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[Back to index of May 2008 articles] Evangelist Brian McLaren to Speak Here June 7 By Jim Naughton
“Evangelism is not only for evangelicals,” says Brian McLaren, the best-selling author who is among the most prominent evangelists in the country. “There are a lot of people out there who would really like some spiritual guidance,” he adds, and the Episcopal Church is in an excellent position to provide it. Evangelism “is not sales and marketing,” McLaren says. “It’s taking the role of spiritual consultant. I think that has a lot more integrity for Episcopalians, and is really a lot more needed.” McLaren, who founded the thriving Cedar Ridge Community Church near Laurel, will give the keynote address at the diocese’s Evangelism Conference at 9 a.m. June 7 at the 4-H Youth Conference Center, 7100 Connecticut Avenue, Chevy Chase. He says it may include “a preview” of the presentation he will make to the bishops of the Anglican Communion at the Lambeth Conference in July. The conference also will feature a workshop on personal faith sharing led by the Revs. Heather Kirk-Davidoff and Nancy Wood-Lyczak, authors ofTalking Faith: An Eight-Part Study on Growing and Sharing Your Faith, and a how-to session on parish communications and marketing, led by Carol Barnwell, director of communications for the Episcopal Diocese of Texas. In his keynote address, McLaren plans to draw on one of his early books,More Ready than You Realize: The Power of Everyday Conversations, which is built around a lengthy correspondence he had with a young woman who was finding her way toward a religious commitment but had reservations about Christianity in general and the church in particular. Their letters offer a case study in how to discuss spiritual matters with seekers and doubters. Such conversations are essential, McLaren says, if mainline Protestant churches are to respond effectively to the decline in membership that has beset them for much of the last 40 years. The church, he says, is “struggling against a leftover mindset from pre-1968: ‘We are an institution of society.’ What we have to realize is we are living in a post-Christian culture. We have to move toward a new identity, more as a missional society than an institution. The paralysis comes when people think that institutional accomplishments matter more than a deeper shift of which every person is an agent.” “The institution is fading,” McLaren says, “but that doesn’t mean the mission of the church is fading. We still need welcoming communities to help people find their identities as disciples.” In calling people to discipleship, however, McLaren says the church must overcome “a 1960s liberalism so afraid of colonialism that it is politically incorrect to have a message you believe is good news that you want to share.” Despite the challenges of declining membership and divisions over the morality of same-sex relationships, McLaren sees signs of health in the Episcopal Church and other mainline Protestant denominations. “I am more hopeful about mainline churches than I am the evangelical ones,” he says. “Obviously everyone has problems, but once over the road blocks I think there are really great possibilities,” he says. “I think there is a renaissance happening in liturgy, an integration of liturgy in Christian formation and a contemporary approach to spirituality rooted in liturgy, not dogmatic systems.” The Episcopal Church with its deep liturgical roots, Celtic and Benedictine spiritual traditions, and its emphasis on common worship, rather than uniform standards of belief, is well positioned to respond to this trend, McLaren says. Citing a study by the Barna Group, a research and strategy firm that works closely with evangelical organizations, he says the Episcopal Church’s openness to gays and lesbians may be appealing to people in their teens and 20s. In his recent book,Un-Christian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity and Why it Matters, author David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group surveyed “outsiders” and “churchgoers” between the ages of 16 and 29, and found that 91 percent of “outsiders” and 80 percent of “churchgoers” identified Christians as “anti homosexual.” Eighty-seven percent of outsiders and 52 percent of churchgoers thought Christians were “judgmental.” McLaren is most closely associated with the so-called “emergent” church movement, a non-denominational and sometimes cross-denominational phenomenon that has garnered attention by holding innovative services in unusual venues. He is on the board of directors of Emergent, an informal leadership group of the movement, serves as a board chair for the D.C. based Christian social justice movement Sojourners/Call to Renewal, and is a founding member of Red Letter Christians, a group of communicators seeking to broaden and deepen the dialogue about faith and public life. McLaren says that while the media frequently refers to the emergent movement as untraditional, it actually seeks to rework ancient Christian practices for contemporary audiences. “There’s Anglican-emergent, Methodist-emergent. I think there is some real energy there,” he says. However, he adds that there is less emergent activity in Washington than in other large cities, perhaps, he says, because people come to Washington to claim a place within its institutions rather than to create an alternative to them. “Across the board things are pretty entrenched,” he says. “I think a lot of the jobs in Washington are plum positions, and get people a little more protective. The emergent movement is really something that happens at the margins.” McLaren’s most recent book is Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises and a Revolution of Hope. He has several Web sites, including brianmclaren.net and deepshift.org. Register Online today for the Evangelism Conference! [Back to index of May 2008 articles]
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