A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [84]
Ah, more questions. And very good questions. These questions don’t render us passive theorists about the “future of the church,” producing and consuming speculations that we must compliantly prepare for or adjust to. These questions render us creative protagonists who have the power, through the Holy Spirit, to create a new future of the church as a school of love—which means a school of listening, dialogue, appreciative inquiry, understanding, preemptive peacemaking, reconciliation, nonviolence, prophetic confrontation, advocacy, generosity, and personal and social transformation. Anybody who thinks this is all soft and easy obviously has little experience in actually seeking to live this way and helping others to do so.
But understand this. I am not recommending we add to our to-do lists and pastoral job descriptions the burden of yet another crushing wish-dream or idealism—spiritual formation of Christlike people who follow the way of love. Nor am I recommending we start arguing with others that they should be doing this, why don’t they get this, and so on. Instead, I am recommending that some of us experiment with throwing out the other lists and starting over again, with this item as number one, knowing that there may be no need for a number two. Our quest for a new kind of Christianity, expressed on the local congregational level with this kind of mission, must then include a quest for new liturgies, lectionaries, calendars, and music (with lyrics that celebrate and embed the new paradigm, not the old one); new heuristics16 and curricula for children and youth as well as adults of all ages; new training and support structures for church leaders; and so on. If the current wineskins have been developed and finely molded to serve the old wine of a Greco-Roman, constitutional, tribal, non-kingdom-of-God-oriented Christianity, we shouldn’t be surprised that new wineskins will need to be created all in the service of the one thing that matters: forming people of Christlike love.
The one grand calling, I suggest, tells us what the church most truly is: it is a space in which the Spirit works to form Christlike people, and it is the space in which human beings, formed in Christlike love, cooperate with the Spirit and one another to express that love in word and deed, art and action.17 Where that happens, I believe church is happening, whatever the forms or structures, whatever the history or pedigree.
I passed over what are probably Paul’s best-known words in the 1 Corinthians. Those words should conclude this chapter, because they paint the portrait of the kind of Christlike person our churches are intended to form. They also describe the kind of Christlike leader who can assist in the conception, birth, and nurture of a new kind of Christianity, recalling Nemo dat quod non habet:
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends…. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (13:4–8, 13)
PART VII:
THE SEX QUESTION
17
Can We Find a Way to Address Human Sexuality Without Fighting About It?
I don’t want to be closed-minded or judgmental, but in good conscience I simply can’t approve of the lifestyle. I believe it’s a