in defense of the institutional church

DeYoung, Restless, and Reformed: Why They/You/We Don't Like the Church

As I mentioned some months ago, local pastor and author Kevin DeYoung is writing a new book along with Ted Kluck called Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion. It looks like an interesting book. As Kevin is demonstrating in his post about thee upcoming book, he and Ted are serious about addressing the very real issues that people raise in rejecting the institutional church. Kevin has written previously on this topic on his blog and is clearly very passionate about what he perceives as the proper manifestation of the local assembly. This book should provide an interesting contrast to another book I am getting ready to read, Dave Black's book The Jesus Paradigm. Kevin is going to post excerpts from the book of the next few months addressing some of the concerns that he has mentioned, so I am looking forward to seeing what he has to say and interacting with other posters on the blog.

I commented on Kevin's blog that I am concerned that people on both sides of this debate have taken positions that they have not thought out as well as they should (including in many ways myself). Every Christian ought to desire to understand how the local assembly and the greater Body of Christ relate, how they overlap and how they are separate and to not come to a conclusion based on tradition or pragmatism on the one hand or misplaced anger or rebellion on the other. This is too important a topic to embrace or reject cavalierly.