A Good-Natured Rant

by Frank Turk


With DJP trapped in a vacation of his own making in high-altitude parts-unknown, and Phil suffering through the urban delights of Houston (Eat at Papasitas, Phil!), you're left with me to carry the water for the week, and fortunately for all of us I have a giant stack of books to review in order to maintain my credibility as a blogger who lives up to his end of the bargain when someone sends in a PDF or promo copy for the sake of good will.

If you visit my blog, there are about a dozen books in the sidebar I have listed as "required reading" mostly because they are books I have enjoyed and benefitted from. There are some other books I need to add to that list, but the book I have in my hand today would probably serve most of you as a sort of survey of those books -- a survey of the landscape of the evangelical church.

Warren Cole Smith has published A Lover's Quarrel with The Evangelical Church, which is a sort of late-comer to the cottage industry of recounting the evangelical church's loss of its first love, as they say. Smith sees himself as an insider and longer-term traveller inside the conservative evangelical movement, and as such he has come to a lot of the same conclusions a lot of the rest of us have -- the church is facile, ahistorical, sentimental to the point of being trite and irrelevant, ironically market-driven in spite of its irrelevance, more concerned with gaining an audience rather than growing disciples, and so on. There's a chapter on each of those subjects, and you can really see the problems pretty vividly when he's done.

Which, of course, is fine. These are observations made by David F. Wells, Mark Noll, David F. Wells, Os Guinness, David F. Wells, D. A. Carson, David F. Wells, Mark Dever, Kevin DeYoung, and of course David F. Wells. maybe it's actually David Wells who has done all the legitimate leg-work here and everyone else has sort of cited him or referred to him.

In that, it may be unfair of me to make that my primary criticism of Warren's book: it's not really anything new. However, that criticism misses the numerous and copious end notes (sorry, Dan) he has provided to the reader to demonstrate that he has in fact done his homework and he is in fact not the first guy to bring all this up.

In a real way, all that work makes this conversationally-styled book perhaps all the more damning as it seeks to speak the truth in love to the English-speaking church: this has all actually been said before, and the problems are not really getting all that much better. At some point, the church has to stop reading books which tell us how charming we are or ought to be and instead hold up the mirror to ourselves and say plainly, "you didn't really mean to come out of the house looking like that now, did you?"

So here's the thing: I enjoyed this book. It's nice when a book can say something is deeply wrong with the church and still have confidence (even if it is a sub-textual confidence) in the Gospel in spite of the flaws of the people in churches today. I appreciated the non-apocalytic tone of the book -- it was urgent and serious when it needed to be, but not hardly a "this may be the last Christian generation" sort of jeremiad. It was sort of an old friend in a new pair of jeans and some loafers who came over to the house for a bit of a good-natured rant.

So I recommend it -- on a scale of 5, I'll round up and give it a 4, though students of David Wells will chide me for grade inflation.

I have a couple of other books to review tomorrow, so we'll pick up there, then.

---