Meet the Author
Dan Kimball is a pastor who oversees “Sunday gatherings and teaching as well as the missional aspects of the church” at Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, CA. He is an adjunct professor at George Fox University. Kimball is the author or co-author of multiple books on church leadership and culture, including They Like Jesus but Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations (2007).
Book Basics
Adventures in Churchland is the story of the American evangelical Christian subculture as told by an insider with a unique perspective. As a young adult, Kimball was introduced to and began exploring the Christian faith abroad while playing drums in a punk and rockabilly band. When he returned to America, he affiliated with an evangelical congregation. In the years since, he has been transformed from one who had negative notions about Churchland based largely on the behavior of extremists to one who loves the church and is at home in Chuchland even while serving as a voice of reform.
Divided into three parts the book seeks to (1) introduces Churchland; (2) address the biggest tensions and confusions outsiders experience when trying to find their way in Chuchland; and (3) help those within Churchland to envision and move toward a new image, which Kimball terms Graceland. Kimball’s vision of the future church is aligned with his understanding of Jesus’ expectations, as is explored in the following chart (p.184):
|
The Church Isn’t |
The Church Is |
| A building that Christians meet in | Followers of Jesus, wherever they are throughout the week |
| A service you go to on Sunday (it’s a theological impossibility to “go to church”) | A community that gathers on Sunday to worship and serve God |
| A Sunday meeting where religious professionals give sermons and lead people in singing songs while they sit in rows and watch | A missional community that meets on various days of the week, whose pastors and leaders train, support, and help the church understand their giftedness and how God made them to participate in Jesus’ mission |
| Successful if decisions for Jesus are made | Successful if disciples of Jesus are made |
| A place you go to be a consumer, like in a shopping mall | A community that cares for each other as they serve the world |
| A community whose mission is to alert people to the wrongs in culture and to judge the world | A community whose mission is to alert people to universal reign of God through Jesus by proclamation and demonstration |
| Go to church | Be the church |
While Adventures in Churchland offers significant insight into Kimball’s own journey of faith and the movement he calls Chuchland, it offers less to a constructive conversation about the future of Churchland than I had hoped. Additionally, in several explanatory sections he dumbs matters down such as to appear a part of the anti-intellectual fringe he finds unhelpful. In short, if you want to read just one book by Kimball I strongly recommend They Like Jesus but Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations (2007).
So What?
An incredibly helpful way to better understand religious traditions other than your own is by listening to stories of those who have invested their lives in specific traditions. While this is commonly discussed for interreligious dialogue, it is significant from intrareligious understanding as well.
- If you are an evangelical, what has helped you better understand those in the mainline? If you are a mainliner, what has helped you better understand those who are evangelical?
- If you are a Protestant, what has helped you better understand Catholics? If you are Catholic, what has helped you better understand Protestantism?
- Regardless of your specific affiliations or tradition, how does your awareness of the rich diversity of the many people and groups that together form present day Christianity inform your understanding of Christian unity? offer enriched meaning to participating in your own tradition?
Dan Kimball. Adventures in Churchland: Finding Jesus in the Mess of Organized Religion (Zondervan, 2012). ISBN: 9780310275565.