Fred Peatross’ book A Mobile Church for E.P.I.C. Times is a curious beast. The first part consists of a diverse collection of essays through which the author explores the impact of cultural change on the church. He sets out his premise in the preface: the world is in transition from rational to Experiential, from representative to Participative, from word-based to Image-based, from individual to Connected; and if the church is to survive in this new E.P.I.C. culture, it will have to acquire a new mobility.
The essays are short, imaginative, sometimes humorous, and always readable. Some are simple anecdotes - stories of faith and church life that become parables of renewal and transformation. There are dramatic expansions of biblical themes, personal reflections on the paradoxes and possibilities of change, and sketches of alternative forms of church life. Peatross does not attempt to develop his subjects at length: his aim is to suggest, stimulate, provoke, challenge, and this is the real strength of his writing.
The diversity of style and perspective is at times a little disorienting, but there are a number of important unifying themes running through the collection. One is the rather disjointed and allusive narrative of Peatross’ personal struggle to resolve the tension between a growing postmodern sensibility and the cultural and intellectual immobility of the Restoration Movement. Another is the parallel struggle to develop a form of discourse, an idiom, a dialect, a rhetoric, a voice, flexible and creative enough to embody the values and priorities of emerging church. Finally, there is a consistent attempt to lure the church out of its self-imposed captivity to legalism and isolationism to re-engage with the world for the sake of Christ. As Leonard Sweet writes in the Foreword to this book, ‘mission’ is the one word that the church needs to hear today, and it is one that ‘you will hear in a variety of voices throughout this book’.
The mention of a ‘variety of voices’ draws attention to the fact that there is more to this book than Peatross’ own essays. He also illustrates the creativity of postmodern comunication by including a lengthy email correspondence between Fred and myself on the subject of emerging church and two paraphrases of texts from Genesis by Andrew Careaga in the esoteric form of chat room conversations. In the final section of the book there are interviews with ‘leaders from various tribes throughout Christendom’: Brian McLaren, Milton Jones, Dennis McCallum, Cecil Hook, Andrew Careaga, David Hopkins, Sally Morgenthaler, and Larry Crabb. Peatross asks good questions and gets good answers. reviewer: Andrew Perriman
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