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McLaren: 'It's Not All About You'
By Bob Smietana
ROSEMONT, IL (February 6, 2004) - "It's all about you." That's the message
that most of us receive every day from advertisers and marketers who
want us to buy their products.
Unfortunately, said author and pastor Brian McLaren, that's what most
people believe the Christian faith is all about. Instead of Christianity
being a life of service devoted to God and others, Christianity has
become "just information about how to go to heaven after you die,"
McLaren said.
And once you know how to get to heaven, Christianity is about making you
happy. "God is just focused on making sure you have a nice day," said
McLaren.
After spending several sessions talking to Evangelical Covenant Church
pastors attending the 2004 Midwinter Conference about the effects of
postmodernism on the church, McLaren turned his attention Thursday
evening to an essential flaw in modern Christianity - the lost art of
disciple-making.
The gospel has become "all about me," he said. And to accentuate his
point, McLaren read a slightly altered version of a familiar passage
from the Gospel of John. "For God so loved me that he sent his
only begotten son so that if I would believe in him, I
would not perish but have life in heaven after death. For God sent his
son into the world not to condemn the world, but to save me."
"That is not John 3:16," McLaren said, "but I fear, brothers and
sisters, that if we were to sneak into everybody's Bible and change it,
not too many people would notice. And this misreading of John 3:16 may
more accurately represent what many, many Christians actually believe."
This misreading of the Gospel of John is an example of what sociologist
Leslie Newbiggin has called "the greatest heresy in monotheism," said
McLaren. The world's three great monotheistic faiths - Judaism,
Christianity and Islam - all trace their beginning back to Abraham. In
Genesis, God promised to bless Abraham and to make him "a great nation"
and that "all nations of the world will be blessed through you."
While these great faith's embrace the first part of Abraham's call -
God's promise to bless him" - they ignore the second half of the call to
be a blessing to all the people of the world, said McLaren. "We can have
this idea that the world exists for the (benefit) of the church," he
said. "We look at the world as the source of raw materials to bring into
the church."
That approach is completely wrong, argued McLaren. The church and
Christians exist to bring God's blessing to the world, to be "the hands
and feet of God, bringing God's love to the world." To do this, said
McLaren, the church needs to recapture the art of making disciples - not
converts, or Christians, or even "church people." While getting people
to make decisions for Christ is essential, he said, it's just the first
step.
"We have turned the starting line into a finish line," he said. Building
on the analogy of a road race, McLaren argued that churches often line
new people up at the starting line, and then "the gun goes off and they
go one inch forwards and then stare down at the ground." Becoming a
Christian is not the end of the story, he added, it's just the beginning
of becoming someone whose life is formed to the image of Christ.
To learn how make disciples, we need to follow the example of Christ our
master who gathered followers around him and taught them - by word and
by his actions - how to have abundant life or life to the fullest, said
McLaren. Those disciples then passed that knowledge and experience on to
their disciples, beginning a process of spreading the Christian faith to
the whole world.
To further make his point, McLaren recalled that he had recently seen an
article on the attempts by modern scientist to unravel the mysteries of
Stradivarius violins. Even with the most advanced technology, we cannot
replicate the sound of Stradivarius' violins.
We will never replicate those violins, said McLaren, because the art of
making them has died out. It wasn't just the genius of Stradivarius that
made his instruments great. It was his own skill and knowledge added to
the knowledge passed on by generation after generation of master
violinmakers.
To make disciples, we need to recapture this kind of approach - sharing
both the knowledge of the Christian faith and the lived out experience
of two thousand years of Christian tradition, said McLaren. Our churches
need to become "disciple-making communities" that "form people who want
to be part of a community that expresses God's saving love to the
world," he said.
In closing, McLaren offered some advice based on his studies of some of
the practices on Medieval Christian monasteries, where the art of
disciple making was treasured and lived out for hundred of years. There
are three essential stages of those practices, he said:
- The "purgative stage," where we try and rid our lives of the
practice of sins like greed, lust and pride - "or money, sex, and power"
- The "illuminative stage," where we open up the windows of our lives
and let God's light in through worship, prayer, and devotional practices
- The "unitive stage," where we experience God's presence in our souls
and are able to bring his blessings to the world by living out God's
love. The "unitive stage" is also known as "theosis" - or what McLaren
called "getting a bad case of God."
And if there is anything the world needs now, it's people with a bad
case of God.
Copyright © 2008 The Evangelical Covenant Church. |
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