Endorsements of TNC

February 18, 2008 By Tony Jones

“No one is better placed than Tony Jones to offer an insider’s view of the emergent conversation in the United States. His clear and engaging writing style, his wide-ranging and incisive mind, and his extensive personal involvement make him the ideal person to tell this story and invite others to be part of it. The New Christians is instructive, inspiring, enjoyable, and a milestone in the development of this important young phenomenon.” ─Brian McLaren, author and speaker (brianmclaren.net)

“This is an insider’s journal of the journey called emergent Christianity, and it is the book I have been looking for. If you want to know what emergent Christianity is, buy this book, read it, talk about it and then give it to someone else. But don’t leave it around, someone will swipe it!” ─Scot McKnight is the Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies North Park University, author of A Community Called Atonement, and an avid blogger ( www.jesuscreed.org)

“There is indeed new life arising from the compost of Christendom. Tony’s book lets us see it, smell it, and touch it. The challenge with a book like this is neither to be overcome by the smell of the poop, nor stupified by the beauty of a flower — more than anything we must see this book as an invitation to get our hands dirty, break a sweat, get messy outside the air-conditioned walls of comfort, and not just read more books on gardening.” ─Shane Claiborne, author, activist and recovering sinner

“Lots of people have questions about just what this Emergent Church thing is all about. Tony Jones has the answer for them here. A great starting point for understanding a significant movement.” ─Christian Smith, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame and author of Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers

“The New Christians shows how the influence of Jesus of Nazareth is moving among a new generation hungry for something real and desperate to move beyond simplistic polarities inherited from the past. Tony Jones stands at the crossroads of theology, philosophy, and culture, tackling the issues facing this ’emergent’ generation with the depth, humility and grace, only a sojourner intimately familiar with the journey could provide.─Jim Wallis, Author of God’s Politics; President of Sojourners/Call to Renewal.

“Tony Jones pulls no punches in calling for new ways of being church–and after reading this book I have a few bruises to show for it! But it was well worth the scuffle. This is a challenging and engaging call to think new thoughts about what it means to be faithful to the Gospel in our present context.”─Richard J. Mouw, President and Professor of Christian Philosophy, Fuller Theological Seminary

“In the tradition of all great apologists, Jones has written both a reasoned explication and a deeply personal explanation of emergent Christianity. Every thinking Christian should read this book either for the explication or the explanation. Wise ones will read it for both.”─Phyllis Tickle, compiler, The Divine Hours

“I devoured this book! Like A New Kind of Christian gave words to the experiences and thoughts of so many, early in this decade, The New Christians provides language, theology and a nudge toward a path out of our bi-polar morass of left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative, mainline vs. evangelical. It cuts sideways across all the rhetoric, entrenchment and warfare-positioning of modern-day Christianity. I’m confident Tony’s book will provide definition for many, helpful disequilibration for others, and best of all new hope for those who cannot (or refuse to) continue trudging numbly along the cattle paths of the American church.”─Mark Oestreicher, president, Youth Specialties

“What Tony Jones has done in this book is to deliver a gift. His insight, perspective and prophetic story telling will serve many in finding hope in God’s activity among the New Christians. The New Christians is the story of alive-and-well faith in our day. This book will encourage those inside and outside emerging church circles to understand why so many people find a Christianity worth believing in this dynamic movement.”─Doug Pagitt, author of A Christianity Worth

The Emergent Church, which Tony Jones describes for us in this book, must be taken seriously. Offering both hope and challenges for the rest of us, this postmodern version of Christianity will certainly change the face of the religious landscape.”─Tony Campolo, Eastern University

“No one I know is better equipped than Tony Jones to write an insider’s history of emergent churches. Tony brings to his work deep, intuitive first-hand observation. His bright intellect and inherent goodness and fair-mindedness make him an especially appropriate advocate and critic. The New Christians is a joy to read. It both challenged and inspired me. It made me miss old friends and caused me to re-cherish Emergent’s vision ‘to follow God in the Way of Jesus.'”─Todd Hunter, National Director, Alpha USA, and former President, Vineyard Churches USA

“Tony Jones relentlessly and rightly challenges us to examine what Christianity means in our historical context. The more you might have questions or possible disagreements with Tony or Emergent ideas, the more you need to read The New Christians.”─Bruce Ellis Benson, Professor of Philosophy, Wheaton College

“This is the book to read to get the actual insider’s view of all things emergent.”─Dan Kimball, author They Like Jesus but not the Church

“There is simply no way to think about the future of the church without knowing of the emergent journey. Tony will give you an all-access tour from the inside.”—John Ortberg, author and pastor, Menlo Park Presbyterian Church

“Reading these words you feel things bursting back to life inside of you. It is some kind of re-enlightenment; an awakening in the most noble and holistic sense of the word, a thing coming to take hold. Tony’s writing is generous and clear.”—David Crowder, singer, songwriter, leader of the David Crowder Band

BUY The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier

About

January 1, 2006 By Tony Jones

6 Comments

Tony is the author of The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier and is theologian-in-residence at Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis. A doctoral fellow in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, he is the author of many books on Christian ministry and spirituality, including and The Sacred Way: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Life, and he is a sought after speaker and consultant in the areas of emerging church, postmodernism, and Christian spirituality. Tony has three children and lives in Edina, Minnesota. (more…)

What Is Practical Theology? Part I

February 23, 2005 By Tony Jones

I do get asked on occasion, “What is practical theology?” Lots of people are pretty sure they know what systematic, dogmatic, and biblical theology are, but less are sure exactly what practical theology is.

At Princeton Theological Seminary, Dr. Richard Osmer has developed a model of doing practical theology that is extremely helpful in this regard, so I’ll describe it over the course of a few posts. His is what a philosopher would call a “wide, reflective equilibrium model” — that is, he’s not trying to reinvent the wheel but to describe the field of practical theology as it currently stands.

But before that, a little history: the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher “invented” practical theology in the 18th century. At the time, the German research university model was being born — that’s what all of our higher education now is reflecting, for better and worse — and the work of theology was being broken up into what is called the “theological encyclopedia.” The volumes in that encyclopedia were 1) biblical studies, 2) systematic theology, and 3) church history. Schleiermacher proposed that a fourth discipline be added, called “practical theology,” that would develop “rules of art” for Christian life and ministry.

Over the course of three hundred years, however, practical theology devolved into, basically, application of the findings of the other three disciplines. That is, you’d take all your weighty courses in seminary from the other three, then you’d get a class on preaching or Christian education or pastoral counseling that was basically a “nuts and bolts” class.

Since the middle of the 20th century, there has been a renaissance in practical theology, spurred on by the University of Chicago Divinity School, Princeton, Emory, and several European universities. During this time, practical theologians have staked their claim as doing constructive theology, not merely applying the findings of other fields of study. What sets practical theology apart from the other three disciplines in theological education (and what I find most compelling) is that it’s grounded theological reflection. In other words, practical theologians attempt to deal with issues that are a part of life in the world, not to solve abstract theoretical problems.

So here’s a working definition: practical theology is theological reflection that is grounded in the life of the church, society, and the individual and that both critically recovers the theology of the past and constructively develops theology for the future.

Without Author|ity 2: Clearing the Table

November 13, 2004 By Tony Jones

Now I’ll try to respond to some of the issues raised in the comments following my rant. I’ll deal with these fairly briefly, because I don’t consider them the substantive issue at hand — we’ll deal with that once we’ve cleared the table.

1) To those who say there is no emerging church:

Then why do you keep blogging about it? Your statements of non-existence do not in any way really refute the existence of these communities of faith. That’s a nice way to try and preempt some fruitful conversation about the future of the church, but it simply doesn’t work. Nihilism is so 19th century.

2) To those who say emerging church is just a evangelical-fundamentalist phenomenon:

a) To even use the term “evangelical” is highly problematic. Sociologists as prominent as Robert Wuthnow and Christian Smith, and a polling organization like Gallup dramatically disagree on what constitutes “evangelical.” Smith says evangelicals are 7% of the U.S. population, Gallup says they’re 38%. Who are evangelicals?

b) That’s just the sociological; it’s more problematic when you get theological. Stan Grenz wrote a book in 2000 called Renewing the Center, and just days ago a group of more conservative scholars came out with their response (read: attack), Reclaiming the Center. Each is battling over who gets to use the term “evangelical.” What is evangelicalism? Who gets to define it?

c) To those who conflate evangelicals and fundamentalists by accusing emergent of being “evangelical-fundamentalist” (or using the pithy but ultimately meaningless term “fundagelical”), you’re making an even bigger mistake. Friendships were broken, books were written, and new seminaries and magazines were launched in the middle of the 20th century in an effort to differentiate evangelicalism from fundamentalism (see, for instance, George Marsden’s excellent history of Fuller Seminary, Reforming Fundamentalism; see also Mark Noll’s The Rise of Evangelicalism for an excellent account of the origins of the word “evangelical”). The conflation of the two in popular parlance is the result of journalistic haste and laxity.

d) QED, it is virtually meaningless to accuse someone or some group of being evangelical.

3) To those who accuse us of using the machinery of evangelical publishing to disseminate our work:

Can you believe that Charles Wesley had his hymns published? What a sellout! What was Martin Luther thinking to let people reprint his treatises on a moveable type press? Loser! And how about all those bloggers? Don’t they know that much of the technology of the Internet has been pioneered by pornographers!?!

4) To those who think that I am inconsistent with the inclusive nature of Emergent:

While, at first glance, it may seem that I am standing in contradiction to Brian McLaren’s recent Emergent/C email and to Jason Clark and Emergent-UK’s “Inclusive Church” event, in fact I am not. All of us in Emergent want to 1) stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us (more on this in a coming post), and 2) be open and inclusive to those from many (all?) Christian theological traditions. However, this does not mean that we include or embrace sinful and dysfunctional ecclesiastical/denominational structures. You’d better go back and reread Brian’s A Generous Orthodoxy, for he promotes the broad theological heritage of Christianity, not the many super-structures that have grown like weeds around those theologies.

5) To those who say that it’s just about Jesus and we should quit arguing about theology, philosophy and the church:

The philosophy that “It’s just about loving Jesus — let’s all just go out and serve the poor” is just that, a philosophy. More importantly, it’s a theology, and the problem is, it’s a very reductionistic theology. The idea that one can take two thousand pages of holy scripture and two thousand years of interpretation and Christian action and boil it down to “just” this or “just” that is offensive to the gospel and to those saints who spent their lives trying to better understand and live out the gospel. Let’s all stop pretending that Christianity is simple. God gave us minds capable of incredible things, so ideas matter.

6) To those who promote leaving the church altogether:

By doing so, you have just separated yourself from orthodox, biblical Christianity.