A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [13]
10. The what-do-we-do-now question: How can we translate our quest into action? It’s one thing to consider these questions in the private forum of one’s mind, but when we begin engaging others in conversation about these questions, there can be many unintended negative consequences—including division, disruption, and distraction in our beloved congregations, denominations, families, and circles of friends. So we ask: What happens next? How can we on this quest pursue truth and hope in a loving spirit when our quest is opposed or ignored by many of our fellow Christians? How can we learn from history to introduce needed new ideas without also introducing needless division? How does our search for a new kind of Christianity relate to a renewed kind of spirituality? What new questions open up for us once we begin grappling with these? How can the kind of reflection we have engaged in be translated into reflective practice and action?
These ten questions are, to recall Dylan’s epic line, blowing in the wind around us. Even if we’ve never heard them articulated, they have been hovering just outside our conscious awareness. They trouble our conventional paradigms of faith just as the ten plagues of frogs, gnats, flies, and hail plagued the Egyptians in the Exodus story. When people tell us to be quiet and accept the conventional answers we’ve been given in the past, many of us groan like the ancient Hebrews when they were forced to produce bricks without straw. We cry out to God, “Please set us free!” We cry out to preachers and theologians, “Let us go! Let us find some space to think, to worship God outside the bars and walls and fences in which we are constrained and imprisoned. We’ll head out into the wilderness—risk hunger, thirst, exposure, death—but we can’t sustain this constrained way of thinking, believing, and living much longer. We need to ask the questions that are simmering in our souls.”
So we set out on our quest, our exodus, driven out of familiar territory and into unmapped terra nova by ten questions stirring in our hearts. In the coming chapters we’ll consider each question and then some provisional, preliminary, incomplete, but promising responses that I’ve cobbled together or gleaned from others on the journey. Responses, please remember, are not answers: the latter seek to end conversation while the former seek to stimulate more of it. The responses I offer are not intended as a smash in tennis, delivered forcefully with a lot of topspin, in an effort to win the game and create a loser. Rather, they are offered as a gentle serve or lob; their primary goal is to start the interplay, to get things rolling, to invite your reply. Remember, our goal is not debate and division yielding hate or a new state, but rather questioning that leads to conversation and friendship on the new quest.
In each of our ten responses, I will present a close reading of at least one biblical passage. Through those biblical passages, I will be seeking a passageway, a passage out of our conventional paradigm and a passage into new territory, new possibilities. In this way, we’ll be making passages through passages.
So may our quest begin.
3
A Prayer on the Beach
It’s 1620, and we’re in Delfshaven, Holland. A group of pilgrims are about to embark on a quest. They have already had a hard road. They have defied religious authorities in their native England to stay true to their conscience and seek the truth. They have relocated to Holland, and now they are preparing to relocate again. In a few moments, they will take their greatest risk ever, setting sail to the New World in hopes of establishing a new community there, a community in which they can live their faith in honesty, openness, and freedom.
Their pastor, John Robinson, hopes to join them at a later date.