A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [107]
Evangelism would cease to be a matter of saving souls from a bad ending in the Greco-Roman soul-sort narrative. It would cease to be a proclamation of the superiority of the Christian religion. It would no longer require hellfire-and-brimstone scare tactics or slick promotional campaigns, as if Jesus and his gospel were products under exclusive proprietary licensure to the Christian religion, to be sold to customers using religious infomercials and catchy jingles and, if all else fails, threats of ECT (not electroconvulsive therapy, but eternal conscious torment).
No, instead, a reborn, postimperial evangelism would mean proclaiming the same good news of the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. It would mean seeking to do so in the manner Jesus proclaimed it—in word and deed, through art and teaching, in sign and wonder, with clarity and intrigue, with warning and hope.18 It would mean recruiting people to defect from destructive ways and join God in the missio dei (“mission of God”), a decentralized, grassroots, spiritual-social movement dedicated to plotting goodness and saving the world from human evil—both personal and systemic. It would invite people into lifelong spiritual formation as disciples of Jesus, in a community dedicated (as we’ve seen) to teaching the most excellent way of love, whatever the new disciple’s religious affiliation or lack thereof.
This kind of evangelism would celebrate the good in the Christian religion and lament the bad, just as it would in every other religion, calling people to a way of life in a kingdom (or beautiful whole) that transcends and includes all religions. Yes, it would welcome people into communities of faith in which they would experience formation in the way of Jesus, and yes, you could call these communities Christian churches if you’d like, although you could call them other things too. But whatever you call these communities, they would be interested in breaking out of the cocoons of Christianity that were spun within the Greco-Roman narrative, governed by a constitutional reading of Scripture, oriented around violent and tribal views of God, and so on.
To get there, we will have to take a fresh look at the “reflex verses” that are used to justify the dismissive or combative attitude of many Christians toward their neighbors of other religions—beginning with John 14:6.19 If we do so, we will see the painful but liberating irony that John 14:6 has nothing—absolutely nothing—to say to the questions it is commonly quoted to answer. One would think that the text reads like this:
You should be very troubled, because if you believe in God, but not me, you will be shut out of my Father’s house in heaven, where there are a few small rooms for the few who have correct belief…. Then Thomas said to him, “Lord, what about people of other religions or no religion at all? Will they go to heaven after they die?” Jesus said to him, “I am the only way to heaven, and confessing the truth about me is the only truth that will get you to life after death. None will go to heaven unless they (a) personally understand and believe a clearly defined message about me, (b) personally and consciously ask me to come into their heart, (c) disavow any other religious affiliation, and (d) affiliate with the new religion I’m starting and naming after myself. None can come to God unless they get by me first.” (not John 14:1–6)
But Jesus’s actual meaning is very different, because it comes in response to a very different question. The question is not a cosmic, doctrinal question like, “What about people of other religions?” or “Is Jesus the only way to heaven?”20 Rather,