In A New Kind of Christian, Brian McLaren writes a “philosophical dialogue” in the form of a work of fiction. In this work, the character Dan is wrestling with leaving the ministry. Dan is helped through these struggles by Neo, a former minister himself and a high school science teacher. While McLaren cautions against any type of direct equivalency between him and the character Dan, it is clear from his foreword that Dan represents the types of struggles that McLaren underwent in his role as a minister.
The basic problem that Dan faces is being a minister in a modern expression of the church in an increasingly postmodern world. Before he encounters Neo, Dan has no language to express the discontinuity he is feeling. He merely knows that he is tired of criticism, tired of fighting for every small change, and that he has begun to question his “fundamentalism.” Here McLaren taps into the feelings of many ministers who would undoubtedly identify with Dan’s frustration and confusion. As Dan listens to Neo’s philosophical discourses on the shift from modernism to postmodernism, Neo challenges his fundamentalism even further.
Neo is relentless in seeking to shift Dan’s thinking about the most “fundamental” aspects of the Christian faith. God is mysterious and not to be controlled. The Bible is not an answer book, but a family story that shapes our identity. Evangelism is not a sales pitch, but an invitation to a journey. The church does not exist for its own aggrandizement; instead, it exists for the mission of God. These are corrections to modern distortions of the faith. Dan’s other criticisms of hypocrisy, selfishness, and lack of genuine concern for the lost are problems that have existed in the church throughout the ages.
I have at times felt some, though not all, of Dan’s frustrations. Our fellowship was born in the 1800s in the height of modernism, and bringing about change in the congregations of which I have been a part has not been easy. I have considered church planting, due to its success in reaching lost people and the appeal of starting a church that is less resistant to change. At this point, however, I, like Dan, have decided to neither quit ministry nor destroy a church by moving too quickly; instead, I have opted for the “third route” of lovingly bringing about missional transformation in my current congregation.
Postmodernism upholds the importance of language, and one of the significant gifts that Neo gives Dan is a language to help him articulate and understand the shift in worldview that he is experiencing. This learning process for Dan is not smooth. At times, he is bewildered, frustrated, and angry. Neo has to learn when to press forward in shaping his views, and when to give him time to process. I must remember these lessons as I seek to help make our congregation become a more incarnational, missional church filled with “new kinds of Christians.”
