A New Kind of Christian

I finally started reading it. I got a $25 gift certificate from Amazon.com for using my credit card so much, and I ordered it and started reading it: A New Kind of Christian by Brian Mclaren. For those of you who don’t know (as I didn’t until recently), that is Mclaren’s ‘it’ book.

 

I’ve read two and a half pages and already I have to comment. On pages xiv and xv of the introduction, Mclaren discusses two theories of paradigm change, both similar. I will recount the second one he mentions. In the preceding passage, he discussed his feeling in 1994 that he was sick of being a pastor, and, perhaps to a deeper extent, being a Christian. He describes the shift he went through with this diagram:

 

“Area 1 refers to the old paradigm, the old mental map or way of seeing things. Over time, it becomes increasingly cramped and feels more like a prison than freedom. Area 2 describes the early transition period, where there is a high degree of frustration and reaction. An individual or group in this phase turns against the old paradigm and can’t stop talking about how wrong, inhumane, or insupportable it is. In area 3, people gradually turn from deconstructing the past to constructing the future and begin the hard work of designing a new paradigm to take the place of the old one. This is a time of creative exhilaration, challenge, and perhaps anxiety-because the discovery of a new paradigm that will be superior to the old is by no means assured and because the wrath of the defenders of the old is likely to be unleashed on those who dare propose an alternative. If the creation of a new paradigm succeeds, the group moves into area 4, where the new era develops and expands freedom and possibilities. (Of course, one must anticipate a time when the new liberating paradigm itself becomes confining and old.)” [Mclaren xiv-xv]

 

Recently, I have had (about two or three months ago) what I refer to as a ‘spiritual enema’, in which I took every ounce of dogmatic belief I had been indoctrinated with and threw every bit of it away. I became highly disconcerted due to unanswerable, challenging questions about the existence of suffering, reliability and inerrancy of the Bible, and everyday disgust with the way Christians conducted themselves.

 

I started to get really frustrated with Christians in the two bodies that I am a part of: Christians at ODU and Christians at Crossroads. I noticed that the bulk of our time is by far spent on becoming ‘better’ Christians, dealing with the tough things in life, learning more about Jesus and the Bible, and worshipping through music. I complained a lot and was a whiny, overly critical jerk. (I still am, by the way.) I started questioning everything. Why, I asked, are there megachurches that have eight gazillion worship services? How many times can you sing songs about how much you love God and still get the same ‘buzz’? How much of what you’re doing is a pure emotional rush? Why am I not feeling the same emotion you are? Is your relationship with God better? Are you a better Christian than I am? Am I a Christian at all? (I still think that our American church needs to take a good, hard look at the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, but that is neither here nor there. Or is it? What if Christians not only read but actually lived the Bible?)

 

I lived in self-denial for a few months after I came back from Peru, convinced that the problem was my own fault and that I needed to shut up and accept things. That obviously did not prevail, and I had to come to grips with my walk with God was full of lies. Lies that I had been telling myself that things were ok, and lies to God, insincere prayers that were amazing lip service to Him but oddly similar to the prayer Jesus warns against in Matthew 6:7-“And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.”

 

Once I realized how fake I was being with God and myself, I had a crisis of belief and may or may not have become depressed. I abandoned all of my commitments and stayed in my apartment for the better part of a week, completely distraught because of how much I had learned was wrong.

 

I was forced to cling to my basic philosophical belief in God: that He is. Naturally following that are His omnipotence, His omnipresence (kind of), and His omniscience…but not His omnibenevolence, because that doesn’t have to be necessarily true…but I digress. From there, I took steps towards redefining and establishing my belief as to who Jesus was and what He was and what He did. I realized (painfully) that many of the things I have been taught were wrong. Many things were kind of off, but there were also flat out lies: things contradictory to Scripture, the early church, and common freaking sense.

 

I started reading like there was no tomorrow, reading, reading, reading; I spent hundreds of dollars on books, books with a variety of topics, ranging from theology to meditations on the Psalms to church history to practical living out of faith, which is what I will cover in this post…in just a second.

 

It was in this restructuring and rebuilding time that I finally started to realize grace. Not to take advantage of it, mind you, which is something I still struggle with, but more that it’s by grace that we able to do anything: breathe, walk around, and, most importantly, be in relationship with the Father. It revolutionized everything I did and everything I do. I still can’t get enough of it, but I digress again. I was realizing all this stuff about grace but at the same time reading more stuff that caused me a great mental anguish.

 

It all started when I began reading The Secret Message of Jesus, which focuses solely on the Kingdom teaching of Jesus. Its points severely challenged my recently renovated faith, because I painfully realized that I (along with my church and the Church) know about Jesus, but we don’t really follow Jesus. My idea of Jesus transformed from what He did to what He is doing. The active faith of people in the new monastic movement, xxxchurch.com, and Rob Bell and Mars Hill shook me to my core. Here it is: people within the Body pushing for an ongoing Reformation of the Church that is adaptive to context and strives to be His hands and feet, focusing on the idea that Jesus was not an evangelist, but rather, He came with a message that He lived.

 

This stuff made me uncomfortable at first, mostly because it was so new and fresh, but then I realized that the reason that it made me uncomfortable was because the emerging church takes the focus so far away from doctrine and puts it squarely on action. In doing so, it takes the focus off of what one knows and instead puts it on what one does. The reason it makes me uncomfortable is because I don’t want to see how much the way I’m living doesn’t line up with the teachings of Jesus.

 

An interesting note: a message from Rob Bell of his series ‘Jesus Wants to Save Christians’ covers hell. It points out that the times Jesus talked about hell, He was always speaking to either the religious leaders of the time or His followers. Never once to the Gentiles or pagans or whatever. Always to religious people. There is a reason Jesus did this. People’s lives aren’t lining up with the words they profess so proudly. I am as guilty of this as any.

 

All that being said, however, I still am having an impossibly hard time reconciling our need for Jesus with action, social justice, and the like. I am having a difficult time realizing our need for grace (moreover, the need for everyone of grace) in light of this living the Gospel. Needing the Gospel vs. living the Gospel. Evangelism vs. working against social injustice. Matthew 28 vs. Isaiah 1.

 

I know that it’s a place I’ll never reach (the right balance), and, right now, it’s giving me a huge headache. But I think that as soon as I get the answer, like Bell says, “If we do definitively put God into words, we have at that moment made God into something God is not.” I think this is a conversation that is not only pretty darn interesting, but it is also a pretty necessary one for the Church to be having.