Emerging Evangelicals Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity [Hardcover]

The Emerging Church movement developed in the mid-1990s among primarily white, urban, middle-class pastors and laity who were disenchanted with America’s conservative Evangelical sub-culture. It is a response to the increasing divide between conservative Evangelicals and concerned critics who strongly oppose what they consider overly slick, corporate, and consumerist versions of faith. A core feature of their response is a challenge to traditional congregational models, often focusing on new church plants and creating networks of related house churches.

Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, James S. Bielo explores the impact of the Emerging Church movement on American Evangelicals. He combines ethnographic analysis with discussions of the movement’s history, discursive contours, defining practices, cultural logics, and contentious interactions with conservative Evangelical critics to rethink the boundaries of “Evangelical” as a category. Ultimately, Bielo makes a novel contribution to our understanding of the important changes at work among American Protestants, and illuminates how Emerging Evangelicals interact with the cultural conditions of modernity, late modernity, and visions of “postmodern” Christianity. This book is full of thick description and rich detail.  Bielo has a knack for capturing the essence of the people he interacted wth in his 3 year ethnographic journey throughEmerging Evangelicalism.  The personalities come through in his description of their appearance and clothing, mannerisms and attributes, and in their voices in the text.  His descriptions of gatherings and worship ritual are so vivid that at times I found myself transported through his prose back to my own ethnographic research on Emerging congregations.  -Review of Religious Research From [Bielo's] empathetic description...[it's clear] the growth of introspective evangelicals serves as a cautilÚ