Being engaged in a few other books lately, I loaned my copy of Frank Viola’s Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity to my friend Grant, who is familiar with Frank’s other work. Grant has furnished a bit of a review, which I’ve edited only lightly to present here.

Monday morning after logging my menu selection and discussing Bosnia with my waitress, I began to dig into Reggie McNeal’s Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church. I’ve not had much time with it this week, so I’ve only ingested the introduction and chapter one… but I found myself jotting down an inordinate number of notes and quotes for so brief a sample, and yesterday when I tweeted “Those who miss the missional renaissance will find themselves rendered irrelevant to the movement of God in the world. — Reggie McNeal” it proved to be good retweet material. (Paraphrased from p.17 for the sake of a 140-character limit.)

I’ve been sharing some of the books in my pile for review, usually trying to match up books I’ve received with people who I think will enjoy them. Although I appreciate the humour of The Wittenburg Door, I loaned Becky Garrison’s latest book to my friend Mike before I’d had a chance to read it. Asked for a quick response on the book, he said the following:

I’ve been using The Voice translation a little bit lately, and am enjoying it. I received a review copy, and want to offer one — but I begin with an excursus on Bible translation generally and dynamic equivalence specifically, since this will frame helpfully what I want to say about The Voice.

The Christmas season has become the beginning of my “reading year.” Over the Christmas holiday, I try to find, make, or steal time to do some reading — usually fiction, often something on the lighter side. Not always though: sometimes a well-written easy-reading nonfiction book does the trick just fine. This practice forces me to take time away from the computer and break the normal patterns of daily life at a time when there’s a lot of additional activities and festivities going on, so a little extra disruption can be a good thing as well. The mental break is a fantastic exercise as well, and a good rest for me. It also renews a reading-habit, and if I am able to build up a little “reading-momentum,” I tend to blast through a few titles during January as well.

A little while ago the stack of books I had for review started to get a little out of hand, particularly as I also have books that I want to read which don’t arrive in the review pile. To make matters worse, I have other things to do besides reading, a horribly inconvenient fact of life. Anyway, since I needed a solution to the review backlog, I assembled a crack team of average post-church readers from our merry little band of vagabonds. And I mean “average” in the good way of course, as in, just like the rest of us… except perhaps a little less prone to prattle on and on on a blog. Anyway, I distributed several books and a CD, and reviews are forthcoming. As a preview, I’ve heard good things so far about Sara Miles’ Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion as well as Life After Church: God’s Call to Disillusioned Christians (CBD Link) by Brian Sanders. I’m presently breezing through Scot McKnight’s The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (CBD Link), which I’ll be giving a strong recommendation when I finish it and write my review. I mean, unless Scot says something I really take exception to in the last quarter of the book, which is rather unlikely at this point.

I confess that I fall behind in reading some of the books that come my way for review. A while back, I received a book on evolution that I just didn’t know when I’d get down to reading — but it just so happened that my friend Mike is interested in the subject and was already doing some reading on it. In the interest of getting a review posted sooner rather than later, I passed along the book to get his opinion — his review follows. In addition to these comments, Mike has also recommended Michael Spencer’s review, where Michael Dowd actually joins the comment thread part way through, making for an interesting discussion.

As it turns out, reviewing Becky Garrison’s book, Rising from the Ashes: Rethinking Church, is not a simple straightforward matter. It doesn’t really have a plot or a single argument to put forward that one could assess and say, “She convinced me” or, “She didn’t.” The book is a collection of interviews she conducted in person, over the phone, by email, and by instant messenger chat sessions — with a few excerpted blog posts thrown in for good measure. It’s a bit like reviewing an entire table of hors-d’ouvres and attempting to render a single opinion. Or better perhaps, it’s like wandering around a wild cocktail party filled with every emerging church personality you could think of and a few besides. As you wander, you eavesdrop on a myriad of conversations… you grab some ideas from one, move onto the next, and another, and another. You wander by the first one again to find the subject has changed, then move along to yet another discussion. The conversation are all very diverse, but if there’s a single theme it would be the subtitle of the book: “Rethinking Church,” which is a broad enough summary that the pages of the book still cover a wide array of topics.