McLaren: 'It's Not All About You'

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.

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