Teaching Brian McLaren’s “A New Kind of Christianity”

Well, I just finished-up a week of teaching A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith, at North Scottsdale UMC’s adult vacation Bible school class. I had about eight people total attended all or most of the sessions. We met Monday-Friday from 9:30-11:30 a.m. (with about twenty minutes for a snack break each day. You HAVE to have the snacks at VBS!). That meant we covered about four-five chapters per day. It was pretty intense and if folks did not do at least some reading before hand it was really hard to keep up. I knew this might be an issue so I tried to give a summary and cover the main points of each chapter before we got too deep into discussion. This seemed to work pretty well and the folks who were not caught-up on reading were still able to engage in meaningful discussion with the class.

The book focuses on ten questions that McLaren is frequently asked about Christianity:

* What is the overarching story line of the Bible?
* How should the Bible be understood?
* Is God violent?
* Who is Jesus and why is he important?
* What is the gospel?
* What do we do about the church?
* Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?
* Can we find a better way of viewing the future?
* How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?
* How can we translate our quest into action?

I’m not going to do a summary or in-depth review of the book because some folks who are way smarter than I am have already done a great job of doing that.  A moderate/conservative review of the book can be found here, a more conservative reaction can be found here, and a more progressive one here.

After discussing the first five chapters of the book, primarily centered around the Bible and the character of God, I thought some of McLaren’s arguments sounded familiar. I remembered, then, Rob Bell’s The Gods Aren’t Angry DVD and how much it really related to the early chapters in ANKoC. We ended up taking most of Wednesday to watch the video (about ninety minutes) and discuss it, although, we did get about twenty minutes in to discuss a couple of chapters.

Throughout the week I also used the official discussion guide for the book as well as short video interviews with McLaren that are related to each question. Links to those resources can be found on McLaren’s website.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book and the class did as well. Some of them found the reading a bit heavy and challenging but not out of reach. Most of the class was moderate to liberal so they didn’t find the book very controversial. What I think the book did do for them though was challenge them to think more deeply about what we believe about the Bible, God, Jesus, the Church, and how we talk about theology and controversial issues in the church. Many of them were not aware of some of the deep divisions in the church over topics such as homosexuality and the end times (yeah, I was surprised by this too).

I’m hoping to teach this class again in the fall with some of my college students on a weekly basis. I think this book is a great overview on how we can approach the Bible and theology in a conversational way vs. a legalistic or what McLaren calls a “constitutional” way. I’m not sure I agreed with everything he said, however, I enjoyed the images, models and illustrations he used and would recommend this book to be used for the basis of an adult study class.

What do you think? Have you read the book? Have you taught it or plan to teach it? If so, what worked and what didn’t work?

Tagged as: book review, Brian McLaren