By Lloyd Mackey

WHEN ‘emergent church’ proponent Brian McLaren and musician Steve Bell come together at Victoria’s Christ Church Cathedral May 28 – 29, the church leadership hopes the conference will be “an empowering weekend of sharing and discussions on engaging the world around us.”

Exploring ‘Evangelism and Transformation in a Secular Society,’ the event will culminate in a  concert featuring the Juno-winning Bell, whose latest CD is Devotion.

BCCN reached McLaren by phone from his home in Maryland, a few miles from Washington, D.C.

The author of A Generous Orthodoxy is a well-known – and, in some circles, controversial – advocate for the ‘emergent’ approach to the faith.

McLaren’s thinking and witness come out of an evangelical perspective that was honed from an upbringing in the Christian (Plymouth) Brethren on the American eastern seaboard, and his early college English teaching experience.

During his teaching time in the 1970s and 80s, he told BCCN, “post-modern philosophy was entering the American academy. I was exposed to these currents.

“Then, in the early 90s, I realized that many of these changes came to the street level. People were asking a lot of questions – not the same old questions, but in a new way. I realized part of my work would be thinking through these questions.”

That work was expressed in 24 years of pastoring Cedar Ridge Community Church, a suburban Washington congregation of about 700 founded by McLaren. Today, he still attends that church when he is in town, but is mainly engaged in writing and speaking about the emergent movement.

One of the 24 books McLaren has written is entitled A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That are Transforming the Faith (HarperCollins). The questions, summarized recently in a huffingtonpost.com column under his byline, contain these key terms: narrative, authority, God, Jesus, gospel, church, sex, future, pluralism and what-do-we-do-now.  “Undoubtedly, these questions will come up in the conference,” he said.

The reason he will be at a stately and traditional Anglican cathedral in a west coast capital that particular week can be traced to the 2008 Lambeth Conference. Lambeth is an Anglican ‘summit’ convened every 10 years by the worldwide head of the communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

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McLaren told Lambeth conferees: “So many of our forms, structures and assumptions about evangelism are not biblical – or even traditional in the ancient sense . . . Evangelism is not revivalism [or] colonialism. Nor is it sales and marketing, [or] argument.”

Evangelism, he asserted, “is the gentle and respectful relational process . . . of understanding and responding to people’s questions . . . so they can find the hope that flows from the good news that Jesus Christ is Lord . . . not Caesar, not capitalism, and not even the Christian religion.”

McLaren noted that “in Victoria, I hope we can be sensitive to people who see themselves as being spiritual but not religious – and with no active commitment to the faith community.” The cathedral leadership and he agree on one thing: “that the Anglican tradition can create a hospitable place for such people.”

He said many people have a “built-in hesitancy to talk about their own faith and experience. They don’t want to be pushy.”

One means of helping such individuals communicate will come through the sharing of emails he has exchanged with people who wanted conversations about faith.

“We will converse around tables and in small groups about those emails and the insights they provide.”

He indicated that the conference would hopefully “focus on moving beyond old polarities, with the theme of helping people to be comfortable in sharing their faith with others – including people of other faiths.”

McLaren suggested there are means by which Christians can share faith in Jesus with Jews and Muslims. He said this could be done without raising the red flags of anti-Semitism or the Crusades. And Christians, he asserted, can learn as well from the insights Jews and Muslims have about Jesus, coming out of their own traditions.

McLaren concluded the interview with this thought: “I think a lot of us envision a new sense of ethos for our faith and churches – our belief that when people have a vibrant faith, it is worth sharing.”

Info: christchurchcathedral.bc.ca.

May 2010