Brian McLaren in conversation with the Faculty, Staff, and Students of SSU.

On Wednesay, October 18, BRIAN McLAREN ( A Generous Orthodoxy, A New Kind of Christian, and other works ) addresed the Faculty, Staff, and students of SSU in a time of informal discussion on topics ranging from spiritual development to modern politics. Biran is a frequent guest on television, radio, and news media programs, and has appeared on many broadcasts including Larry King Live, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, and Nightline. His work has also been covered in Time (where he was listed as one of American's 25 most influentialevangelicals), Christianity Today, Christian Century, the WashingtonPost, and in many other print media.

HEAR a portion of Brian's conversation with SSU, courtesy of Joel Mason's podcast site >>>

READ some selected portions of transcript from Brian's dialogue with SSU below:

 

THREE CALLINGS

All of you are going to have a choice, I think, of three places to invest your life and energy.  I don’t think one is good and the other bad; I think all three are good, but it’s probably smart to have some idea of which one you are setting out on. Later on you might change paths, and before you’re done here, you might do all three. But here would be as I would define it, the three:   

One would be to take care of Christians in the Christian sub-culture of whatever denomination.  That is a legitimate and holy task because human beings are precious, and if you take care of people in a little congregation somewhere and the congregation never grows and it never is famous,  but you faithfully love those people, that is a very good way to spend your life, and if that is your calling, that little territory where you’re able serve can be a little taste of the Kingdom of God if you do it well—that’s a holy calling, and I would never ever want to disparage that at all—thank God if that’s your calling. 

Then, I think on the other extreme are the people who do what St. Patrick did and in a sense you become transgressive Christians by breaking some of the boundaries and limits that contemporary Western Christian culture reflects.  Now, of the few things I know about your school you have a deep interest in exposing people to the world and not just being locked into Western culture, and I think that part of what will happen and part of what already is happening and some of the foment and controversy that I am involved in is that white, western people have started to realize what people of colour have been saying and non-western people have been critiquing about the Christian faith: [namely] that it is a “white man’s religion” and probably “white” and “man” are both the right words. And so, from feminist voices, to African theology, to black theology, to eco-feminist theology—many, many different areas-people are saying “it was wrong,” they are saying “it is not right in the future for the Christian faith to be a white man’s religion.”… And I think that this is another option to which some of you perhaps will be called, or maybe against your will will be thrust—exploring out Christian faith in this new context. If you are white, you will be joining other people who are already doing that…So some of you will be called, perhaps into that direction and into that world, and that is a legitimate calling, not an easy one, fraught with danger, but everything’s dangerous.

And then, I think probably there is a third calling that comes in between the two, and those are the people who will try to make sure that these two callings can keep communicating and will try to listen to both sides and maybe run interference with the one so that the other is not excluded and vilified, and maybe run interference with the other so that the former isn’t also seen as passé and all the rest.

 

GROWING UP BY GROWING OUT

This is to me how the church progresses: it doesn’t progress in a linear fashion where you have this stage and then we are done with that and then you start this stage and then we are done with that. It progresses like a tree, and the tree grows taller by actually growing fatter. Like at the tips of the branches next spring, a new layer will form which will make the tree a half-inch taller, but really its grown taller by adding a new ring, and the new ring embraces everything that is within it. And I think this is how the church grows: we always embrace everything in the past including our atrocities and failures. Then we add the next ring, and some day, another ring…

 

EMBRACING THE LARGER "WE"

The biblical story has some “we” groups that are nested inside of one another. And the littlest “we” group maybe is our family, and then there’s the “we” group maybe of our community, or let’s say our faith community and the “we” group or our denomination and then the “we” group maybe of Christianity. But there are larger “we” groups:  there’s the “we” group of our countrymen and there’s the “we” group of human beings.  There’s the “we” group of living beings (St. Francis had this right: brother fox and sister cricket) and then there’s a bigger group of other created things (brother sun; sister moon). There is also the “we” group of all creation—things that we call gravity, and electricity—in a sense we have a relationship with those things: I mean, we’re part of them and they’re part of us. And then the biggest we group of all which in a sense —here’s a bizarre thought—is bigger than God, is the Kingdom of God, which is God is all of God’s fullness and creation.  And you might say “well, nothing can be bigger than God” and in one sense you might be right, but in another sense there is a “we” and I think that that’s the “we” Jesus is talking about when he proclaims “the Kingdom of God.” And one of the ways that human sin operates is when any of the smaller “we” groups down to the ultimate smallest “we” group which is me. (You might say “Why is that a “we” group? Well, I can talk to myself! but it’s where I talk to myself and I divorce myself from the community—of all of these other communities.) So to me, part of the call to repent (which means rethink everything and realize that the Kingdom of God is at hand) is Jesus invitation to rejoin the larger “we.” And frankly, I think that this is a place where when Christianity converted the Roman Empire it was actually converted by the Roman Empire…[for example,] most of us don’t realize this, but one part of that was anti-Semitism, and the roots of anti-Semitism in Christian history are so deep—it was only two or three generations ago where I think it was the norm. And maybe your parents or grandparents got beyond that, but it was incredibly normative, just at white racism was incredibly normative in my country, at least among Christians, and all kinds of them still exist. All of that’s to say, what if now, just as Christianity co-existed with slavery for so long, what if now it’s time for Christianity to outgrow this kind of western-centric “we-ism” and embrace the larger community? That would be one way to talk about it, and we don’t even have to talk about relativism and absolutism to get to that place.