A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [79]
So perhaps for some readers, this is as far as you need to go for now. But for those who are ready to go through the doors we’ve unlocked and opened, it’s time to emerge and explore.
PART VI:
THE CHURCH QUESTION
16
What Do We Do About the Church?
Many if not most of our churches are perfectly designed and well equipped to promote and support the five paradigms we have questioned so far: the Greco-Roman narrative, the constitutional approach to the Bible, a vision of a tribal and violent God, a rather flattened view of Jesus, and a domesticated understanding of the gospel. When we unlock the gates of those paradigms and begin to emerge into new territory, we find this question waiting for us: What do we do about the church?
For a lot of people, the answer has been simple: they leave. Recent titles like A Churchless Faith, UnChristian, They Like Jesus but Not the Church, and Quitting Church tell the story.1 Just this morning, I met another person in this category—a dropout not only from Christian ministry, but from the church and very nearly, truth be told, from Christianity entirely. “They won’t let you ask questions,” he said. “How can you be alive if they won’t let you think?”
Yet local churches and denominations, we must acknowledge, play a vital role in the lives of millions of people around the world—very literally, churches save lives.2 Over the years I’ve seen this saving and unsaving drama playing out in the lives of many people.
I’ve heard stories of Catholics being saved from ritualism by becoming Pentecostal, Pentecostals being saved from emotionalism by becoming Presbyterian, Presbyterians being saved from rationalism by becoming Eastern Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox being saved from clericalism by becoming Baptist, and Baptists being saved from historical amnesia by becoming Catholic or Orthodox. Simple churches save people from complexity, and complex churches save people from simplicity. Political churches save people from an overly personal religiosity, and personal churches save people from an overly politicized religiosity. Exciting churches save people from boredom, and quiet churches save people from hoopla and hype. Around and around the cycle goes.
The folks who are successfully saved from something by a certain type of church or denomination generally stay in it, along with some others who get stuck there by birth or marriage or inertia or duty. (As a pastor, I always felt sorry for these poor people and wished for their sake—and sometimes mine—they could go elsewhere.) The folks who don’t find any particularly helpful kind of salvation from a church or denomination eventually leave, sometimes stomping out mad, but more often just drifting away bored. Sometimes they find a church that saves them from whatever their previous churches afflicted them with or disappointed them over, but increasingly they just drop out entirely, often swelling the hospitable ranks of the “spiritual but not religious.” Younger generations especially have been choosing the latter option lately; they just can’t figure out what they’re being saved from, or for, enough to stay.3 When enough church leaders wake up and smell the Ben-Gay, when they realize that their faith communities are shrinking and wrinkling and stiffening, they start to ask the church question very urgently: What are we going to do about the church? Behind their question is the very real fear that their beloved congregation or denomination could soon find itself on the red side of a spreadsheet and they could find themselves seeking to save the beloved church that has saved them.
Those who dedicate themselves to be agents of change in