I’m not sure what changed. Back in 2001, Brian D. McLaren published A New Kind of Christian. That book rocked my world. The fictional conversation expressed things I had never been able to put my finger on before. I was inspired. While I never left the ‘institutional church’ for the spiritual-but-not-religious camp, it forced me to rethink my faith from the ground up.

Nine years later in 2010, McLaren published A New Kind of Christianity. It’s a different book than its predecessor, to be sure. McLaren dropped the fictional form of his earlier work in favour of a more conventional didactic approach. The book is centred around ten questions. These questions are intended to free us from “our conventional paradigm” and present a path into “new territory, new possibilities” (23).

The first five questions are broad, each building on the former:

1. The Narrative Question: What is the shape of the biblical story?
2. The Authority Question: How is scripture authoritative?
3. The God Question: Is God violent or peaceable?
4. The Jesus Question: How does Jesus fit into the story?
5. The Gospel Question: What is the gospel?

These questions provide the intellectual framework to ask the final five:

1. The Church Question: How should the church be structured?
2. The Sex Question: How can we talk about human sexuality?
3. The Future Question: What should our eschatology look like?
4. The Pluralism Question: How should Christians understand other religions?
5. The What-Do-We-Do-Now Question: How do we move from words and ideas to action?

For each question, McLaren interacts substantially with scripture. He has knack for portraying a familiar scripture in an unusual or even counterintuitive light. It’s no wonder he’s loved and hated (as he readily acknowledges).

Maybe it’s because I’m reading this eight years after the publication date, or because I’ve been thinking through these issues for almost two decades now, but the “new possibilities” didn’t feel so new any more. Some areas appear blindingly obvious while others struck me as somewhat oversimplified.

I suppose I’m the one who’s changed.

McLaren, Brian D. A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith. New York: HarperOne, 2010.

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