Brian McLaren on Outreach

Interview by Lynne Marian

Recognized as one of the significant voices in the Emerging Church, Brian McLaren is founding pastor and minister-at-large of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Md., which has a mission to help people “live life to the full.” McLaren, speaker and mentor, has authored numerous books including A New Kind of Christian (Jossey-Bass), More Ready Than You Realize (Zondervan) and his latest, A Generous Orthodoxy (Zondervan). Recently, McLaren sat down with us to dialog on outreach in a postmodern culture.

Outreach  magazine: In general, how do you feel the American Church is doing with outreach?

Brian McLaren The statistics are absolutely frightening. In spite of church growth, church planting, religious broadcasting, publishing, movies and everything else, we are losing ground! And I don’t think the answer is to do all the same things we’ve been doing, but only harder and better. We have to say, maybe our approach isn’t right, and we’ve got some other deeper problems.

OM What would you say are these deeper problems?

BM  We’re not paying attention. Where the Church is growing rapidly, pre-modern people are entering modern culture. Where postmodern people are leaving modern culture to enter a postmodern culture, it’s not just that the Church isn’t growing—it’s that it doesn’t yet exist. It’s as if a new continent rose up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and there are no missionaries on it. And this new continent represents people who are post-colonial, post-enlightenment, post-modern, post-critical, post-analytical, and we could add a lot of other “posts,” as well.

To connect with these people, who by the way, are both young and old and represent endless races, we have to first see how much of our current understanding of the Gospel has already been effectively accommodated to modernity. But we have to realize that that was the solution to past problems. Now it’s a problem in itself.

Most people think about the Gospel as “how to go to heaven after you die.” But, is that really the Gospel? At the very least, we have to ask, “Is this the understanding of the Gospel that’s needed and appropriate for people in the emerging postmodern culture?”

We have to find a way to convey Jesus’ meaning without necessarily using the same words, and I’m not just saying that we have to be relevant to the times or be trendy. That’s not it at all. I’m saying that we have to understand that our problem is that we were very trendy in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. And we’ve forgotten that there is any Gospel other than the version that was encoded in those trends.

OM What does the salvation experience look like at your church in Maryland?

BM  Very, very rarely does someone have the date-and-time experience of conversion. Typically, a person comes to us because they’re spiritually searching. They participate in our services, they get to know some people, build relationships, join a small group or maybe even start volunteering. And at some point, they connect with God. The Gospel makes sense to them. They know that God loves them, and they just say, “I’m in.”

If you ask those people, “When did you become a Christian?” they probably can’t tell you because they don’t think in those terms. We aren’t creating a “you’re in, you’re out” mentality at our church. Our message is: The Kingdom of God is available to everybody, and now the ball is in your court.

OM In your books, you’ve talked about the problems that result when we think of salvation as an end point.

BM  Yes, the Church has taken what is intended to be a starting line and turned it into a finish line. The gun goes off, people jump across the line. Then they stop and start jumping up and down and celebrating, “I crossed the line, I crossed the line!” Well, yes, but they’ve only crossed the starting line. We’ve got to help people look at following Christ as a life-long journey. It’s great to cross the starting line on that journey, but salvation is about a whole life.

OM If you could say one thing about evangelism to every pastor in America, what would it be?

BM I’m going to say two things. First, we as church leaders have to encourage people to count conversations rather than conversions. If we focus on counting conversions, we’ll tend to pressure people into making a decision before they’re ready. Instead, if we encourage people to say that conversations count, then relationships develop. Then when people do make a decision, they’ve counted the cost. They have really been able to appraise the magnitude of the decision that they’re making.

Second, we need to encourage people to spend less time at church activities. Make friends with their neighbors. Get involved in the community. Have fun and meet people in the course of human interests—in other words, get a life. Ultimately, I think the Gospel will be spread through people who can observe it being lived out in the life of a Christian. People have to know we accept them and that we’re interested in being around them. They have to see that we’re not using them for target practice.

OM What do you do to keep the fire and passion for non-Christians lit in your own heart?

BM I think the Holy Spirit wants us always to be sharing our faith. And if we’re not, there must be some loss of satisfaction and joy. That has certainly been the case for me before.    

I remember losing touch at one point toward the beginning of my full-time ministry. I did two things. First, my kids were young, so I volunteered to coach community soccer. And second, because I have always been interested in ecology, I volunteered with the Department of Natural Resources. I did wildlife surveys with biologists and it was so fun. That’s what it’s about. Get involved. Be active. Have friends. Stay in touch.

And whenever I’m around people who aren’t Christians, once they know they won’t hear a sales pitch—I really can’t think of any friends not interested in talking about God and spiritual things—once the walls are down, once they know they’re safe.

-Outreach magazine, "Point of View," July/August 2005

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