Language of the Emerging Church

This would be the only book by Leonard Sweet that I've actually enjoyed, A is for Abductive - The Languag of the Emerging Church. It is actually co-authored by Brian McLaren, though I don't have much interest in reading any of McLaren's other books, popular as they may be.

This isn't so much a book as it is a dictionary of terms related to the "postmodern emerging church movement", and a useful one at that.

Much of this book is total crap, as Mr. Sweet has shown in his other works that he has a penchant for making up words and phrases and has a field day with a "dictionary of terms." You could go crazy trying to wrap your mind around these entries: Cyborg, Double Ring, Eschaton, Fractals, Helix, Holarchy, J-Factor, Matrix, Robitis, String Theory, Xenophilia, Zending.

Despite Sweet, this book was useful and will be helpful in the future also. Of particular note was the entry on Deconstruction. This entry pretty much sums up the entire book and the emergent church, at least from the viewpoint of McLaren and Sweet. I understand deconstruction/post-modernism, but I have a hard time buying it, because I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist. I'm not very prone to thinking that I've been "duped" by everyone and everything around me. The major blunder of this book for me, was comparing the emerging church movement to "The Truman Show" and "The Matrix", thereby implying that everything around us is one big lie. Sorry, I may be a disgruntled child of the grunge era, circa 1993, but I'm not paranoid enough to go jumping down the rabbit hole.