Post Series
Introduction
Reimagining Christian Religious Identity (Part 1: The Crisis of Christian Identity)
Reformulating Christian Doctrine (Part 2: The Doctrinal Challenge–1)
Reformulating Christian Doctrine (Part 2: The Doctrinal Challenge–2)
Reconstructing Christian Practices (Part 3: The Liturgical Challenge)
Redefining Christian mission (Part 4: The Missional Challenge)
This post is the sixth and last in a series examining the ideas in Brian McLaren’s newest book, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?: Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World
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The heart of McLaren’s redefinition of Christian mission for a multi-faith world lies in completely writing out the Church in favor of “teams of unlikely people—Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, people from a whole range of indigenous religions, together with agnostics and atheists—coming together, not in the name of the Christian religion, but seeking to walk in the way of Jesus, learning, proclaiming, and demonstrating ‘the way of liberation.’” (236) Mission for McLaren has nothing to do with the Great Commission, but everything to do with so-called Great Commandment of love: mission is spreading and sowing the universal human ideal of love—which everyone can do, whether they even believe in anything at all!
The point of mission, then, is making people “a little more Christ-like,” which has nothing to do with the Holy Spirit transforming people into Christ, but our shared commitment to love somehow magically influencing our behavior to reflect Jesus’ loving example. After listing several people he knows who he thinks are modeling well or fighting for the universal human ideal, McLaren goes on to say “What [they] and so many other people are doing is a lot like what Jesus did: bringing together unlikely people to serve and heal together, to liberate the oppressed and their oppressors together, and to model, in their collaboration, the kind of harmony and human-kindness the world desperately needs.” (247) Again, for McLaren, mission isn’t about the Great Commission, but the Great Commandment.
Now, to be sure, the historic Christian faith has also been about the Great Commandment to love God and neighbor. History is riddled with examples of Christians who love the world because Christ first loved them by giving up His life, even to death on a cross. So, yes, the Christian faith is about doing acts of love, but those acts can never replace or compete with the greatest act of love we could ever give: Making disciples, baptizing them into the Church, and teaching what Jesus commanded. This is the Great Commission that Jesus gave exclusively to the Church, which involves influencing people to give their life and lifestyle to Jesus as the one and only Savior and Lord; initiating people who have been saved from death to life into the Church; and teaching them how to live out the teachings of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. This Commission is fundamentally absent from Mclaren’s gospel, because the Church itself is fundamentally absent.
Stretching back to A New Kind of Christianity and even to Everything Must Change, one can see the curious absence of the Church in McLaren’s religious enterprise. Instead, what’s important are “religious communities…organizing for the common good.” (250) Remarkably, McLaren seems to believe that any religion can solve our human problem. McLaren has no problem with people of other faiths cherishing and maintaining their “distinctive religious identity.” In fact, he encourages it. (256-257) So instead of challenging other religions to convert to faith in Jesus, we are called to band together to work toward solving our dysfunctional, destructive systems and stories by working for the common good, the commonwealth or Kingdom of God.
Because every religious identity is valid and each religion has a “unique, particular, and evolving perspective from which to encounter the Spirit in a unique way,” (152) McLaren considers the old language of saving souls is meaningless. (258) Instead, he says our collective “sacred mission of salvation” is saving people, human societies, and this planet from “the dehumanizing effects of hostility to God and other.” (258) This collective saving mission calls every individual to make a saving decision: “the choice to live not for our own selfish interests alone, and not for the groupish interests of our clan or caste or civilization alone, but for the common God, the good of all creation.” (258) Since our problem is a bad way of living and our solution is the ideal way of living born by an ideal liver—Jesus, our collective human mission is to get people to live better in relationship with themselves, the Other, and the planet. And the way we do this is to issue what McLaren calls an alter call.
Not an altar call—which long-time Christians will recognize as a come-forward call to confess Jesus as Lord and Savior—but an alter call, a call to “consider turning around and choosing a new path,” an alternate path of understanding and living. McLaren invites people to confess these things: Where they stand; who they are becoming; where they are going; how they believe; and why they believe. (263) Of course, there isn’t anything particular about this confession. And frankly, it is rather humanistic, in that the confession isn’t rooted in God, but in the one confessing and even in humanity, in our collective power to change the world through love.
