A Conversation with Brian McLaren

Brian McLaren is a Christian thinker, global activist, speaker and author of more than a dozen books. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is an Auburn Senior Fellow and a leader in CONVERGENCE, a collective of organizations, leaders, artists and activists rooted in a just and generous Christian spirituality. We recently had a wonderful, rambling chat with Brian about his life, his work, his insights about past and present-day Christianity, and his hopeful vision of the future.

Brian McLaren’s latest book is called The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World’s Largest Religion is Seeking a Better Way to be a Christian.

First, here are a few audio highlights from our conversation, with original music by Peter Locke (4:15)

Kolbe Times: We’re so glad to be able to talk with you today, Brian. Let’s start with your latest book, The Great Spiritual Migration. One of the main ideas that you discuss in the book is that our Christian faith is meant to be on a trajectory, instead of a static location where we just arrive and stay put.

Brian McLaren: Yes – and you would think that would be obvious when one of Jesus most essential statements was “Follow me.” It wasn’t “Stand with me” or “Sit with me”. He wants us to follow him, because he’s going somewhere. And when Jesus left, he said, “Hey, listen, there’s a whole lot more I want to teach you, but you’re not ready for it yet. When you’re ready, the Spirit will continue to guide you.” So everything in the New Testament sets us up to see that this would be an unfolding, ongoing trajectory, just as you said. But for a whole lot of reasons that are totally human and totally predictable, we find ways to stop the motion and to dig in our heels and act as if we’ve got it all figured out – and that we just have to circle the wagons and defend, rather than keep moving or growing. But then at different points throughout history, people come along to wake us up and challenge us to move forward.

Kolbe Times: You also point out that so much of the Old Testament is about migration and human movement, stories of people being uprooted and finding new places to live.

Brian McLaren: Yes. The theme of the ‘Promised Land’ is this beautiful dream, but what’s so interesting is how little time that people actually spend in the Promised Land – and when they are there, it’s kind of miserable. It turns out that they become corrupt and then a whole lot of things go wrong. You realize that what that dream of the Promised Land does eventually is allow them to dream instead for a better time in the future, which then challenges them to keep moving forward. That’s so much of the work of the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures. The prophets say, “Listen, folks. We haven’t arrived. We have a long way to go. Let’s face our need for change, and let’s keep going.”

I was brought up Protestant and I think this is especially a problem in Protestantism. We revere the Bible so much that we have pretended that it only presents one message or one way of doing things, which is just ridiculous. When you read the Bible, you realize there is a lot of major change happening all the time. In the very beginning we have what someone once described as “two naked vegetarians in a garden” – not really any religion at all, just people walking with God in the cool of the day. From there you have the development of tribes and what we might call warlords and tribal chieftains, which in the Bible are called Judges. Religion develops, but that religion exists for a long time without any temples or a tabernacle, but then there’s eventually a special location. Then after the temple is built it is soon destroyed – and people have to figure out how to live without a temple. So there’s change built right into the whole Biblical story. Then you get the New Testament, and of course, it just explodes even more. Things that had been settled and unquestioned for centuries – like the necessity for circumcision, for example – suddenly that’s goes from being an absolute unchanging essential to being optional, and maybe even problematic. So the Bible certainly is a book that invites us to see that change is happening.  What is it someone said? “The only thing that’s here to stay is change.”

Kolbe Times: That reminds me of a quote by Cardinal John Henry Newman: “To live is to change, and to change often is to become more perfect.” Change has been a big part of your own faith journey. Can you tell us about that?

Brian McLaren: Sure. I grew up in a very strict Christian sect called the Plymouth Brethren. We thought that we were the only true church, and we felt we were the only people who really interpreted and applied the Bible as it should be. I gained so much from my heritage, but we were very much fundamentalists. I was taught that creation took place in six days, and that there was no evolution of any kind, that the world was about 6000 years old, all that sort of thing. So pretty early on I realized that I wasn’t going to fit in to that context. I remember being a teenager and thinking okay, I’m 14 years old. Four more years and I’m out of here.

But then I had quite a dramatic spiritual experience that set me on my own path of committed Christian discipleship, and then in some ways I kept thinking, okay, now I’ve got it right. I can settle down. And then that would fall apart, and I’d be on the move again. So my whole life has really been an experience of that kind of growth. And the truth is that more and more people are experiencing this, and maybe it’s always been happening, but I think there was a social pressure in the past against admitting it. There was a lot of pressure to act as if we all arrived at some place relatively early in life, and we would just camp out there for the rest of our days.

Kolbe Times: And I think what you’re describing in your own life resonates with a lot of people. At one point in your book you mention feeling a “clammy sense of spiritual claustrophobia”, which many of us feel at some point in our spiritual journey. But somehow we feel kind of guilty about moving along and visiting other churches and maybe even learning from other faith traditions. There’s a nagging feeling that there must be something wrong with us, that we lack “stick-with-it-ness” or something – or we’re afraid that we’ll lose our own faith if we explore too much. But it seems to me that your book is a validation that questioning and exploration and movement is all okay, and in fact it’s healthy. I think that’s one of the gifts of your book.

Brian McLaren: I’m glad to know you feel that way. And you know, I think if you looked back on your experience, you’d realize you have lost something. What you may lose is your sense of religious superiority, and your sense of entitlement. But you don’t lose Jesus. In fact, he becomes more beautiful and essential. You don’t lose the Bible. You don’t lose the heart of your faith.

I also want to say that of course there are many people who inherited something and the shoe fits for them, and they are very happy to stay right exactly where they are. I don’t want to bother those people at all. God bless them, and I wish them well. But the fact is that around the world, traditional forms of Christian faith are losing their younger generations – and that’s a sign to us. Part of this is that in the last couple of hundred years we really have entered a period of unprecedented change and upheaval, from horses and wagons to spacecraft; from handwritten manuscripts to the internet and social media. The changes have accelerated, and exposed us to things that we just couldn’t be exposed to before. I think of my grandfather, who spent his entire life in one county in New York State around Rochester, New York. And you know, I don’t think my grandfather, in his whole life, ever met a Hindu or a Muslim, and I think he might have known maybe one or two Jews. I’m quite sure he never met a Buddhist and probably hardly even any atheists. And then I think of his great grandchildren – my grandchildren. They meet people of all different world religions every single day by the time they have lunch! We live in this world that requires us to be open, and to be willing to change – and that’s not a bad thing. Obviously unscrupulous and uncritical acceptance of change can be a bad thing. What did someone say? “Every open window needs a screen to keep the bugs out.” That’s certainly true. We’re not in any way saying, “Anything goes”. But we are saying that the greatest way to love a tradition is not to be slavishly bound by it, but rather to help extend that tradition faithfully into the future.

Kolbe Times: You also write about the fact that there are many issues about which our historical Christian views have definitely changed – issues like anti-Semitism, and colonialism, and denying women equal rights, and the slave trade, to name a few. I think we’d all say thank goodness our views have changed on those things, even though many of them were originally seen as being rooted in the Bible.

Can you expand on another very intriguing idea that you bring up in your book – about moving from being an “organized” religion to being an “organizing” religion. What do you mean by that?

Brian McLaren: I was invited a couple of years ago to attend something called the Parliament of the World’s Religions. You may have heard of this. In fact, this year it’s being held in Toronto.  First of all, it was an amazing experience of meeting people from all around the world and people of all different cultures. But what I realized is when the parliament began in the 1890s, the leaders of every single world religion were all men, and in fact they were all old men. In some ways – I don’t mean to be harsh in saying this – traditional organized religion is organized to protect the clergy, and it’s organized to, in some ways, keep the ‘old boys club’ intact. And the resistance to change is usually orchestrated by a group of people who are very comfortable with the way things have been, and the way things are.

So if we defined ‘organized religion’ as religion that organizes to protect itself, that is a kind of religion about which people by the millions are saying, “I don’t really want to be part of that.” They’re looking for something better. It’s been really interesting for me to watch this emerge in the Christian faith – and then to find counterparts who are Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and so on, who are seeing very similar and parallel changes happening in their communities. Instead of organizing for the protection and benefit of our own little religious club or tribe, what if we were to organize to work together for the common good? What would it mean for our faith if our churches existed not just to make their members happy, but to equip their members to be a blessing to everybody in the community, of whatever religion, or non religion. That’s a completely different vision for what it could mean to be part of a church. I find that very exciting and inspiring.

Kolbe Times: You write about churches becoming ‘schools of love’. What a beautiful picture that phrase paints.

Brian McLaren: I think that many, many people, deep inside, want to become more loving, but they’re just not convinced that churches have anything to offer. So that’s our great opportunity, I think – for our churches to make and keep the promise that we’ll help people and their families become the most loving versions of themselves as possible.

Kolbe Times: In your book you also lay out the case for having a literary view of the Bible rather than a literal view. That can be a scary road for some Christians to travel down, and can lead to arguments and even broken relationships. And yet, at the same time, many people are having a very hard time reconciling certain parts of the Bible with their understanding of a loving, all-merciful God.

Brian McLaren: I think a lot of us were brought up in churches where there were only two ways to read the Bible: our way and the wrong way. And “our way” was a literal way. The first thing you have to say is that anyone who has actually read the Bible closely knows that nobody follows the Bible literally in every detail. So even that term ‘literal’ isn’t really that honest.

I mentioned that I was brought up in this group called the Plymouth Brethren, and we jokingly would say that we were ‘the church of the last detail’ – meaning we hoped to get the last detail of obeying the Bible literally, and that God could finally bless us if we would just get that last detail right. So, for example, we were a church that required all women to wear head coverings or veils over their head when they came to church and they were never allowed to speak. We didn’t let a woman give an announcement. We didn’t let a woman say a word in public. Obviously they could talk before and after the service and we’d let a woman play the piano or the organ, but we would not even let them announce a song title. So we thought we were being very, very literal because we could find a verse which said women should keep silent in the churches.

I know a lot of people claim to read the Bible literally, but nobody does it consistently and when they do, it doesn’t necessarily lead to life at all. It often leads to a kind of deadness, and endless arguments about who’s got the right interpretation.

So here’s the way I would say it. I don’t want or need to argue with people about whether they want to take the Bible literally in terms of literal history. If someone wants to believe in this or that miracle as a literal thing, I don’t argue with them. I wasn’t there, and I can’t prove it happened or it didn’t. What I’m interested in is, if it happened, what would it mean? We have to realize that virtually everyone in the ancient world believed in miracles – not just people of faith. So what did these extraordinary occurrences mean? And if they had a meaning, then that’s what’s important to us today.

Not too long ago, I was speaking to a journalist named Nicholas Kristof who writes for the New York Times. He had read my book, and he wanted to talk to me for an article he was writing. He said, “So, if I understand what you’re saying, when you read the story in the Gospels where Jesus healed multitudes and fed 5000 people with five loaves and two fish, you don’t want to argue about whether that miracle really happened as it’s described. You want to say that the meaning of that story is that we ought to care for the sick and feed the hungry, because that’s what Jesus did, and we want to follow him.” I remember telling him that I wished he had talked to me about that before I wrote the book, because he said in one sentence what took me a couple of chapters.

In talking about all this, I’m not saying that people in Bible times were stupid and they believed all this literally, and now we’re so smart because we know how to read things metaphorically. I would say the opposite. I would say that people in Biblical times knew that the telling of stories was the way to tell the deepest truths. We’ve lost that depth. We only argue about the details and the surface. I think we’ve got to get back to the deep way of reading stories, that was just part of the basic literacy of human beings in the ancient world.

Kolbe Times: That brings to mind a quote in your book from a Rabbi friend of yours, who said that there was something about the way Christians read the Bible that didn’t make sense to her as a Jew. She said, “We don’t read stories in the Bible looking for beliefs. We read them for meaning…to guide us in the predicaments in life, and help us know who we are, why we’re here, where we’re going, to help us be better people, so we can heal the world. And we never let one interpretation end the conversation. We see our sacred stories as bottomless wells of meaning.” That perspective seems like a much richer journey than the way many of us read the Bible.

Brian McLaren: There’s an old story that the Rabbis tell. The story goes that there were a group of Rabbis arguing about the meaning of the text and they came back, day after day. And the argument raged on about who had the right meaning of the text. And finally, there was a voice from heaven and God spoke and said, “Here is the true meaning of the text…”

Well, all the rabbis stood up and looked toward the heavens and said, “Now you be quiet. If you gave us this book, then it’s our responsibility and our right to hash out its meaning. You aren’t allowed to come in and end this conversation if you gave us this text.”

It’s a humorous and great story in which the Jews are saying that we’re being faithful to God, not when we shut down the conversation, but when we sincerely and passionately seek the truth in conversation together in the presence of God. The term for that among our Jewish brothers and sisters is ‘midrash’. Midrash is the process of wrestling with the meaning of the text, and the assumption is always there that you will never finish with the meaning, that there will always be more meaning to mine from the biblical stories, and I certainly think that’s true.

Kolbe Times: And there’s a lot we can learn when we aren’t afraid to ask questions, and when we listen to people with perspectives and faith traditions and backgrounds that are different than our own.

Brian McLaren: It’s one of the great gifts, getting into conversations like that and sharing insights. And that seems new for many of us Protestants and Catholics. We’ve almost built our religious identity on all agreeing on interpretations. If we were to stop defining ourselves by our interpretations or beliefs, we’d have to define ourselves in a new way. I think what’s happening is that many of us are saying what really should define us is that we’re aiming to be people of love. We’re in the process of being students in the way of love and that brings us together in a different way. And it also opens the door for new kinds of relationships.

Kolbe Times: So often people come at interfaith dialogue simply as a celebration of the ways in which we’re alike. It makes us feel more comfortable, I guess. But we probably experience more growth when we explore our differences, too – with a genuine, respectful curiosity.

Brian McLaren: I agree. Whenever I bring up interfaith dialogue with my Muslim friends, they often quote a verse in the Quran where God says that he made us all different so that we would be curious to understand each other. It’s the idea that our differences should instill and inspire curiosity, not judgment or condemnation.

When I’m engaged in relationships with my friends of different faiths, I don’t come to convert them, although I want to share all of my treasures as a Christian with them. And similarly, if they have treasures they want to offer me, I welcome that. I want to come together so that we can work side-by-side for the common good, bringing our own gifts with us. That brings us back to your question about “organizing” religion. When we’re organized to only protect our own turf, and maybe even proclaim our supremacy over other religions, that makes a certain kind of relationship possible – but it’s very limited and often somewhat unpleasant. But when we’re organizing to work for the common good with one another, because we believe that the Spirit of God is sending us into the world to do just that, then it makes a very, very different kind of relationship possible. And I’ll just say, having experienced both in my lifetime, it’s a much richer and deeper kind of relationship.

Kolbe Times: So what brings you hope today?

Brian McLaren: If I can be very specific, just this morning I was cleaning off my desk, because I keep accumulating business cards in my travels. I’m constantly traveling and speaking around the continent. So today I was putting these cards away, and as I did I was looking at each one of them. It was such an excellent reminder to me of all these very creative groups and faith communities, and the great work they are doing. We see a lot about religious people doing a lot of horrible things and saying a lot of unhelpful and in some cases just infuriating things, but there are these wonderful Christians and wonderful congregations around the world who are doing creative, innovative, loving, generative things. That brought me a lot of hope today.

Kolbe Times: There’s a section in your book called “So Much Right with the World”. It’s a great list of the many things we have to be thankful for. I’m so glad you included it.

Brian McLaren: We all need to remind ourselves of all the good out there. It’s easy to live from outrage to outrage. Instead, I think we need to learn more and more to live from gratitude to gratitude.

Kolbe Times: So true. Thank you very much for sharing your time and thoughts with us today.

Brian McLaren: It’s been a complete pleasure. Thank you – and keep up the good work.

Photos courtesy of Brian McLaren

Visit Brian McLaren’s website for his blog, upcoming events, books, and other resources.

Check out the Convergence website, to learn more about this diverse network of faith-based organizations, churches and leaders.