Influential Book 1 / A New Kind of Christian

I grew up in the church, yet for the majority of my childhood my faith remained a moral code to follow or a set of beliefs to give intellectual acceptance to. I didn't begin praying until I was eighteen and about to head off to university.

I had never been passionate about my faith before, so it was only as I outworked my faith at uni that I came to realise that I saw following Jesus differently to many others. In particular, I noticed that I placed much greater emphasis upon people’s experiences—both in terms of our lives today and in the way I read the Bible as a collection of stories about a people group’s ongoing experience of the divine. I naively put these differences down to denominational background at the time.

Memory is an enigmatic thing at times, for I have been trying for weeks to remember when I first read A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren. My best guess is sometime between 2003-2005. Even though I can’t pinpoint it directly, I look back and recognise how A New Kind of Christian was a kind of watershed moment for me.

If you’re not familiar with Brian’s book, A New Kind of Christian is a fictional account of a conversation between a pastor and his daughter’s high school science teacher, where they discuss real-life theological belief and practice. The pastor is recognising the old way of doing things is no longer working, and finds a friend and mentor in the science teacher to explore a new way of faithfully following Jesus.

My journey towards a nonviolent reading of the Bible didn’t start with this book but in the experiences and questions that had taken root in me before then, however, A New Kind of Christian represents a definite catalyst that propelled me faster in that direction.

I don’t think the mid-20s me would have seen it quite that way at the time, for I had no idea of how the journey ahead would bring me to where I am now. However, with the benefit of retrospect I can now recognise this book’s influence in changing my theology. It did this by emboldening me to question the presuppositions of the modern Christian gospel rather than ignore my doubts. It enabled me to identify how most postmodern expression of Church continued to preach a modern message dressed up in postmodern clothes, and to try and offer something different in my teaching. And perhaps most importantly, it equipped me with the imagination to dream about being a new kind of Christian where faith becomes a way of life and not just a system of belief. Which I think was Brian’s purpose all along.