Book Review: Kinda Christianity

One of the many blessings I’ve experienced since moving to Michigan was the opportunity to get to know Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck. In the past, I've written of my appreciation for Kevin and Ted, who have co-authored two award-winning books, Why We’re Not Emergent and Why We Love the Church.

One of the reasons they work so well together is the contrast of their styles. Though both are really smart and really funny, Kevin’s writing tends to emphasize the former while Ted leans a little more heavily on the latter.

Ted recently teamed up with another pastor, Zach Bartels, to write Kinda Christianity, a satirical response to Brian McLaren’s latest tome in the Emergent Conversation, A New Kind of Christianity. I’ve never met Zach, though I have read his blog from time to time. He’s clearly also a real sharp, funny guy, making it difficult to tell where his contributions to the book left off and Ted’s picked up. It wasn’t just as if Ted wrote it by himself, it was like two Teds wrote it.

What exactly does that mean? Well, if you don’t like satire or you do like Brian McLaren and the Emergent Church movement, you probably won’t particularly like this book.

If you’d like to get a theologically astute, incisive, well-written critique of A New Kind of Christianity, I recommend that you read Kevin’s review here.

But if you would like to read a more light-hearted (though still incisive) critique of McLaren and all things Emergent, then A Kinda Christianity is definitely for you. It's sub-title bills it as "A generous, fair, organic, free-range guide to authentic realness." One can only assume that "relevant" and transparent" simply didn't fit on the cover.

The authors freely admit that this short book is not intended to really encourage anyone. Rather it is solely meant to make people laugh. It’s satire definitely accomplishes this goal for the anti-Emergent reader, ultimately answering the question, “What would Christianity look like if we were all college sophomores?”