Conversing with “The New Conspirators”: Turbulent Times

I finished reading Tom Sine’s The New Conspirators a few weeks ago and I’ve meant to throw up a review for a while now. Because this is such a great and important book I’ve decided to devote a post for each section and hopefully open up some conversation. If you haven’t read this book yet, I highly recommend it, especially if you’re one of those emergent-y types. It’s a shame this book hasn’t received more publicity in emergent circles.

Sine begins the book acknowledging that we are indeed living in turbulent times as far as the church as a worldwide institution is concerned. But instead of focusing solely on the negative he writes, “For followers of Jesus, times of challenge are always times of opportunity to give new expression to God’s love for a people and a world.”¹

In the midst of these challenges new, grassroots streams are re-imagining what the church looks like and what it means to be followers of Jesus. Sine identifies four new streams that comprise the new conspirators–groups of people seeking to identify the needs of their local communities and the world then join in God’s conspiracy of compassion and justice to meet those needs.

I won’t say much more about the four streams themselves–that is for the next post–but I it is worth pointing out that Sine identifies this movement as a “…[conspiracy of] the small, insignificant, and the ordinary,”² which is reminiscent of the biblical narrative–from Genesis to Revelation, it’s always been bottom-up efforts that have made the real difference to realize justice.

Toward the close of the first section of the book Sine makes the observation that over the last 50-100 years Christians have assumed that all the important questions have been answered–and answered correctly, thus all we need to do was improved our tactics and strategies. Personally, I think most of our mainline churches are still operating under this assumption as the drastic decline in attendance and membership in recent decades illustrates. But Sine is not satisfied with our answers. He asks five important questions that remain on the back-burner throughout the book.