Church is out, spirituality is in. This is true outside Christians circles but, shockingly, it is true within as well. Recent years have seen a long succession of books talking of the revolution to come (or the revolution underway) which will see Christians abandon the institutional church in favor of expressions of the faith that are supposedly more pure. Christians meeting together in Starbucks in twos or threes, Christians meeting on park benches or around a backyard swimming pool. This, say some, is a true, pure, biblical expression of Christian community. It is in reaction to this kind of misinterpretation of Scripture that Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck have written, Why We Love the Church.

You may recognize DeYoung and Kluck as the men behind Why We’re Not Emergent, a book that won Christianity Today’s 2009 Book Award in the The Church/Pastoral Leadership category. In that first book they showed why they, though apparently prime candidates to follow along within the Emerging Church movement, had eschewed it in favor of a more traditional expression of the faith. This book is a follow-up, of sorts, offering the positive expression of what they declared negatively in the first book. We know that they are not Emergent and here we learn why they love the church. They follow the same pattern, writing completely separate chapters. DeYoung’s chapters are the more academic ones—providing the theological foundation. Kluck’s chapters, on the other hand, are less formal and more reflective. Both men are excellent writers who are adept at turning a phrase, making this a book that is just plain enjoyable to read.

The question will be asked: Is this as good, as enjoyable a book as Why We’re Not Emergent. I don’t think so; I don’t know that they quite recaptured the voice, the perspective they spoke from in the first book. Somehow it seems they were not able to duplicate the magic, the interplay between the two authors, that marked Why We’re Not Emergent. Yet Why We Love the Church is still plenty good in its own right.

The book, they say, is written for four kinds of people: the committed, the disgruntled, the waffling and the disconnected. For each of these people there will be value in reading the book and reflecting on the message it shares. When it comes to the disgruntled, the waffling and the disconnected, they offer four reasons, or perhaps four groups of reasons that people are disillusioned with the church: the missiological (the church is simply not fulfilling her God-given mission); the personal (the church is anti-women, anti-gay, hypocritical, etc); the historical (the church as we know it is a product of paganism, not Scripture); the theological (the church as an organization, institution, hierarchy, etc is foreign to the Bible). Throughout the book, DeYoung and Kluck respond to these people and respond to these reasons, always looking to Scripture, always seeking to provide a biblical understanding of who and what and why the church is.