Mark Coppenger on “Blue Like Jazz”

I read Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz several years ago after finding that so many of my students were enamored with this hip new book that was taking the evangelical world by storm. At the time, the “emergent church” was all the rage among a certain sector of evangelicals, and folks were trying to sort out how the author Donald Miller fit within that whole discussion. In any case, my students loved the book and were talking about it, and I felt almost obligated to read it. So I did.

I didn’t much care for the book. I thought it was irreverent in all the wrong ways. At the time, I started to write a review of the book, but then decided against it. There were already many helpful reviews appearing, and so I let it go. But the one review that I still remember to this day is the one delivered by Dr. Mark Coppenger at a school of theology lecture at Southern Seminary in 2006. There is a written version of the review, but I still think the audio version is worth listening too. This is classic Coppenger, and it is a spot-on critique. You can read a summary here, download the audio here, or listen below.

[audio:http://www.sbts.edu/media/audio/faculty/20060222coppenger.mp3]