A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [80]
Congregationalists of all sorts (including most Baptists and charismatics), who have no qualms about starting new congregations, can simply go ahead and do so (especially if the church planters are willing to be bivocational and thus avoid the need to ask institutional headquarters for money).5 Savvy denominations of all types (and newly forming collaborative networks too) will find ways to create “free trade zones” and “R & D departments,” in which old rules and strictures don’t apply and emerging leaders can be given freedom (and, we could hope, some financial support) to experiment, learn, and create new kinds of congregations to express a new kind of Christian faith.6 These hopeful processes have already begun, and they continue the trajectory of development we see when we look at the big arc of church history.
Consider this diagram depicting the evolution of early Christian churches:
The first communities of disciples existed at the ground floor, so to speak, and over five centuries they developed increasing levels of organization, institutionalization, homogeneity, and hierarchy—especially as their bishops decided to remake the Christian movement into a mirror image of the Roman Empire after Constantine.7 By the sixth century, the first three levels had been completely engulfed within the fourth. But over the last five hundred years (since the Protestant Reformation), the Christian faith has experienced “downward mobility,” expressing itself in less hierarchical, less centralized, and less imperial forms and recapturing its earlier plurality of forms, as depicted in the following diagram:
Some see this as a division to be remedied, but there’s another way to see it: as diversification to be celebrated. What if the Christian faith is supposed to exist in a variety of forms rather than just one imperial one? What if it is both more stable and more agile—more responsive to the Holy Spirit—when it exists in these many forms? And what if, instead of arguing about which form is correct and legitimate, we were to honor, appreciate, and validate one another and see ourselves as servants of one grander mission, apostles of one greater message, seekers on one ultimate quest? That, I’d say, sounds like a new kind of Christianity.
But what would that one mission, message, and quest be? Around what one grand endeavor can we rally?8 What one great danger do people need to be saved from and, more positively, what one great purpose do they need to be saved for? Around what melody can we harmonize without trying to homogenize? Of many possible answers, there is one to which I am continually drawn, embarrassingly obvious and simple to understand, but also embarrassingly challenging to do: the church exists to form Christlike people, people of Christlike love. It exists to save them from the great danger of wasting their lives, becoming something less than and other than they were intended to be, gaining the world but losing their souls. When we ask, “What do we do about the church?” the first answer must be to rethink our core mission and to identify it in terms more or less like these.
When we are unlocked from our conventional paradigms regarding the biblical narrative, the Bible, God, Jesus, and the gospel, the formation of Christlike people of love naturally becomes the grand unifying preoccupation and mission of our churches. Churches, simply put, come to be communities that form Christlike people who embody and communicate, in word and