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Church is ‘a bridge in a desert’
by Bill Bowder
 ACNS/GUNN |
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CHRISTIANITY should take second place to Christ in a new kind of evangelism fitted for a postmodern world, bishops heard on Monday night The message came from Dr Brian McLaren (above), the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Maryland, and the author of ten books on evangelism. “Jesus Christ is Lord — not Caesar, not capitalism, and not Christianity. Jesus is Lord — and not our understanding of Jesus,” he told a packed Big Top in the first plenary session. “Decisions could be made in this gathering that could change history. You need to get this right,” he said. Bishops nodded as he described the draining process of maintaining institutional structures and answering internal questions, which meant that they were not free to set an example to the world outside the Church. |
 Sustenance: bishops queue at a brabecue in the university grounds ACNS/SWEENY |
| “What if everything ultimately depended on the example of the people in this room?” he asked them. “Please don’t have committees and papers about this.” Instead, he told them to show passion. The old model of the Church was a bridge that stood strong and firm in the desert; the river now flowed elsewhere. It had been built for modernity, but the world was postmodern. Even the societies that were moving from premodernity would spend only “four or five months, or four or five years” as moderns before becoming postmodern. Church growth hid the problem, because it was usually people transferring “from other places or other faiths. . . Our structures are becoming tourist attractions. They are not helping people get from here to there. . . We are deep into a paradigm shift,” he said. Problems beset even the African Church, where Christians were hearing a gospel of prosperity that made only the preachers prosperous, and experienced a “warehousing” Church that held people until they could be “beamed up to heaven”. “Will the Church help us to deal with the real problems of Africa? Or will it be an opiate, as Marx says? I want to recruit people on the side of peace, justice, life and reconciliation,” Dr McLaren said. The Church was “over-accommodated to modern colonial Western cultures”. “We have to be ready for a season of unlearning and new learning.” A focus on evangelism was “the only hope to save the world from its trajectory of violence”. |
