I'm embarrassed to admit that I just recently got around to reading Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian.I say that I'm embarrassed not because McLaren is such a dynamite Christian thinker, but because of the stir the emergent church has caused in evangelical circles in recent years. If you're an evangelical and you're paying attention - you've likely heard about the emergent church.
In this book, McLaren expresses the drivers behind the emergent phenomenon in a conversational narrative that is easy and enjoyable to read.
In A New Kind of Christian, McLaren exudes in many ways the same feelings I have toward the traditional church. A sense that the traditional church is still answering questions no one is asking anymore. A gnawing in my gut that we're never going to really make a dent in the Great Commission if we keep trying to do church the way we've always done it in the face of the postmodern world.
McLaren is ambiguous with regard to solutions, though. That ambiguity might be intentional and meant to align him more fully with the deeply ambiguous postmodern world.
Neo (the fictional emergent guru of the story) and I don't see eye to eye on the telos of Covenant and Kingdom, culminating in the very real New Jerusalem. But that in itself I can handle.
I appreciate McLaren's willingness to express his own disappointments in a rather candid fashion - disappointments that I share in many ways. I would prefer a prescription or two, though, rather than vague admonitions.
But that's why Neo would likely call me a "modern" - I'm looking for real answers rather than a postmodern shrug.
