This book by Brian D. McLaren is another truly pivotal vägmärk on my walk with the growing strangeness of my relationship with Christ's body, the Church - as I feel it probably has with a great many of my brothers, sisters and non-binary siblings in the community of us worldwide.
In it, he dedicates a chapter each to exploring why he can, in the fullness of gospel truth, consider himself to be each of the adjectives in the subtitle of the book: missional, evangelical, postprotestant/protestant, liberal, conservative, poetic/mystical, Biblical, charismatic, contemplative, fundamentalist, Calvinist, anabaptist, Anglican, incarnational, Methodist, catholic, green, emergent, depressed-yet-hopeful & unfinished: - many of these, which are used here as adjectival labels, are more commonly seen and adhered to as "in-group" border-maintenance tools by denominations, and though before reading this book and probably the main thing that led me to reading this book was a sneaking suspicion that if Jesus is truly God's son and the Church his body then humanly-constructed/maintained denominations are kind of a bullshit idea, having now read & digested it I think perhaps there is something else there, something deeper, weirder - so strange, beautiful, sad and perfect that only God could have planned it - that our endless splitting of hairs and ideologies in the bizarre evolutionary tree of Christian history has not led to an inevitably entropic end - but that each strand, each twig, let off freely to pursue its own inklings may do so within the full assurance of Jesus's goodness & promise, to someday, and I pray this might be soon but only God can say - to return home, to a Church unified, where the insights and perspectives of all may be reconciled in Truth and good faith to one another - all having something to share, much to learn, and a great deal more that actually unites them all that they can remind each other of in all joy.
It's with this book that I can in my brain-heart now rest easier in no longer feeling like I was properly "part" of the ideological-theological community I'd been inhabiting since my home-church joined it nor really a participatingly-up-to-speed part of the one that has since adopted me - I am in Christ, and the labels ultimately, while they don't entirely not matter, don't define me in my being in Christ - and as such I am free to see, and benefit from the insights of, any group that falls under any adjective one might think fit to append to their own particular cell in the great historical body of God's son. How liberating is that?
In it, he dedicates a chapter each to exploring why he can, in the fullness of gospel truth, consider himself to be each of the adjectives in the subtitle of the book: missional, evangelical, postprotestant/protestant, liberal, conservative, poetic/mystical, Biblical, charismatic, contemplative, fundamentalist, Calvinist, anabaptist, Anglican, incarnational, Methodist, catholic, green, emergent, depressed-yet-hopeful & unfinished: - many of these, which are used here as adjectival labels, are more commonly seen and adhered to as "in-group" border-maintenance tools by denominations, and though before reading this book and probably the main thing that led me to reading this book was a sneaking suspicion that if Jesus is truly God's son and the Church his body then humanly-constructed/maintained denominations are kind of a bullshit idea, having now read & digested it I think perhaps there is something else there, something deeper, weirder - so strange, beautiful, sad and perfect that only God could have planned it - that our endless splitting of hairs and ideologies in the bizarre evolutionary tree of Christian history has not led to an inevitably entropic end - but that each strand, each twig, let off freely to pursue its own inklings may do so within the full assurance of Jesus's goodness & promise, to someday, and I pray this might be soon but only God can say - to return home, to a Church unified, where the insights and perspectives of all may be reconciled in Truth and good faith to one another - all having something to share, much to learn, and a great deal more that actually unites them all that they can remind each other of in all joy.
It's with this book that I can in my brain-heart now rest easier in no longer feeling like I was properly "part" of the ideological-theological community I'd been inhabiting since my home-church joined it nor really a participatingly-up-to-speed part of the one that has since adopted me - I am in Christ, and the labels ultimately, while they don't entirely not matter, don't define me in my being in Christ - and as such I am free to see, and benefit from the insights of, any group that falls under any adjective one might think fit to append to their own particular cell in the great historical body of God's son. How liberating is that?
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