Chuck Warnock, Chatham, Virginia USA

2. The New Conspirators, Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time, by Tom Sine. Great book by a well known leader who probably has more perspective on this movement than anyone. Tom’s book is crammed with examples and will widen and deepen your understanding of the EC.
3. The Emerging Church, by Dan Kimball. Widely received and appreciated. My comments here with links to Dan’s history of the words “emergent” and “emerging”
4. The Church on the Other Side, by Brian McLaren, was for many of us, the first book that said what we wanted to say or at least what we were thinking. Brian can be a controversial figure in Church circles and I don’t know anyone who would agree with everything he says but he has consistently verbalized emerging church issues for the last decade with astonishingly clarity.

5. A list on a number of possible books for the 5th spot.

Andrew Jones, Orkney Is., Scotland

The first chapter is a highly charitable yet clear-headed overview of the various “streams” of the emerging edge in contemporary Christianity: the emerging, the missional, the mosaic and the monastic. While I’ve been mildly familiar with most of these streams, I must say that Sine’s engagement is able to provide the necessary overview thereof without much fluff (an approach that I can appreciate).

Although I was mildly familiar with the various streams, I must say that it was the Mosaic stream as characterized by Sine that was the least familiar and most challenging. Having grown up primarily in Rural North Carolina, I can say that I have lived a pretty sheltered life when it comes to substantive and authentic engagement with people of different ethnic and/or cultural backgrounds.

Let’s just be honest here, I’ve not had very many friends in my life who weren’t white, middle class protestants. My awareness of and desire to engage with people who might look, think and view the world differently than I do has, fortunately, expanded in recent years with my growing passion for the study of Christianity and the American civil rights movement. Authors of the movement such as James Baldwin and Howard Thurman have been incredibly challenging and formative with regard to the way I view both my own personhood as well as the ways that both I and “my people” relate to and engage with people who, for better or worse, have been “the other” for me. Other diverse thinkers such as John Hope Franklin, Tim Tyson (a teacher and friend), and Charles Marsh (among others) continue to force me to re-evaluate my complicity in racial and cultural discrimination and marginalization.

It is for these reasons that the Mosaic stream has been both encouraging and challenging. I currently live in a small rural community with a population of a little under 4,000 people. A large percentage of those who live around me are Hispanic and Latino. I am a minister in a predominately white church which is part of a predominately white denomination. Because I live in the south, I can say that racism and ethnocentrism are alive and well. In short, a large percentage of the people who live, work and spend their lives in the community in which I live are viewed by my brothers and sisters as less than human.

And while I’ve long been sheltered with regard to sharing life with those from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds, I’ve also always possessed a deep sense that the monolithic whiteness of Sunday mornings was not what God intended for the church. And the hard part is that - at least from my vantage point - this is what church has looked like for my entire life. Reading The New Conspirators has lighted a fire in me to work for racial & cultural reconciliation in my own community. I’m not sure whether it’s lack of creativity, lack of desire or simply lack of faith that has kept the church separated in the South. I do know (and so does Sine) that the wretched legacy of slavery and racial oppression is one large factor but I also know that the God that I worship is bigger than my ancestors’ sins. In The New Conspirators, I recognize the call for a multicultural church as the call to all people but especially the call to those of us who have the legacy of racial hatred and oppression running in our veins. And this is an urgent call. Sine writes,

By 2060 the United States will become the first non-European Western nation - a nation of Latinos, African Americans and Asians. Those of us from European roots will just be another group. Our churches need to help people prepare not only to live in this future, but to receive and celebrate the gifts from other cultures. (The New Conspirators, 45).

While this book isn’t only about the Mosaic stream of the emerging edge of the church, I clearly needed to hear God speak through Sine regarding the work that’s going on to build God’s multi-cultural, multi-gifted kingdom, not on some far-off future but in the here and now. In the lives of ordinary people living out humility and faithfulness by receiving and rejoicing in the gifts that God has given our neighbors.

The posture of reception and celebration of the gifts of our neighbors must, if we take Sine seriously, include also a posture of humility with regard to our use of language to communicate with one another. As an American of European descent, I can say that I’ve not given much thought to why my Asian, African & Hispanic/Latino brothers and sisters in Seminary are required to learn English. For now, at least, practical concerns regarding the transmission of information are likely at the forefront of those who develop curriculum guidelines for the Association of Theological Schools. HOWEVER, if what Sine tells us is true, Seminaries and Churches need to take seriously the possibility that English may not always be the “official” language of the Western Church.

In other words, Western (and particularly American) Christians need to learn to receive the gifts of others with a humility that is willing to learn how to hear them in their indigenous language. This, of course, becomes uncomfortable for some because it hits close to home with regard to the immigration debates that rage constantly in the South. And all of this makes the work of the church more difficult because of the ridiculous entanglements in which we find ourselves with regard to patriotism and discipleship. Should white American Christians pledge allegiance to the flag of (white) America or do we give our full allegiance to the kingdom of God without borders? These are hard questions and I don’t have the answers but I am thankful for Tom Sine and for The New Conspirators for forcing me to deal prayerfully with them and I look forward to the rest of the journey (This is, after all, only the first chapter). Please share your thoughts and your life in this space. Converse, create and imagine with me what God’s kingdom can be…

A.S. Tatum, Angier NC, USA

So Sine did what many would not have done … he went small. He recognized that God’s movement in the world was what Robert Capon described as God’s love of those who are least, lost, last and little. God is often most active in the small and not as the brassy power of the dominant world. Sine understood that God is not into signs of power as in the thunder and the lightning but instead often sensed best falling on us in the form of a gentle rain, often unnoticed and unrecognized by us. God is in the tiniest mustard seed working quietly -seeding the ground with those things that will eventually bless the world.

So Sine wrote an epistle to the church encouraging us to be at work in the world doing just as much in our little ways. Being faithful. Laboring quietly like the farmer, dropping seeds into the ground that God waters with grace blessing the world around us knowing that God will produce a crop in another season.

Likewise, we’re to pay attention to the little acts of kindness. We’re to faithfully attend to the little habits of being. We’re to be as we’re called, “little Christs” in the world doing what Christ did as demonstrated by the humility of his sacrificial death.

Sine’s newest book is titled The New Conspirators and falls into the form of his earliest theme of mustard seeds and God’s affinity with small but significant faith. In his introduction titled, “Traveling Into Turbulent Times,” he draws a quote from Alan Roxburgh: “We are all in the early stages of a massive transition … We cannot return to the past like some nostalgic That 70’s Show, nor can we jump over to the present to go bravely where none have gone before, like some kind of Star Trek series. We are more like the strange, motley crew of creatures struggling to make sense of their situation on board the space station Babylon Five.”

His big idea is that God is doing what God has always done by finding in each generation those who are welcoming of the work of the Spirit - faithfully tending to the kingdom of God in their own creative “little” ways. He contends that while we can bemoan what’s happening to the form of the traditional church and can translate those losses as the failure of the young to pick up the habits of the old, we cannot ignore that God is still quietly stirring in this younger generation by igniting a flame of passion we who are of the older generation have yet to demonstrate or experience.

I’m overwhelmingly impressed with the spirit of our sub-30’s. They want it real. They want their faith stripped of pretension. They want a sense of adventure. They want to be alive in God’s Spirit without the judgment of the older generations who see the world through generational eyes. Sine’s new book is a blessing on those he calls the “new conspirators” as they bring their passion and fire to the work of God in our time. He calls them conspirators not because they are conspiring with the culture for the demise of the church, but that they are conspiring with God to find the new wineskins of faith by which God’s Spirit will welcome the future.

God bless our New Conspirators! May they invade our thoughts and our tired habits of faith bringing the new wine of what God wants to unleash in our time, in our hearts, and in our community.

 Keith Herron