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Q & A
Q&A: What ‘new’ Christianity looks like Amy Forbus, Apr 9, 2010
Brian McLaren
Brian McLaren says the church has some rethinking to do. In his latest book, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith (HarperOne), he suggests that the old institution of the church may be preparing to give birth to a new sense of what it means to follow Christ.
He spoke recently with staff writer Amy Forbus.
How did you come up with this list of questions you say the church must answer? I’ve been doing a lot of public speaking for the last 10 years or so—from Argentina to Sweden to Korea to South Africa—and it’s been amazing to me how the same kinds of questions are raised in such different settings. So really I’m just reporting the kinds of questions I’ve been observing all over the place.
Authors like Phyllis Tickle and Len Sweet agree that something’s not working with the way we’re doing Christianity. At the same time, I’ve seen mixed reviews of your book. Did you expect that? Yes. I have a group of very loyal and very passionate critics, some of whom agree that there are problems and that these questions are important, but they really don’t like the kind of answers I’m proposing. Others don’t really like the questions, and they think we’d be better off to not even raise them.
On the positive side, of all of my books I’ve never had such heartfelt, and in some cases, heartbreaking responses from people that tend to come in privately via e-mail. These are often people who have left the ministry, and they say, “The lack of answers to those questions tells my own story.”
Who’s your intended audience for this book? I think there is a potential convergence of what I would call progressive Catholics, progressive evangelicals—some people call them post-evangelicals—and what I would call post-institutional mainliners, meaning folks from the mainline tradition who are not preoccupied with institutional maintenance. With that group coming together with social justice-oriented people from the black and Latino churches, I just think there’s potential for a tremendous coalition and convergence.
But the truth is I always write for a lot of the people who feel somewhat disenfranchised and alienated, to try to give them a little bit of hope and help them know that they’re not the only people with these kinds of questions.
One of these questions that I’ve asked myself is, “What do we do about the church?” Let me tell you the two general things I always try to tell people. The first one is that I think our leaders have to go through a kind of theological and spiritual transformation, because a lot of our leaders are weary, some are a little bit jaded, some are just exhausted. It’s not an easy job. There are a lot of challenges. This is one of the reasons why I think we in leadership have to rediscover how good the Good News is. If we can rediscover that, it will re-energize us with another spurt of hope.
The second thing is we have to understand the value of movements and institutions. We have a lot of people who believe in institutions and not movements, and a lot who believe in movements but not institutions. I think we have to see that they both have a very vital role, and that they actually need each other.
You’re sounding a lot like a United Methodist now. Well, good! [Laughs.] I try to get Methodists to think about this, because I think [John] Wesley is just a fantastic example. Wesley did not try to reform the institution; he created a movement alongside of it in the hopes that the movement would then bring some benefits to the institution.
The way this would translate into our churches today is to say, “We need a movement that involves the starting of thousands and thousands of new faith communities.” I mean a gathering of people who get to talk about God, and where there is some safe space to ask questions, and safe space to be open about doubts and safe space to explore.
New forms can innovate, and institutions can imitate. But if [institutions] don’t have anything good to imitate, they’re really stuck. So that’s why I see the forming of new kinds of faith communities as not being in competition with existing traditional churches, but actually being an asset and a resource for them.
Your book introduced me to a new term: “fundasexuals.” Obviously it’s sort of a playful term to deal with a very tense subject. Arguments about sexuality, especially homosexuality, have become polarizing and paralyzing in a lot of our faith communities. What I try to do is to help us move beyond immediately jumping to a for-or-against, pro-or-con discussion, and instead to think more deeply and biblically about the issue, and to ask the question, “What are we going to do when we disagree?” Because we’re not all going to agree any time soon.
Even if we all agreed on the issue of homosexuality, there are about 25 more issues related to sexuality lining up on the horizon. And if we’re going to divide every time one of these questions comes along, there won’t be much left of us at the end. So we’ve got to find a way to be honest about these very tough issues.
You’ve written about ways we can look at the biblical narrative. Well, I love the Bible. I was a pastor for 23 years. I was preaching from the Bible, and that meant that I was actually reading the Bible a lot. And I became convinced that our biggest problems have to do with the assumptions that we bring to the text. In other words, it’s not what is in the text that’s causing us problems.
One of those assumptions that we share is that the Bible is meant to have the same kind of authority as a constitution. I’m trying to question that assumption—not to minimize biblical authority, but to rediscover biblical authority in a more appropriate way. I propose that we learn to see the Bible as an inspired library. And to realize that a library is intended to do different things than a constitution is intended to do. For example, a constitution is intended to eliminate disagreements, but a library is intended to preserve disagreements—to keep disagreements from being eliminated, because we assume that there’s value to having multiple perspectives.
Instead of reading the Bible as if it were a homogenized text, I think we can rediscover the Bible as an exciting, dramatic conversation with many voices who are passionately interested in the one subject that really matters: “How can we live a life that pleases God, a life that really counts for something?”
What do you think Christianity needs to look like 50 years from now? I would be intrigued if we could spend the next 50 years asking, “How can we form and deploy more Christ-like people into the world?” So that’s what I hope the faith will look like—that we will refocus our efforts and energies on forming and deploying people who actually want to embody the mission and character of Christ in the world.
Brian McLaren
One of these questions that I’ve asked myself is, “What do we do about the church?”
Even if we all agreed on the issue of homosexuality, there are about 25 more issues related to sexuality lining up on the horizon. And if we’re going to divide every time one of these questions comes along, there won’t be much left of us at the end. So we’ve got to find a way to be honest about these very tough issues.
