I love to read, but there are so many things to read: books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, micro-blogs, and more. No one has time to read everything.
I’m interested in how to get the most out of the time I spend reading. Since you’re reading right now, I assume you are too. So I thought I would share some choices that help me manage my reading to get the most out of it.
Tension is the best word to describe my experience with Jim Belcher’s book Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional (affiliate link). The first time I recall hearing about the book was when @jimbelcher followed me on twitter. When he was not following me a few days later, the follow/unfollow felt somewhat spammy; however, the book did impress me with its endorsements. On the one hand, I didn’t care much about the controversy of the emerging movement; on the other hand, I was concerned about the amount of emergent literature I saw in the library of someone I care about. When I saw a promotion to get a copy of the audio book from Christianaudio, I decided to go ahead and take a chance on it. After listening to it, I felt largely positive about it, but decided to get the paperback copy from the library so I could see the words on the page and better understand it.
Deep Church begins with Belcher’s narrative of his relationship to the emerging church and why a third way matters. He attempts to define the emerging church and identifies seven "protests" of the emerging church: captivity to Enlightenment rationalism, a narrow view of salvation, belief before belonging, uncontextualized worship, ineffective preaching, weak ecclesiology, and tribalism. He takes these protests and devotes a chapter to understanding the controversy of the protest and presenting his "deep" solution: Deep Truth, Deep Evangelism, Deep Gospel, Deep Worship, Deep Preaching, Deep Ecclesiology, and Deep Culture.