A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [112]
In the end, if this quest leads only to a reformation in our thinking and talking, it is not a new kind of Christianity at all, but just a variation on an old kind. The end of our quest is not simply better concepts or beliefs in our heads or hearts, although both have some instrumental value. The end of our quest is a better world in which God’s will is increasingly done. Similarly, stopping the dropout and decline rates among young people in the church has instrumental value, but our quest must aim higher. Our goal must be to see those young people put a vital, radical faith into vital, radical action, action for and with the poor, action on behalf of the planet, action that makes for peace.2
So our quest calls us first and foremost to nurture a robust spiritual life—not only a deep commitment to serve God, but also a deep desire to know and love God, to make room, as Gamaliel said, for God to be truly in us and in our quest. That means that we need as our models more than great thinkers and theologians; we also need great saints, women and men of the Holy Spirit, women and men who are full of God. Thankfully, we can look back in our tradition for the examples we need as we move forward.
For example, in the tradition of St. Patrick and the Celts, we can learn to arise each day in the real presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, knowing Christ beside, above, before, behind, and within us. And like Patrick, we can nurture a lifelong passion to bring the liberating good news of Jesus Christ to everyone we can and to do so, like Patrick, outside the bounds of the Roman Empire, so to speak.
Similarly, in the tradition of St. Francis and St. Clare, we can nurture an interior life with God that awakens our kinship with brother sun, sister moon, brother fox, and sister bird, not to mention brother leper and sister Muslim, Buddhist, or Jew. In the tradition of Martin Luther, we can find sustaining inner strength, so that we will not recant when under pressure, because our conscience is captive to God’s Word.3 Like Luther, we can learn to struggle with the versions of the faith we inherited without giving up on faith altogether, and we can discover what he called “a totally other face of the entire Scripture.”4
In the tradition of Menno Simons and the Anabaptists, we can learn to proceed less by loud disputation and bitter polemics and more by quietly building communities of peace and practice rooted in the teaching and example of Jesus. In the tradition of Julian of Norwich and St. Teresa of Avila and all the other mystics, we can learn to render ourselves vulnerable to the “favors of God”—those indescribable experiences that mock our dualisms and so saturate our imagination with abundance that they transcend our ability to convey the joy and wonder. In the tradition of St. John of the Cross, we can learn to survive and derive benefit from the soul’s dark night. In the tradition of the Wesleys, our hearts can be “strangely warmed,” and we can refuse to pit head, heart, and hand against one another. When head, heart, and hand come together (the intellectual, the experiential, and the volitional; the mind, the soul, and the strength), then faith, reason, and tradition will come together too, and personal and social holiness will be for us two expressions of one great love. In the tradition of the early Pentecostals, we can experience the fire of the Holy Spirit so powerfully that the dividing walls between races, classes, and denominations will burn away. Like them, we can create new forms and expressions