God In Your Face

I don't often recommend books on this blog, simply because I'm very cautious about inadvertantly participating in the marketing of postmodern ministry merchandise, but for once, humour me -- I'm in the midst of reading Dan Kimball's "The Emerging Church", and I'd like to recommend it. Wholeheartedly in fact.

Wow, Robby, what took you so long? The book's only been available for, like, about two years already...

But I have some really good reasons for recommending Dan's book!

• First of all, because Dan writes as someone who is actually doing something, not just theorizing from the comfort of Starbuck's on his laptop.
• As a practitioner, Dan is also urging us all to remember that we only deconstruct in order to reconstruct.
• The is not a book about "the" model of ministry that will work in every situation; it's about re-thinking ministry in general in order to be accurate witnesses of Jesus called the Christ.
• It's written with humility and grace (especially towards seeker-sensitive institutional churches), and we can always use more writers/bloggers who exhibit humility and grace.

Reading the early part of Dan's book reminds me of the cultural shifts we were engaging in the early 1990's at "Rock The City", our youth church that met in a rec centre every Sunday night. Unlike the conventional wisdom of youth ministry at that time (seeker-sensitive), Rock The City could be better described as "God In Your Face".

There was nothing subtle about it at all. Worship was grunge style, thanks to the nice folks in Nirvana & Pearl Jam (which was current at the time), teaching was simply reading a Bible passage and applying it to daily life (no youth pep talks, etc.), followed by inviting people to come forward to receive prayer from teams made up of other teenagers, and usually ending with more worship, until the rec centre staff's subtle hints (mops and pails scraping the floor at the back) made it clear that we should pack up for another week and head for a local restaurant for a late snack.

I'll never forget stuff like Tony, a big Japanese-Canadian guy, standing a metre or so in front of me as worship was happening, and watching him -- with tears streaming down his face while he raised his hands above his head -- falling to his knees in worship. Or seeing one teen who came to sell drugs (hey, over 100 youth in a rec centre -- who could resist the target market?), and instead becoming a Christian a month or so later, and then going to his high school principal, and all of his teachers, and apologizing to them for his behaviour, and then telling his classmates "I don't sell anymore. I don't use anymore. But you've got to come to this Rock The City thing".

Dan's book provokes the same sense of "God's up to something" that the memories of RTC bring. So, breaking my normal habit, I am recommending his book.

Highly.