Don Kimball and The Jesus God

So, a few months ago I received the “page proofs” of The New Christians. That’s the final pass that an author has to make corrections, and, since the pages have already been typeset, only minor corrections can be made. That’s because the editors don’t want to repaginate the whole book. So, if you delete a sentence, you have to replace it with a sentence of similar length.

So here’s the truth: when I got to the end of chapter 2, I could almost write Andrew Jones’s review: “Tony does a nice job of writing the history of Emergent Village from his perspective, but he’s left out a lot of important stuff.” And TSK would have been right.

At the close of chapter 2, on page 59, I saw a bunch of unclaimed real estate: an empty half-page. So I wrote a CYA paragraph, basically saying that this is my perspective of the history of the emergent phenomenon in one chapter and that I’d left out a lot of important people and events, like Andrew Jones, Dan Kimball, Youth Specialties, and Scot McKnight.

So I wrote that paragraph and never saw it again, until the book arrived last week.

Well, between my typos and the editors, a couple funny mistakes made it into the final text.

Instead of Dan Kimball, it’s “Don Kimball.”

And instead of The Jesus Creed, it’s “The Jesus God.”

These will be changed in the the second printing, so the first printing might be some kind of funny collector’s edition!