Emerging Star
by Jana Riess -- Publishers Weekly, 8/13/2007
"Emerging church" lightning rod Brian McLaren encourages American Christians to put their faith into action in Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope (Reviews, this page). Why must "everything change"? The book tries to answer two questions: What are the top global crises, and what does the message of Jesus say to those crises? When you’re confronted with the unsustainability of our current life, you begin to see that we need a profound change. What surprised me when I began the book was the relevance of the core message of Jesus with our current crisis. Can you be specific? Jesus was dealing with similar systems in his world. You have an imperial framing story, the story that Rome tries to impose on the Jewish people, and some sectors of Judaism, the Sadducees and the Herodians in the gospels, collaborate with that story. And then you have people who develop a counternarrative, the Pharisees and the Zealots, who dreamed of a violent revolution and the overthrow of the Roman story. You have a withdrawal narrative, and that would be the Essenes. Jesus comes along with a fourth alternative in his dangerous metaphor of the kingdom of God. Why dangerous? It critiques the three main alternatives. And in our day, we have the same three dominant narratives at work. We have imperial narratives that want to bring peace and prosperity by domination by a superpower. We have violent counternarratives epitomized by terrorist networks. We have withdrawal narratives, some of which are religious and some of which are consumerist. Jesus could be seen as recruiting people to a fourth alternative—a nonviolent alternative. Am I reading between the lines here that our culture is the new Rome? You are. I’ve been speaking about this for the last couple of years, and the overwhelming response I get is gratitude and relief. People have some sense that the Christian faith has been co-opted by our societal machinery, and they’re relieved to hear someone validate that suspicion. I think they’re also excited because it helps them get the Christian message back as a force for social transformation, rather than social control. You first became a breakout author with A New Kind of Christian [Jossey-Bass,2001]). Why the move to Thomas Nelson? I wanted to try to reach an audience that included people who go into religious bookstores, as well as the audience that I would call spiritual but not religious. Thomas Nelson approached me with a strong commitment to connecting with that other audience.
