A Call to Resurgence

Mark Driscoll. A Call to Resurgence: Will Christianity Have a Funeral or a Future? Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2013. 336 pp. $19.99.

Mark Driscoll’s new book, A Call to Resurgence: Will Christianity Have a Funeral or a Future?, is sometimes insightful, sometimes amusing, sometimes stirring, and sometimes exasperating. In places, particularly at the beginning and the end of the book, it represents the best of Driscoll: an uncompromising assessment of the scale of the mission, a robust call to courage and obedience, and an impassioned plea for sound doctrine, spiritual power, and sacrificial mission. At the book’s heart, however, is an internal tension so significant that large parts of it are likely to be ineffective, or even counterproductive, in persuading those who do not already share Driscoll’s view. Consequently—and I say this as a broadly Reformed, complementarian, charismatic, missional pastor—A Call to Resurgence is somewhat frustrating to read.

The book is clearly laid out, and its contents can be easily summarized. American society is in a terrible mess: Christendom is over, and the results aren’t pretty (chapter one). The American church is also in a terrible mess, with weird spiritualities, sexual sin, fluffy pluralism, immature masculinity, and financial stinginess creeping into her through the surrounding culture (chapter two). Not only that, but the church is also divided into tribes that may barely know each other: Reformed and Arminian, complementarian and egalitarian, continuationist and cessationist, fundamentalist and missional (chapter three).   Continue at Andrew Wilson