The New Christians by Tony Jones.

Tony Jones has a new book coming out in March 2008. Tony was gracious enough to send me an advanced reader’s copy (in advance of an upcoming podcast) and I devoured it in 3 sittings. While I’m prone to hyper-active spurts of exaggeration, in this particular instance I’m afraid I’ll understate things. I think The New Christians is the most important book since A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren.

I’m really not prone to kissing someone’s butt (unless of course it’s this guy’s), but I was literally engrossed in this book from the first page until the last. I raced through it because I couldn’t put it down. I don’t know if it’s because I’m in sort of a sensitive/soft place about possibly entering back into an intentional community of people but I was actually inspired to want to go out and be a part of creating a space again for a gathered community.

The book was part personal memoir, part history, part theological framework, and part travelogue. At times it felt like I was listening to a father-type figure reflecting back on his life and looking forward to the life ahead. And at other times it felt like was truly reading a letter from a pioneer in some far away land reporting back the signs of life that he was discovering.

The strongest portion of the book are the metaphors that Tony develops to articulate this nexus and transition in culture that we are experiencing. He waxed poetic with metaphors about phone booths, chickens, and wikis.

Far from being soft, Tony talks at length in deep theological terms about the trinity, the art of hermeneutics, and politics. But despite wading into these heady theological waters, these topics get addressed and explained simply and honestly. But Tony is doing more than trying to articulate what Emergent’s “is” . Instead he is building a framework for an entirely new/old/third way of doing Christianity. I have a suspicion that in the same way Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian was so instrumental in helping people put their frustrations in to words, that The New Christians will be instrumental in helping people put their hope into action.

I don’t think this is a book that could have been written 7 years ago like A New Kind of Christian. ANKOC helped many people articulate what they were feeling. Which was a beautiful and freeing thing for many people. But it also left many of us (and maybe it’s just me) on the outside looking in, feeling at times like we were on an island, albeit joined by a few of our friends.

Tony’s book has the potential to be one of the final (or first) steps towards many of us reclaiming our role as leaders and visionaries by giving us some sort of closure for the past few years and some sort of hope for the years ahead.

Plus any book that calls Al Mohler and Paige Patterson “bishops” on page 6 is solid by my definition of pwnage. To be fair, he also pushes back on Marcus Borg and John Piper to name a few. Tony appears way more moderate than the “heretic” label that his critics want to put on him.

My only complaint is that I didn’t get a G.I. Joe action figure to accompany the cute little figure on the cover.

DISCLAIMER: I know my review may appear as quite biased. Partly because I consider Tony a friend (albeit an extended one) and I consider myself thorougly emergent (although I understand the hang-ups with labels). This is an understandable assumption. However, I didn’t write a glowing review because of my appreciation for Tony or Emergent. I wrote the glowing review because it’s a freaking good book. And if you’re a critic of Emergent (you know who you are) then I can’t think of another book that would be my greatest hope to get you to give us the benefit of the doubt more than The New Christians.