Someone once told me a blog is like an email to your friends. Email is for noobs - the internet geek simply posts a blog for his friends to read via RSS.
So... this is for my small group leader Jeff - they're the Brian McLaren videos I was telling you about. This is also a test to see if JHop really logs on to MyChurch like he claims :)
McLaren talking about Jesus' secret message of the Kingdom of God and what that means for us to live in and manifest that Kingdom:
BMac talking about justice (aka righteousness), how power is exercised in love, and how God sides with the weak and the poor (and not the powerful)
At the Integral Mission conference, BMac mentioned how he has a love/hate relationship with Christian music. Here he explains why:
Thought-provoking, radical, and well-done videos. One of these days, I'll actually finish reading one of McLaren's books. Until that time, I will just surf YouTube for my literary needs :)
Well, one way that this blog differs from email is that many others besides JHop can read and comment on what has been written. Hopefully my comments will not be intrusive somehow!
I watched the videos, read the Wikipedia article on McLaren, and some other articles (including this very helpful one in Modern Reformation magazine by D.A.Carson) about McLaren and the Emergent Church Movement. I have not read any of his books, though (although I did read this interview of him), so those that know him and his writings well may have a better sense of his overall message. A couple of key things strike me, however:
1. He's clearly reacting to a number of problems that he sees in "traditional"/"Evangelical" churches. Being philosophically aware, he believes that an important problem of Evangelicalism is its embrace of modernism, and he believes that the antidote is a postmodernepistemology that is not equivalent to relativism. This thinking is expressed particularly in the videos when he is talking about "power" and "manipulation" and in that interview when he says, "but we haven’t asked some important and hard questions – not about postmodernity, but about modernity and the degree to which our theology and understanding of the gospel have been distorted or narrowed or made 'gospel lite' by modernity." I think that he does point to many important problems in "traditional" churches. But, I'm not sure where he and others in the movement want to go---especially given his comments in the interview (e.g., "For all the work we’ve done and all the progress we’ve made, we still have so far to go...We’ve made a beginning, but we’ve got a long way to go. And of course, once we get to the Jordan River, that’s an ending, but it’s also another beginning, you know?").
2. McLaren has generated a lot of controversy with some of the things that he has said, and it's not just a matter of his pointing out certain selfishnesses that we religious people have. Just what is "Jesus' secret message of the Kingdom of God," and what does McLaren think it means "for us to live in and manifest that Kingdom"? As the Wikipedia article explains, there are a number of "traditional Evangelical" voices who are sounding alarms about his views regarding the Bible (in particular, the Gospel)---pointing to statements like the one he made in that interview regarding justification. Are they taking what he's saying out of context? In the first and second videos, I heard a lot about "following Jesus" by taking care of our neighbors in certain ways, voting in certain ways, etc. He seems there to have in mind certain parts of the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. But, I didn't hear anything in particular about Jesus being God in the flesh and dying on a cross for our sins, about forgiveness, life and salvation being freely given to us on account of this, about how we live in anticipation of Jesus' return when we will fully experience the glory of the Kingdom. I'm sure that McLaren believes in all of that, but does he think that this somehow is less central to the Gospel than our "manifesting the Kingdom" now by what we do?
I am interested in what people who know and like McLaren's views have to say.
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