The conclusion to Brian McLaren’s first five questions was that God in Jesus has come to transform creation through the restoring power of the resurrection. His sixth question, almost inevitably, turns to the church and what we do about it in response to the answers offered to the first five. His first point is one that all of us have been witnessing in the West – for many who have been asking similar questions and issues of faith, their response to the church question is to leave, with the ranks of the ‘spiritual but not religious’ swelling greatly, especially among the young.

Reform

But because he still believes the church has an important role to play, McLaren is not prepared to abandon church. Rather he calls on it to reform. Looking at the history of the church he notices the shift away from hierarchical, centralised, imperial forms of church since the Protestant Reformation – in contrast to the period leading up to Constantine’s conversion in the 4th century where the church increasingly took on a centralised structure. While this shift away from a strong centre has been viewed by many as a division that needs to be put right, McLaren suggests that it is actually a diversification that needs to be ‘celebrated’.

Love

He then offers a unifying vision and purpose for all these diverse congregations and churches: ‘the Church exists to form Christ-like people, people of Christ-like love’. It is this love that transforms people into being like Jesus and also propels them into the world in order to transform it. Crucially, in order to achieve this, we need to be profoundly open to the Holy Spirit because it is through the Spirit that we become Christ-like.

McLaren acknowledges that accepting this unifying purpose is but the start of reform and that it opens up countless questions – both practical and theoretic. But these questions should, he suggests, propel us into a creative engagement with how to form a church that lives out the Christian ideal. And to those who claim that this call to reform is ‘soft and easy’ he says that they have ‘obviously little experience in actually seeking to live this way and helping others to do so’.

Such reform will probably mean a re-fashioning of what church looks like for it is unlikely that a church that was built to serve a ‘Greco-Roman, constitutional, tribal, non-kingdom-of-God-orientated Christianity’ will be able to serve a new kind of Christianity.


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