Part 7 - Discovering Brian MacLaren

“I just feel like I’m a square peg trying to fit into a round hole.” 

I was sitting across from a friend named Dave at my favorite local coffee shop sometime around 2010. He was discussing the difficulty he was having staying engaged at the new church our church had planted in a neighboring community. He felt like the approach of the church was not open enough to accept and love people like they said they did. “Always a place for you” was the motto, but he felt like that was only true for people who accepted the church’s conservative views on science and social issues that were supposedly pulled right from the pages of scripture.

He said he had found a lot of life and encouragement from an author named Brian MacLaren. I had heard of MacLaren but didn’t know much of anything about him. Dave told me if I was interested in learning more I should pick up MacLaren’s book, “A New Kind of Christian”. At the time I just filed that away in the back of my brain and I told my friend I was open to discussing things with him further and thanked him for sharing with me. I wasn’t quite sure what to think except I thought he was right to feel like he did not really fit in the culture of that church anymore with his more liberal views about God’s inclusive love.

A couple years later, sometime around 2013, I ordered two books by MacLaren: “A New Kind of Christian” and “A New Kind of Christianity”. I wish I could remember what prompted me to order these books but I honestly can’t recall what made me hit the “purchase” button. I started reading the book secretly, knowing that the MacLaren name on the book could cause some raised eyebrows among the other pastors of the multi-site church as well as other pastors that I often met with for prayer and encouragement.

In this book, MacLaren tells his own story through the fictional character “Dan” who is an evangelical pastor who finds himself questioning the framework of the faith he inherited and teaches others week after week. In the first chapter “Dan” tells his wife after 17 years in the ministry he’s not sure he can do it much longer. This is because his experiences as a pastor interacting with those inside the church and skeptics he is trying to reach usually leads him to think the skeptics might be right to question what he’s always considered essential to his faith. 

Dan meets Neo (an Episcopalian priest) and they develop a friendship that becomes the setting for long conversations about the Bible, God, faith, and salvation.  These conversations eventually reform Dan’s faith and his practices as a pastor.

I remember when I read these two books that I felt a strong connection with both “Dan” and Brian MacLaren. They were struggling with a framework for Christianity that seemed too small, too limiting, too “God is on our side and thinks we are special”. I was wrestling with the same beliefs and feelings.

Week after week I prepared sermons to inspire the people in my church to live the Christian life more faithfully. But often there were two sermons. The first was the one I wanted to preach: the ideas and illustrations that I thought were really the point of the scripture I was talking about. The second was the one I actually preached on Sunday: a cleaned up version that aligned with what the people expected to hear, and what I had heard many times myself.

I knew the longer this went on, the more damaging it would be to me. I realized being one person “up front” and a different person inside my own head was not going to work long term.  I knew that at some point I’d have to make a choice whether I would share the more honest and authentic message, or make way for someone else to lead this congregation.