UPDATE: Good review at A-Team Blog
(ORIGINAL POST) I read a GREAT book in the bath this morning: The Out of Bounds Church?: Learning to Create a Community of Faith in a Culture of Change, by Steve Taylor of Emergent Kiwi Blog. Steve is a baptist pastor, and has completed a PhD in postmodern worship, and he has a really bad haircut . . . at least he did when i first met him in Seattle in 1999. His hair was frizzy and all over the place. He got up at our Young Leaders Conference and added some Native American touches to our worship which was very well done, tasteful, and surprising, considering he is a New Zealander and it should have been the Americans who were adding redemptive analogies from their own culture rather than a foreigner. But Steve is a missiologist and integrates native theology in his homeland also.
Steve has written the BEST book on emerging church that i have ever held in my hands. I am a little biased – he has some of my thoughts in the columns and He gives attention to many of my own pet teachings about emerging church such as pilgrimage, postmodern monasteries, house church, new media theory, worship in navigable space and DJ’ing as an analogy of creative re:mixing of culture in a postmodern world. He also references writers who’s books are on my shelf such as Lev Manovich and Slavoj Zizek. It looks like Steve has set me up for a great review, but the fact is, Steve has written an excellent resource, zooming in on the global emerging church from a missional viewpoint with practical, Biblical and philosophical grounding asto why people are responding to the gospel in today’s complex, fragmented world.
The Skinny? This is a book to buy, read, discuss, and give to critics. No doubt.Steve has set up a The Out of Bounds Book Blog to go with his book. Well done, O Short Skinny Kiwi!!
OK OK you convinced me! I’m ordering the book ’cause if you say it’s the best, then TSK, it must be the best! And hey! Why waste time on sub-standard stuff! Seriously, it sounds like a great read.
you must have long baths….
the only disappointment with this review is the way it continues the hair fascination trend started by Andy Crouch in Christianity Today. 🙂
Great book, I’ve enjoyed it as well. It’s great to get another view–you Kiwis have a unique way of thinking.
yes, but very much the same as each other
i like steves book because he thinks like me and reads the stuff i read
but there is another side of me that would like to be challenged by a very different way of thinking, and Steves book, alhtough excellent, did not provoke me to think differently.
Makes sense-I think much of what I get from your blog is in a similar vein as Steve’s book–which challenges me, coming from a somewhat modern-American-church-background. So, what is beyond–Steve’s book for you; what ways would you like to be challenged? Or, what books are bringing to light things beyond your Kiwi thoughts? Just curious…
good question
i am fascinated by the current thinking from French philosophers on gift economy . . . but i dont read French so i have to find fragments on the internet.
a good book on economics and spirituality just came out by my friend Wolfgang Simson . . . but that is only in German
dang . . . we are living in the wrong language!
hey hey dude… i just read the book too and posted a chapter by chapter review…
i enjoyed it but I’m still wanting more, I versed some of the things I’m still wanting to discuss but ther’s an untangible something else that I’d like to explore…
d