "church" or "culture" the way they do. What's more, I would want to call people to "preserve both" by returning to early-church practice, which would mean a *radical* change compared to where they were coming from. I couldn't promise to stay in my assigned corner of the grid. Despite all this troublemaking they still wanted me in the book, and so they ended up bringing in a fifth author to cover my corner, and I did my own thing.
I'll just paste in the URL because the essay is long:
I'm very pleased with this essay; my husband says its one of the best things I've ever written, so I hope you'll take a look. I think it will pull you right in because I use an unusual format.
The other authors are Brian McLaren, Andy Crouch, Erwin Raphael McManus, and Michael Horton. We all met in San Jose about a year ago for a day of discussion, and the book is full of photos. It's a fun book. Each of us read and commented on each others' essays, and in the published versions these comments appear in gray print in parentheses in the course of the text. It's a little more obtrusive than footnotes, so I like this version on my site better since it's intrusion-free. If you buy the book you'll get it all, though.
Each author also wrote a response to all the comments, and mine is also posted on my website. Here's teh response essay, which is much shorter:
I'm afraid that Zondervan won't allow anyone to reprint these, but they are probably too long for most purposes anyway. But feel free to forward this post and the URLs.
best, F
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Frederica Mathewes-Green www.frederica.com |
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