Nine down, one to go, in this chapter-by-chapter review of Dave Tomlinson’s The Post-Evangelical.  Even though the book has been out for some time (published in the UK in 1995) I’ve gone back to it because it seems to have had a seminal importance in the ‘movement’ now known as the ’emerging church’.

In the final chapter, Tomlinson argues that post-evangelicalism is linked to the shift from the modern to the postmodern.  The challenge is ‘how to express eternal truth in and through this emerging culture.’ …

The Post-Evangelical is entitled ‘Let Me Tell You a Story’.  This chapter deals with the failure of modern, and the rise of the postmodern, ‘stories’.

What is the new postmodern world that is emerging?

It is a world which understands itself through biological rather than mechanistic models; a world where people see themselves as belonging to the environment, rather than over it or apart from it; a world distrustful of institutions, hierarchies, centralized bureaucarcies and male dominated organizations. 

Chapter 4 of Dave Tomlinson’s The Post-Evangelical is entitled ‘Longing to Grow’.  In this chapter, an attempt is made to explain the evangelical ‘problem’ in terms of a couple of psychological models.  ‘The problem’ for Tomlinson, as is becoming increasingly clear as the book develops, is that evangelicals are way too sure of themselves and need to grow up and start doubting things.

A couple of stories are given of people who started off as evangelicals but (you guessed it) became disillusioned with evangelical certaintism and found no welcome for their doubts and questions. …

Chapter 2 of The Post-Evangelical, by Dave Tomlinson, is entitled, ‘We’ve Never Had it so Good!’

Here, the author asks why, if evangelicalism has experienced such a resurgence over the past 30 years, many people have become dissatisfied with it.

Tomlinson notes a very considerable transformation that took place in British evangelicalism between 1980 and 1990.  This was due to a considerable extent to the ‘charismaticizing’ of mainstream evangelicalism.  Whereas the charismatic movement in its early days in the last 1960s and early 1970s was seen by many as a threat to evangelicalism, the former has been assimilated by the latter to a remarkable extent, so that much of the energy of current evangelical activity derives from charismatic believes and practices. …