A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [124]
F. Preach the Bible. I’ve tried to show in these pages examples of how the Bible can be read to give birth to a new kind of Christianity, just as it has been read to defend various old kinds. I’m convinced that our quest here is on the side of the Bible wisely read and applied. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt has explained, nearly all conversations depend on five main lines of moral reasoning: fairness, compassion, tradition, in-group loyalty, and purity. Liberals or progressives typically rely on the first two only, and conservatives on all five.16 This helps explain why conservatives tend to think of progressives as less moral: they seem to run on two cylinders instead of five.17
If we are going to help more people embark on our quest, we need to use all five lines as we preach and teach from the Scriptures. Yes, we need to affirm that a new kind of Christianity is dedicated to fairness and compassion—themes that resonate on every page of the Bible. But we also need to show—as I hope I have done in these pages—that what we seek is more true, not less, to our primal living tradition as found in Scripture. And rooted in the Bible, we can proclaim that the group loyalty that is most Godlike and Christlike (and Pauline, recalling the gospel question) is loyalty to the wide come-on-in-group of all God’s creation. And we can promote what Scripture presents as the highest kind of purity—purity of heart, motives, mind, and soul, recalling Jesus’s words, that the purity that counts depends not on what we take in our bodies, but what comes out of our hearts (Matt. 15:10–11). We will find, at every turn, that in light of our quest, the Bible comes alive in ways it never did in the old paradigms.
G. Employ experiential learning. Yes, preachers must preach toward the desired future drawing from Scripture, but many people won’t “get it” until they also go through an “abductive experience,” an experience that helps them see in a new way. Mission trips often create these experiences by exposing people to a world of great need and injustice, as do vision visits (where you visit another church to experience what they’re doing). Reading groups (using books like this one) can be important, but the experience of well-facilitated interaction is at least as important as the content of the book being read, and the interaction is best followed by action. Especially powerful are listening teams—groups that form to listen to people they would not normally listen to. For example, your church’s leadership team could take four evenings to which people who have dropped out of church would be invited—the young adult children of members and their friends are a good place to start. Your team’s job would be to listen, to ask questions, to draw out deeper understandings of why people left—and to do so without judgment or defensiveness of any kind.18 Then the team would reflect on their responses, leading to some sort of creative action. This kind of listening exercise could do more to help a congregation change than attending five conferences and reading twenty books.
H. Keep your short-term expectations low and your long-term hopes high. The systemic institutional forces that oppose quests for change are strong, and they almost always win some of the time. In so doing, they test the ideas and characters of change agents and weed out all but the strongest and most enduring. So we on this quest for a new way of being followers of Christ should expect setbacks and mistakes, opposition and misunderstanding, conflict and discouragement