What McLaren Actually Said About Rethinking Faith
I spent about three years working in a congregation that was trying to take Brian McLaren's A New Kind Of Christianity seriously. It didn't end well for most people involved, but I learned a lot about what the framework actually requires in practice. The book itself came out in 2007 and became a flashpoint for conservative critics. That part is well documented. What you won't find in the reviews is how hard it is to actually implement the ideas without either losing your church or diluting the theology so much that nothing distinctive remains. The core argument is straightforward enough: McLaren contends that Christianity has been filtered through modern Western assumptions about truth, certainty, and institutional structure, and that many of these assumptions are actually foreign to early Christianity. He draws on Augustinian concepts of two cities, eschatological tension, and the distinction between what he calls the "top-down" institutional model versus a more organic emergent church structure. The book isn't a systematic theology. It's more of a conversational exploration of what happens when you stop treating Christianity as a set of propositions to agree with and start treating it as a way of following Jesus within community. Here's where it gets complicated in practice. When I first read the book, I thought the framework was elegant. It wasn't. The problem is that McLaren assumes a certain level of theological literacy and patience from his readers that most congregations simply don't have. He asks people to sit with ambiguity, to hold multiple truths simultaneously, to question assumptions they've carried since childhood. Most people walking into a church don't want that. They want certainty. They want to know what's right and what's wrong. McLaren's approach requires them to sit in the discomfort of not knowing for a while. That's fine if you're a seminary student reading alone. It's much harder when you're asking a congregation to follow.
I encountered a specific edge case that I still think about. We had a member in our church who was genuinely committed to the emergent model but who also struggled with anxiety. The ambiguity that McLaren praises became torture for him. He couldn't handle the "we don't know yet" posture. Every time we said something like "the Bible has many layers" or "we need to sit with this tension," he'd retreat further. The workaround wasn't theological. It was practical. We started pairing the open-ended discussions with concrete service projects. He needed to see the fruit of the work before he could sit with the uncertainty. That's not in McLaren's book. It's just what we learned by watching him struggle. There are some counter-intuitive things about this approach that most people miss. First, the emergent church model actually requires MORE structure than traditional models, not less. When you remove rigid doctrine and formal liturgy, you need to replace them with something. In practice, that something tends to be charismatic leadership. The person who can hold the most ambiguity becomes the de facto authority. I saw this happen repeatedly. The person who talked best about mystery ended up making the most decisions. That's not hypocrisy. It's just how human groups work when you strip away formal structures. Second, McLaren's critique of certainty doesn't apply equally across all doctrines. Some beliefs are more fundamental to Christian practice than others. The resurrection, for example, isn't something you can easily treat as a metaphor without losing the entire framework. McLaren himself seems aware of this but doesn't always articulate where the line should be drawn. In my experience, the people who tried to apply his method consistently ended up somewhere very different from where he intended. They didn't become more faithful. They became less defined. That's not a criticism of McLaren. It's an observation about how theological frameworks interact with human psychology.
Let me be blunt about the limitations. This approach fails completely in contexts where the congregation is already dealing with trauma, abuse, or deep betrayal. Ambiguity is a luxury. When people have been hurt by institutions that claimed to have all the answers, asking them to sit with uncertainty can feel like betrayal again. I worked with survivors of church abuse who found McLaren's framework triggering rather than liberating. They'd heard enough "we don't know" from people who had hurt them. For them, clarity and accountability mattered more than theological openness. That's not a failure of the theology. It's a failure to recognize that not everyone starts from the same place. The book itself is about 240 pages. If you're going to read it, skip the first chapter. It's repetitive and sets a tone that feels more like a TED talk than serious theology. Chapters three through six are where the actual arguments live. Chapter eight on the two cities of Augustine is the strongest part. It's also the part most people misread. McLaren uses Augustine to argue for a both/and posture toward culture and church. But he doesn't fully develop what that looks like in practice. He assumes the reader will fill in the gaps. Most readers don't. If you're looking for a download link, I can't provide one legally. The book is published by HarperOne. You can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or directly from the publisher. Used copies are sometimes available on AbeBooks or ThriftBooks for under ten dollars. The Kindle edition runs about twelve dollars. There's no point buying the hardcover at full price unless you plan to annotate it heavily. Most people don't.
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I'd recommend pairing the book with "The Emerging Church" by Jonathan Wilson and Michael Horton if you want the conservative response. Pair it with "A New Kind of missionary" by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis if you want something more constructive. Neither of those alternatives is perfect. Chester and Timmis are more pastoral. Wilson and Horton are more academic. McLaren sits somewhere in between, which is both his strength and his weakness. The practical takeaway is this: McLaren's framework works best for people who already have a fairly secure theological foundation and want to explore new ways of thinking. It doesn't work well for people who are searching for certainty or who have been burned by institutional religion. If you're in the first group, the book will challenge you. If you're in the second, it might make things worse. I learned that the hard way watching people in my congregation try to make it work. There's also a practical consideration about time investment. Reading and discussing McLaren's ideas in a group setting typically requires about four to six weeks of regular meetings. Each session runs two to three hours. That's a significant commitment. Most churches that tried this either rushed through it or abandoned it halfway. The ones that completed it usually had someone facilitating who had already read the book twice and could anticipate where people would get stuck. That's not something you can fake.
I've thought about writing more, but I've said what I came to say. The framework has value. It's just not as universally applicable as McLaren suggests. Read the book. Think about who it's for. Don't assume it's for everyone, including yourself.
