A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [3]
Along the way, I had briefly considered going into the Episcopal ministry and had joked with my then fiancée about what it would be like for her to tell her Catholic relatives she was marrying a priest. But on Friday afternoon of the weekend I was supposed to go on the “discernment retreat” with the bishop to talk about entering the seminary, I got cold feet. I loved God, and I loved the idea of serving God and helping people spiritually, but I didn’t feel like a great fit for the religious bureaucracy and politics that are an inescapable part of the life of a religious professional. I thought I could do more good for the spiritual cause outside the institutional church than inside of it. So I became a teacher and felt very fulfilled living out my faith in the environment of a secular university.
While I was teaching and finishing my master’s degree, my wife, Grace, and I started a little weekly dinner group. Every Thursday night we had homemade soup, fresh-baked bread, and good conversation about matters of faith and life. That dinner group morphed into an ongoing fellowship group, complete with a Bible study, a few songs with a guitar accompaniment, some prayer, and plenty of time at the end just to hang around and chat. Eventually from that fellowship group, a small nondenominational church grew, of which I was one of the lay leaders. A few years later, our leadership team began talking about the need for a full-time pastor. I was the natural one to take on the role: I was comfortable teaching, I knew the people, and since I was already living on a modest teacher’s income, it wouldn’t be hard for the little congregation to match my salary, so I was a bargain.
I asked Grace what she thought about it. “Well,” she said, raising four fingers, one at a time, “you’re already a full-time husband, a full-time father, a full-time college English instructor, and a part-time volunteer church leader. If you increase that last one to full-time, I don’t think it’s going to be sustainable anymore. My guess is that you can continue any three out of those four long-term and survive.” Then she added, “That means one thing has to go. You pick.” Thus came my call to ministry, at least as I remember it.
Right around this time, I read a book that gave the statistics for what I had seen every day at my secular university: the church was losing touch with “normal people.” Its preachers had forgotten how to speak their language.1 Its pastors didn’t understand their questions, doubts, and concerns. Its leaders only knew how, as the old cliché goes, to preach to the choir, and they preoccupied themselves with institutional maintenance. About 40 percent of Americans, the book explained, attend church regularly, and 60 percent don’t, but the former number is shrinking and the latter growing. When you talk to the people who walk down the aisle at a Billy Graham crusade to make a “first-time Christian commitment,” who say something called the “sinner’s prayer” in response to an evangelistic invitation, or who join a new church, you discover that over 90 percent of them are already lifelong churchgoers. That means that over 90 percent of the so-called new converts come from the 40 percent of the population who are already “in the choir,” and less than 10 percent come from the “unchurched majority.” So we have a lot of Baptists becoming Pentecostals, and Catholics becoming Episcopalians, and so on, but surprisingly few “unchurched people” getting connected with the church.
That book connected with my own sense of calling. So when I became a full-time pastor, I didn’t want to forget about the spiritual seekers who came from the “nonchurch majority.” I wanted