Date posted: February 10, 2012
In early 2010 there was a lot of buzz and internet chatter about Brian McLaren’s new book A New Kind of Christianity. I read that his book was based around ten questions that he believed Christianity in the 21st century had to address. When I finally saw the questions I was utterly deflated.
Not because I did not think the questions that he was asking were not important, it was just so far from where my own thinking was. It was the usual suspects, yet I was sensing as I read the culture, as I listened to those of faith and those outside of faith, a whole set of different questions. I was looking for the questions that were behind the questions. The questions that no one was asking, but that needed to be asked.
So at the beginning of I scribbled in my notebook my own list of ten questions. Yes some of them were quirky, but I believed they were vital. I just I did not realise just how vital they would become.
Here are my questions.
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1: The almost overwhelming consensus in the West is that Church needs to change. But what if Church is not the problem what if we are? In the past people were part of the church because of their sense of devotion, their expectations of Church were much lower. What if we are looking for Church to give us the transcendence that we are meant to find in God?
2: The contemporary christian scene has now fragmented into movements. I know people who were in the new reformed camp but who are now in the emergent camp, and people who have made the move in the opposite direction. I know people who grew up Eastern Orthodox and are now at Pentecostal churches, and Pentecostals who have become Eastern Orthodox. What is the way that we move and change affiliations and tribes telling us? Maybe beneath the theology, and practice something else is going on? Why are we always on the move?
3: Why did the Church flatline across the Western World around 1963-1968? Why such a specific time frame? What happened?
4: What if we as the Church has been so focussed on the way that the enlightenment has captured our minds that we missed the way that romanticism has captured our hearts. How do you communicate the gospel in such a new emotional landscape?
5: What if the sexual climate of the West tells us more about our view of the universe than it does about our sex drives?
6: What if the American author Jack Kerouac in 1947 created a new form of being a half-Christian half-unbeliever that would come to dominate the way contemporary Christians fifty years later would live out their faiths? What if his book On the Road was the genesis of the life script of young adults today?
7: Maybe young adults across the western world are leaving church because we embraced the idea of the seeker? The problem being that in the Western imagination seekers never stop seeking?
8: Everyone in the West sees their life as a journey. What if life is not a journey? What if by seeing life as an individual journey we are preventing ourselves participating in God’s grand narrative of salvation?
9: Why did the 9/11 hijackers spend their last months on this earth smoking dope, binging on donuts, drinking in night clubs, sleeping with prostitutes and buying porn? What does it tell us that men who were so committed to a radical and violent vision of Islam and who despised the culture of the West found themselves so conflicted when it came to behaviour?
10: Why do so many young Christians who profess to follow Christ seem by their actions to be more disciples of Nietzsche, anxiously spending their waking hours attempting to carve out lives of meaning?
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2010 was a year of lots of travel. So I took my ten questions with me on the road. Just me and my small notebook, trying to work it out as I sat in airports in New Zealand, caught trains across Denmark, or drove on the seemingly endless highways of the USA. A pattern began to emerge, what was fuzzy began to become clear. My wrist would hurt as I began to fill my notebook with what I was seeing. All around me planes to catch, people on the go, the perpetual motion of the luggage carousel, the limitless destinations on the screens of the airport, the hovering horizon staring back at me through the windshield. Everywhere around me constant motion, physical movement but also psychic movement, a fundamental restlessness which shaped contemporary life and faith. Answers were starting to attach themselves to my questions.
Then 2011 arrived alongside my twin boys. The travel was over, home was now the centre of my universe. Life became simple, the hours of sleeplessness, the constant changing, the never-ending washing was achieved with a book in hand. I devoured a virtual library in search of answers to my question, evidence for what I was sensing. I began to test what I was learning with my Church, it began to resonate. In the season of my life when I had the least time and energy to invest in my community of faith we began to grow, something was up.
The threads began to fall into place, the patterns became clear and strong. One day standing by my car, it all became clear, the key was underneath my feet, it was the road.
So at the beginning of 2012 it is time to go public with the answers. 17-18 Feb we will be running here an event based around not only the answers to my questions, but what I think are the implications for us as individuals. At the Road Event speaking will also be friends who have been sounding boards, who understand just how important this all is.
You can register here.
My questions and their answers formed themselves into a book called The Road Trip Which Changed The World, I will be blogging more about it later, but this to say I think it is the most important thing I have written so far.