Review of McLaren's Newest Books: Part 3 of 3

This is the final installment in a 3 part series reviewing two of Brian McLaren's books which I think are best read in tandem: A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That are Transforming the Faith(not to be confused with the similarly titled New Kind of CHRISTIAN) and Naked Spirituality: Life With God in 12 Simple Words. I confess that my reviews pretty much ignore his major project in both books - not that they aren't valuable or worth considering, but I found his subplot to be much more intriguing.

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For many of us engaging in the work of missional church planting there is a temptation to view those who “don’t get it” as inferior. It becomes accepted (in some circles) to sit around mocking Christians who want nothing more than to attend a worship gathering and “be fed.” I confess that I’ve been guilty of this. What precisely does this achieve?

Again, it is well and good to challenge one another, but perhaps we must recognize that seasons progress as they progress and it doesn’t do any good to mock summer for being hot. Unless you’re Texas, you don’t get to skip seasons...and when we try to skip over the process of struggle we may find ourselves in an unnatural season of winter.

The autumn season of perplexity may sometimes be the catalyst for some to embark on the task of church planting. When that is the case, we may be tempted to skip the winter of meditation, reflection and beholding and instead move right into a new spring of simplicity. This is understandable. When we make a life-changing decision during a period of deep perplexity we can be so relieved to find something new that we rush forward with little or no preparation.

This may help explain why some groups define themselves by what they’re against rather than what they’re for. We get frustrated with our experience and without pausing to reflect on what we’re being called TO, we simply react out of what we’re running FROM.

This is like trees that begin to bloom and bud in an unseasonably warm January. The hard freeze is still coming and when it does it can kill them. In this case, the natural progression of winter which should send plants into a dormant state actually serves to destroy the tree. Instead of natural season of rest it becomes an unnatural harbinger of death. Naked Spirituality is helpful in reminding us that following seasons of perplexity we need a season of beholding before moving forward.

I suspect that we could trace the cycle of McLaren’s metaphorical seasons through our progression through each of the quests he spoke of in A New Kind of Christianity. As we move from the quest for survival to security or from individuality to honesty there is likely going to be a move from simplicity to complexity to perplexity because it is precisely that season of perplexity to propels us further. The danger of skipping over the winter of beholding, in this macro view, remains a major threat. Before moving forward, we need time to reflect, process, heal...time to “be still and know.”

As we progress from season to season we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater or set about reinventing the wheel. Its important to bring the lessons we learned previously with us into the new. It seems to me that there are two parallel temptations at this point.

On the one hand we may reject everything that had to do with the previous system - like organic church planters recognizing the previous short-comings of rigid, bottle-necking structures and then mistakenly labeling structure itself as the problem.

The other danger is that as we bring these things along, we must allow them to be replanted in the new season, in ways that are appropriate to the time in which we now dwell. If not, we will simply add new things to the old list of things and bring on a whole new season of perplexity and despair. We find ourselves trying to plant seeds, till the ground, pull the weeds and harvest the fruit all simultaneously (I’m afraid that I’m dangerously close to obliterating this metaphor...I think I have a spiritual gift for doing that).

An example of this mistake can be seen in congregations that grab the latest trend and plug it uncritically into their church culture. This can be true for things like the Purpose-Driven Life program as well as missional church “stuff.” Particularly for something like a missional mindset, it simply won’t work to treat it as something we work into our schedule or add on top of all the other programs. Missional represents a new paradigm or a new season, to borrow McLaren’s metaphor. As such we must take time to consider what lessons and practices from the previous season need to be contextually replanted and which ones will no longer function well in the new.

All in all, I think Naked Spirituality is one of McLaren’s better books, particularly if read in tandem with or following New Kind of Christianity. I didn't even cover the 12 words or spiritual practices that McLaren desribes for each of the seasons of faith - but I found them to be appropriate and useful for both individuals and communities.

These two books are not necessarily ones you just want to give to everyone to read on their own. They aren’t as quick and easy to read as some of his other works. However, I think that the contents of these two works could be very beneficial for a community to process through together, even in (or perhaps especially in) contexts where there is a wide diversity of familiarity and experience in the Christian faith.

Review of McLaren's Newest Books: Part 2 of 3

This is part 2 of 3 in a series reviewing two of Brian McLaren's books which I think are best read in tandem: A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That are Transforming the Faith (not to be confused with the similarly titled New Kind of CHRISTIAN) and Naked Spirituality: Life With God in 12 Simple Words. I confess that my reviews pretty much ignore his major project in both books - not that they aren't valuable or worth considering, but I found his subplot to be much more intriguing.

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Life happens in cycles, but nothing is truly and totally repetitive. Seasons progress from one to the next each year in fairly predictable patterns, but never has the exact same season been experienced twice. Every day on the weather, meterologists (who I affectionately refer to as “guessologists”) gives us the day’s average, actual and record highs and lows - today isn’t the same as this day last year, and the good money is on it being somewhat different next year as well.

In Brian McLaren’s newest book, Naked Spirituality: A Life With God in 12 Simple Words (New York: Harper One, 2011), he speaks of four seasons of the life of faith. The spring of simplicity is marked by uncluttered dichotomies; this is right, that is wrong, this is up, that is down. Faith is a simple matter, being right is very important.

This gives way to the summer of complexity; obstacles and challenges come into view, but with a newfound sense of independence, we run headlong toward them. Faith is marked by a passion and zeal to enact change and a confidence that we will see the fruit of our struggles soon.

When struggles, disappointments and disillusionment begin to settle in, we know the autumn of perplexity is upon us. Dichotomies that used to seem so concrete, truths which seemed unassailable, postures which seemed so right begin to crumble and, like Job, we cry out, “When, oh Lord?... No!... Why, God?”

It is only by moving through these seasons that we enter the peaceful harmony of winter. We learn to listen to the deep silence of the snow-blanketed forest, and in it hear the majestic song of creation in response to the Creator. All around us creation is resting and we are invited to slow down and behold.

Of course, progressing through these seasons is not a one-time, linear event. Just as there are cool days in summer and strangely warm days, even weeks, in the midst of winter, so too will we have “unseasonable” periods in our life of faith. Likewise, we know that after winter comes spring - every year...unless you live in Texas and then you usually skip right to summer.

While I could appreciate the previous metaphor of the light spectrum (In New Kind of Christianity), this new image of seasons subtly addresses the danger of viewing people in “earlier” stages as inferior. It may be the case that you are in the summer season of perplexity while another person is clearly floating through the simplicity of spring...but this alone is no reason to view them as necessarily less mature. In keeping with (and perhaps straining) the metaphor, you may be in the summer of 1985 while they’re experiencing the spring of 2011.

This recalls the admonition for ubuntu faith to cease viewing the earlier stages as wrong or bad. I confess that I struggle with this task - and my conversations with many friends suggest that I am not alone. When I hear someone interviewed on the news, as I did recently, claiming that her child was shot in the leg and not the head because God loves her child and protected him, I immediately begin asking, “What about the children who have been shot in the head? Or those eighteen who died when the Tower of Siloam fell on them?” (Luke 13:4)

My natural response when Christians make statements that I feel are naive or immature is to fall back into those initial questions I mentioned in my previous post, “What do we have to say to anyone else if we can’t agree with each other?”

Perhaps my response should be to recognize that this may be the most appropriate way they can articulate life and faith from the where they currently dwell. There has to be room for these different perspectives even within our churches. Perhaps the expectation for everyone to be on “the same page” is inappropriate, given that each of us are likely experiencing various seasons of faith. That doesn’t mean that we don’t question and challenge each other; the questioning may be part of the process by which we move from one season into the next. Yet, there must be room for each of us to grow and mature as the Spirit moves within us.

The challenge then becomes cultivating an environment where each person is invited to pursue God faithfully with others who may be at drastically different points in the journey. Iron sharpens iron, but sometimes iron is also the hammer helping shape the nearly molten metal of another’s life. Of course, the hammer must remember that apart from the hand of the metal smith, it is a lifeless tool.

Perhaps this seems like an elementary observation - and I’ll grant that may very well be the case. However, if it is then I contend that on the whole, Christians in the West are functioning as preschoolers.

In the final edition of this series of posts, I'll say a few more things about Naked Spirituality and comment on how the books work well together.

Review of McLaren's Newest Books: Part 1 of 3

Some authors seem to write in such a way that many of their books are best read together. For me, Brian McLaren is one of those authors. A good example would be his popular books The Secret Message of Jesus (SMOJ) and Everything Must Change (EMC). I read SMOJ before EMC was released and found myself asking, "so what?" - its a pretty good book, but seems to stop short of what we should do with this kingdom perspective of the gospel. On the other hand, a friend of mine read EMC without reading SMOJ and felt that it was too political without much theological teeth. Read together, you may still disagree, but at least you have his whole case laid out.

Over the next few days I'd like to post a review of two more McLaren books that I think are best read in tandem: A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That are Transforming the Faith (not to be confused with the similarly titled New Kind of CHRISTIAN) and Naked Spirituality: Life With God in 12 Simple Words. I confess that my reviews pretty much ignore his major project in both books - not that they aren't valuable or worth considering, but I found his subplot to be much more intriguing. Also, my review doesn't attempt to go into the hyperbole in McLaren's work or the limitations of his approach - for one example of a review which touches on these issues regarding New Kind of Christianity, check out David Fitch's post.

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Part 1

One of the common themes that arises in my conversations with Christians and non-Christians alike has to do with how to deal with the seemingly irreconcilable beliefs and positions among Christians. This disparity is only heightened by the antagonism that surfaces within the church when these differences come up (consider the firestorm surrounding Rob Bell’s book Love Wins).

The question that then naturally comes from non-Christians is, “If you people can’t agree with each other, what on earth do you have to say to me?” The question for Christians, if they aren’t in the pretend-everyone-else-isn’t-really-faithful camp, is, “What the heck are we supposed to do about all this?!”

Though I am a committed disciple of Jesus, I must admit that at different times I still wrestle with both of these questions. I move from times of certainty into periods of doubt and struggle and then sometimes into seasons of despair...and then back again. My understanding of God, people, the church and faith are far from static.

This past year I read Brian McLaren’s, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questio

ns That are Transforming the Faith (New York: Harper One, 2010). In this book McLaren discusses various “big” questions about faith: questions about narrative, authority, God, Jesus, gospel, the Church, sex, the future, pluralism and “what do we do now.”

In the midst of this larger project he also describes a progression through seven quests of faith that he labels (with a controlling metaphor of the light spectrum) as survival (red), security (orange), power (yellow), independence (green), individuality (blue), honesty (indigo) and ubuntu (violet). Ubuntu is an African word referring to “one-anotherness, interconnectedness, joined-in-the-common-goodness and profound commitment to the well being of all” (233). He then points to a possible eighth quest of “sacredness” (ultraviolet light perhaps) and more, as yet unseen, quests beyond that (drawn from his conviction that perfection is a never-ending process of becoming).

Of course, McLaren has a way of unsettling and often offending more traditionally-minded Christians (and even not-so-traditionally minded ones). Though I don’t always find his conclusions thoroughly convincing, I do find his questions to be quite powerful and thought provoking.

As he works through what he believes are natural progressions of faith, he describes what Christianity looks like when it adopts (his description of) Greco-Roman concepts of static perfection rather than the more Jewish concept of perfection as a dynamic process of continually becoming. This understanding is similar to (but less artistic than) CS Lewis’ description in his book The Last Battle, where heaven is depicted as an ever expanding fractal where we are called to continuosly move “further up and further in”.

In the midst of his description of these different stages I found myself repeatedly wondering how people experiencing each phase could reconcile with one another. He seemed to suggest that the earlier stages can (and do) easily devolve into unhealthy or even evil perversions of the Gospel when held too tightly or for too long. How then does someone further up and further in not condemn the earlier expressions? He answers this somewhat in his description of the quest for ubuntu, where he states:

An ubuntu or violet faith will require us to stop seeing the earlier ranges as inferior, wrong or bad. Rather, we must see them as necessary. Each offers something essential to the larger human quest. Each adds an essential band in the full spectrum of light. And contrary to honest indigo thinking, the ideas and beliefs of the other ranges in the spectrum aren’t actually dishonest for the people who hold them: they are simply the way reality honestly looks from that vantage point. From red, the world honestly looks red. From orange it looks orange, and so on. Theologically, we could say that people in a certain zone of a religion or denomination are seeing God in the only way the can see God, and as only they can see God. Yes, it is ultimately a mistake for green, yellow, or blue people to say that God is only green, yellow, or blue, although this is what people at these stages will tend to say. But that is no greater a mistake than for indigo people to attack them for doing so, which is what indigo people will tend to do. 235.

I remember thinking as I read this paragraph toward the end of the book that McLaren could (and perhaps should) write a whole new volume specifically devoted to this concept - which, at least in part, he seems to have done in his next book - otherwise, the polarizing nature of the arguments against the "Greco-Roman narrative" will likely serve to destroy much of the positive implications of his writing. We’ll turn our attention to that book and then briefly to the relationship between these two in the following parts of this review.