QUESTION: What have I done with the 150 emerging church books that used to sit on my bookshelf?
ANSWER: I am setting them free to be read by my blog readers and Suddenly Seminary students. Let me tell you why and how.
WHY? Heres the deal. In a month or so, our family gets back on the road full time for our next chapter of mission, and we don't have room for the books that have accumulated over the past few years. My library in California is still in boxes and I don't want to burden anyone here in Europe. I would rather these books were read and enjoyed. Set free, if you like.
I thought of selling my emerging church books to someone or maybe donating it to a Christian college. Then I figured, since I am the Chancellor of Suddenly Seminary - the world's first cyber-seminary - I might as well loan them out to the students and readers of my blog. My plan was to start a floating library: I send you the book and you read it, comment on it, and pass it on to the next person who wants it, until one day I call it back home to the Suddenly Seminary library.
HOW? I was trying to start a website to make this happen when I found a site called Bookcrossing which will do something similar. I now have a Bookcrossing bookshelf there. You can request these books and I will send them out to you.
We are starting out with my emerging church books - there's about 150 of them which might actually be the world's largest collection on this topic. I have been a terriblly obsessive geek in this regards, hunting down books with "emerging church" or "emergent church" in them, having them sent to me from all over the world, and ending up with emerging church books going back to 1968.
Some of them quite old and hard to find so there are a few I am keeping in my Permanent Collection:
"The Emerging Church, 1967 Volume One and Two, by Kent and Wilkins
"The Emerging Church" 1970, by Larson and Osborne
"The Emergent Church" 1981, by Johann Baptist Metz
"The Mobray Emerging Church Series" (1983)
You would need to be a really special friend of mine to borrow one of these. But the rest are fair game for you.
Anyway, my wife is loading up the bookshelf now over at Bookcrossing. if you want to relieve me of a book or two, or a handful, then find it on the Tallskinnkiwi bookshelf and then private message me inside the Bookcrossing site [only takes a second to join up]. And please send me a mailing address. I will send the book out to you at my cost [might be slow post] and you can send it on to the next person when someone else requests it. Eventually, I would like to call my books back home but I think that's a long way off.
Thats all I know. I am new to the website and am not really sure how to do all that I need to do. Its not very intuitive. Anyway, if things work out positively with this shelf, I will start loading up my mission and theology books.
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