A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [129]
And so, wherever that willingness to rethink has been squelched, wherever that sense of quest has been buried under convention and complacency, the Christian faith in all its forms is in trouble. But even there something is trying to be born. Even now, right here, among us, inside you, inside me. You may feel it as a curiosity, a desire for better answers than you inherited so far. You may experience it as frustration, knowing that there must be more to faith than you currently know. You may know it as hope, hope that God is seeking humble people whose hearts and lives can be the womb of a better future. You may be carrying this pregnancy now, with symptoms beginning to show—increasing love, joy, and peace; growing patience, kindness, and goodness; strengthening faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. In you, your family, your faith community, and circles of friends, among people of peace and faith everywhere, something is trying to be born, indeed, indeed.
For more information and resources related to this book, including links to related videos, music, discussion questions, and online discussion, please go to www.brianmclaren.net.
Notes
Chapter 1: Between Something Real and Something Wrong
1. Jim Peterson, Evangelism as a Lifestyle (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1985).
2. My book Finding Faith, later released as two short books, A Search for What Is Real and A Search for What Makes Sense (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007), attempts to articulate some of what I learned on this quest.
3. David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity…and Why It Matters (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2007).
4. The Church on the Other Side (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998).
5. Leonard Sweet’s Quantum Spirituality (Dayton, OH: United Theological Seminary, 1991) and Sally Morgenthaler’s Worship Evangelism (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1995) were especially helpful in my thinking.
6. See emergentvillage.com, cac.org, gocn.org, http://pagesperso-orange.fr/endirect/evangile-et-culture.html, www.lareddelcamino.net. Jonny Baker offers a good roundup of UK networks at http://jonnybaker.blogs.com/jonnybaker/2009/06/lancaster-linkage.html. Later, I became acquainted with the Asian network launched by Sivin Kit and friends (http://rohmalaysia.wordpress.com/) and the African network led by Claude Nikondeha and his wife Kelley Johnson (amahoro-africa.org). Now, hardly a month goes by in which I don’t hear about new networks forming around the world.
7. Most recently, Dave Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons’s UnChristian (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2007) and Robert Wuthnow’s After the Baby Boomers (Prince ton, NJ: Prince ton University Press, 2007) have been especially helpful.
8. See Michael Gerson’s “A Faith for the Nones,” available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/07/AR2009050703056.html.
9. Dan Kimball, a church planter and pastor, reported what many church planters were beginning to see in They Like Jesus but not the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007).
10. Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2008); Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009); Doug Pagitt, A Christianity Worth Believing (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008); Tony Jones, The New Christians (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008); Diana Butler Bass, A People’s History of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009); Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003); Hans Frei, “Response to ‘Narrative Theology’: An Evangelical Appraisal,” Trinity Journal 8 (spring 1987): 21–24; René Padilla and Tetsunao Yamamori, eds., The Local Church, Agent of Transformation: An Ecclesiology for Integral Mission (Oxford: Ediciones Kairos, 2004).
Chapter 2: The Quest and the Questions
1. I believe I originally