Posted 35 days ago
Spirit Farmer Reviews The New Conspirators
By Steve Lewis, review found at spiritfarmer.com
I’ve been looking forward to reading this book ever since I heard it was coming out. Tom Sine’s work has been widely cited for quite some time, and for good reason. He’s smart, encouraging, witty, engaging, and kicks your butt, all at the same time.
There are aspects of The New Conspirators that will seem redundant to folks who swim in the emerging church stream. You’ll get similar summaries of the emerging movement as you’ll find in Robert Webber’s “The Younger Evangelicals,” Bolger and Gibbs’ “Emerging Churches,” or Dan Kimball’s “The Emerging Church.” However, what this book gives you that the others don’t is a sense of how the emerging church thing fits in with other kinds of movements, that aren’t necessarily “emerging church” in nature.
Sine traces out four streams: emerging church, missional, mosaic, and monastic. Admittedly, some of the differences in categories are a little artificial, as there is significant overlap between several of them. But I think the separations actually helps the book a little in the sense that there are many people who could read this and think, “Oh, you mean, I can be engaged in new kinds of thinking and creative expressions of the way of Jesus, without being affiliated with the emerging church? That’s great – because I’ve heard those emerging folks are a little wacky.”
The areas of overlap are primarily concerning the missional, monastic, and emerging thrusts. But I really think that the inclusion of the mosaic element is what makes this book shine. Sine takes the time to discuss the exciting expressions of church that are taking place within the North American multicultural context, but he also highlights the movements taking place in the global South and East. That’s the part of this whole “conversation” that’s been missing for a long time. We in the West have (predictably) assumed that we’ve got it all figured out . . . meanwhile the Spirit is alive and moving in places we’ve barely heard of.
The New Conspirators serves as a really terrific primer and conversation starter for people who are new to a post-Christendom thought process, and it represents a good “next step” for those who are already in sync with that.
Bio – Steve Lewis work with college students at the University of Washington, he is the director inter::mission. Steve is working on a doctorate degree through George Fox Evangelical Seminary. He is a coffee lover, culture watcher, and like to run around with his dog, Maui.
Steve blogs at spiritfarmer.com
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