"A New Kind of Christianity": Between Something Real and Something Wrong

This is the third in a nascent series of posts on Brian McLaren's astonishing quest for "A New Kind of Christianity."

Brian's honesty in the Preface carries over into his first chapter, Between Something Real and Something Wrong.

Place: a small town in England

Event: a gathering of lay people and clergy

Time: mid-morning coffee break

"I look out the window and see four concerned people rushing from car to car in the car park ("parking lot" for Americans), hurriedly placing a sheet of canary yellow paper under windshield wipers. The leaflet warns participants about this 'controversial religious leader' . . ." (p. 2).

Later, after the event has finished, Brian pulls a leaflet away from its windshield, "and the joy of the day gives way to a feeling of tension. There's a buzzing in my head, a churning in my heart, a heaviness in my limbs. Expansion inside the building, contraction outside. Hope in the conference center, fear in the car park. Open hearts among participants, clenched teeth among critics. Enthusiasm and encouragement in the greetings five minutes ago, suspicion and accusation on the canary yellow flyer in my hand. Again, I wonder to myself, "How did I get into this swirl of controversy?" (pp. 2-3)

I can relate. For me, the churning happens in my gut. And I think of Jesus' trial in St. John's Gospel, when Pilate shuttles Jesus back and forth from conversation inside his headquarters to cries of crucifixion outside in the courtyard. Sometimes, of course, the expansion and contraction, hope and fear, open hearts and clenched teeth, enthusiasm and suspicion, encouragement and accusation, alternate not between inside and outside but within the walls of our houses of worship.

And sometimes those alternating realities happen within us. Brian describes a time in his life when "Morning after morning I woke up in a brutal tension between something real and something wrong in Christian faith. The sense of something real kept me in my ministry and in Christian faith; the sense of something wrong kept me looking for a way out. Somehow, by the grace of God, I held on to the something real long enough to begin to figure out what the something wrong might be. And eventually I began to get some sense of what to do to disentangle the one from the other, to hold to the something real and let the other go" (pp. 7-8).

I'm glad he did, because A New Kind of Christianity is the result of his disentangling and holding on to the Something Real.

Comments

[Jack+, LC]

I agree. I am currently in the middle of an inner turmoil around these same issues. Not necessarily because I haven't struggled with them, I have. But because I sense something bigger on the horizon. I'm wondering if the 'church' is too badly broken. And, honestly, I'm wondering if what we consider the 'church' today shouldn't have ever come into existence.

[Bill Roberts]

Thanks, Jack, for your comment. I gather you may be an Episcopal priest also, with the + after your name. If so, you'll understand and probably expect my response!

1. If the church is a human institution only, then it's evidently too badly broken to be fixed. If it's the Body of Christ, then brokenness is its vocation and by his wounds we are healed.

2. The church is a fact in the only universe we know, so whether or not it "should" have come into existence, it did. Like a lot of other things we might wish didn't exist and yet do exist!

Response?