By Dan Kimball
Dan Kimball is the author of several books including The Emerging Church, They Like Jesus But Not the Church, and is a pastor at Vinage Faith Churh in Santa Cruz, CA. Learn more about Dan at www.dankimball.com and www.vintagefaith.com.
What I really love most about this book, is the variety of people who have contributed to it. Unfortunately, too often there are important voices that don’t get heard, as much and this book gives us the opportunity for us to be reading from a larger pool of people. I have had been really looking forward to reading what everyone else wrote, and when I finally got the advance manuscript of everyone’s chapters, it came on unstapled 8.5 x 11 sheets. So I left them on our coffee table in the living room area, and I went out for a while and I was going to sit down when I got home and read through them all. When I got home, I immediately looked for the manuscript but instead of seeing the nice neat pile of pages, the entire thing was spread out across our living room floor, all in disorder and with lots of crayons and marker drawings on many of the pages. Our two 4-year-old daughters had gotten into them and turned the manuscript into a massive drawing and art project.
I did end up tediously going through every single page and putting the whole thing back in order, and finally got to read through it. I can honestly say that having to sort it all back, complete with crumpled pages and lots of random color, was very worth it. The breadth of experience, diversity, thought, opinions, and hearts contained within gave me a cozy evening of reading, which I will write about more later.