A New Kind of Christian Part 1

This week is officially “Postmodern Christianity week” here at the Second Call. I just finished reading through A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren. Basically he is the spearhead behind a new “movement” called the emergent church. I had an entry earlier about this movement. This emerging church is the first real attempt that seems successful in bringing the church into the postmodern world. The book is actually more of a dialogue between two people, one is a struggling pastor and the other is an aged Jamaican, ex-pastor, high school science teacher. I didn’t like the extra personal stuff in the dialogue, so I have mined out the best concepts for this prose entry. But I did like the real questions that a man steeped in modernity had for someone struggling to bring postmodernity into the world. I have had the same questions as I struggled with my own faith in the last few years. This entry compares the difference between the current church and the emerging church. (note: his comments are italicized)
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Moderns often feel the need to put everything into nice neat categories, which is part of the problem. They believe that they could create a nice framework that would pigeonhole everything. But if you try to categorize this postmodern church and you succeed in creating a postmodern framework, I think you’ve just sabotaged it. We’re talking about a new kind of Christian, not the new kind or a better kind or the superior kind, just a new kind.

At various times he likens this transitional period to the time when the world went from the medieval to the modern period. It was difficult to be sure. But eventually, people realized that if they did not move forward, they would be left behind. McLaren poses two striking questions:

Will you continue to live loyally in a fading world, in the waning light of the setting sun of modernity? Or will you venture ahead in faith, to practice your faith and devotion to Christ in the new emerging culture of postmodernity?

Great thinkers like Luther both embraced and facilitated the change from medieval to modern, and yet remained true to the past. That is the tension and the greatest difficulty. How do you move ahead without alienating and ignoring all that has gone before you? If your desire is to forge ahead, McLaren gives a few things to keep in mind:

Don’t put your confidence in the institution of the church; put your confidence in God
Be open to new ideas and new interpretations of the faith
Don’t be too quick to criticize
Expect things to be messy
Keep going back to the Bible, but not with the standard interpretations blinding you to new interpretations
Try to sort out tradition from the real essentials of the gospel

Whether you are postmodern or not, I think those are guidelines are important in dealing with people in general, and especially people in the church. He concludes this sort of thinking with a challenge:

I want you to invest your lives not in keeping the old ship afloat but in designing and building and sailing a new ship for new adventurers in a new time in history, as intrepid followers of Jesus Christ.

How much are you building and how much are you maintaining? Are you beating the same old path down or are you blazing new ones?