I get sent 4 or 5 books a week.  I have form letters both for authors & publishers saying “unfortunately, I cannot review your book because this space is reserved for discussions about the Church & media technologies”.   Sadly, there haven’t been many publications that fit well in this zone.   But recently, Zondervan sent me the book SimChurch by Douglas Estes.  I sped through it marking up every page, and realized how helpful it was to have a new set of observations about online church.   Now there’s a blog tour and a bit further into this post I’ve listed some of the blogs Zondervan invited to review / discuss / celebrate the release of this timely book.

Douglas Estes is a New Testament scholar and teaching pastor and he authored SimChurch to explore the (sometimes controversial) world of online churches.  As people (thus the Church) migrate online, we are forced to review our theology and re-assess some of our postmodern assumptions in light of our digital world.

Today I’m posting pointers to the SimChurch site, a list of the selected bloggers who are evaluating the book and a brief video clip from Douglas.  Tomorrow, I’ll be posting his analysis of a post previously put of by my friend & colleague, Pastor Drew Goodmanson at his site. (see: http://www.goodmanson.com/church-technology/is-online-community-real-community-questions-about-the-virtual-church/).  [Drew & I will be presenting together next week in Chicago at the Story Conference - come join the discussion.]

Here are the SimChurch bloggers:

• Church Relevance
• BibleDude.net
• Returned Sheep
• The Digital Sanctuary
• Lessons from Babel
• Mark D. Roberts
• Tall Skinny Kiwi
• Captain’s Blog

Now here’s a video clip to introduce you to Douglas Estes and SimChurch.  Come back tomorrow for his lengthy response to my “virtual church” question.

Click here to view the embedded video.