A New Kind of Christian - Brian McLaren

I have just finished Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian book. Brian McLaren is one of the key people in the Emergent Church movement. He is like the philosopher or sage of the movement. As such he cops a lot of criticism from those opposed to the Emergent movement.

This book is the first of a series where he explores some ideas through a story about a pastor in an evangalical church working through the issues that face many churches and many Christians. The story is essentially a conversation between Neo (Dan's new friend) and Dan (the pastor).

It is a very interesting and effective technique for looking at these issues.

There are a few key points that come out of the book for me. Whether they are in the book or whether I was just prompted to think about them... ah... I'm not sure. Anyway... here is a list...

1. Brian makes a very good argument for our society and culture being in a time of transition from one paradigm to another. He says we are moving from a modern paradigm to the post-modern paradigm. Regardless of labels, I tend to agree with him.
2. Brian is woolly about hell. While there is some ambiguity in the Bible, there are some key understandings about hell. Primary amongst these is you don't want to be going there.
3. Brian is fully correct that we, as Christians, should stop focusing on obsure theology issues like hell, and focus on living the core of Jesus' teaching. I am personally fully convicted on this account.
4. Likewise, we should shift our focus from getting people into heaven and focus on being a blessing to the nations and let Jesus deal with the admissions policy into heaven. This applies particularly in our relationships with other religions and other denominations, which evangelical Christians have been not so flash in relating to.
5. One of the key aspects of the Christian message is connected to being in community and all that this entails. The more I think about it, groups like the Armish have got it right with thei focus on family and neighbours. That said we still need to connect into our wider communities.
6. There is a degree of wooliness in what Brian says about the Bible and what it states. I agree that there is a lot of the Bible that is best undertood in the form of stories and then into principles. I think that it is easy to swing too far though. Some stuff is just straight out statements.
7. Related to 4, we are far better to get on living as Jesus did/would than sitting around arguing about it. The difficult side of this is for people who teach at church. We don't just need to live it, we need to communicate it in an official "representative of Jesus" like manner and that is hard.
8. I fully agree that we should be finding ways of being one church, without dividing lines between denominations.

This is an interesting book. Brian is a gifted writer. And he is on to something about the shape of being Jesus in a new paradigm being quite different to what has gone on for the last 50 years.