A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey (Jossey-Bass Leadership Network Series) [Hardcover]

This book really made me breathe a sigh of relief. If you've struggled with the form of Christianity you've inherited and tried to work out how it applies to living in the 21st century, this book is for you.
The author cleverly uses a dialogue format (clearly getting a tip from Plato there!) to discuss difficult concepts and challenging ideas about 'doing church' and being a Christian in the modern world. I got completely absorbed in what was going on in the characters' lives and more than once wanted to shout out loud - 'I've struggled with that too!' or had an 'aha!' moment.
The book outlines how we got to this point in the history of the church and discusses some quite difficult philosophical concepts in laymen's terms.
I can't wait to read it again, this time taking notes, and I've just ordered the sequel 'The story we find ourselves in'.
This book made me re-assess my Christian life and world view and instead of being depressed about how to be a Christian in the modern world, I'm excited!

This is one of those books that the church will either totally love or passionately hate! It really pushes the bounders of being comfortable in Christendom, it questions assumptions that have been held by the modern church for decades and are so ingrained in our churches and Christian lives that to question them is taboo.

The book is writing as a narrative and therefore is very easy to read. The story is of a burned out minister walking, talking and sharing life with an older ex-minister, now teacher.

I believe that this book with help a lot of people rethink and maybe bring a new spark to their faith. I read this book and thought this it was talking about all the questions and thoughts I had about my faith but were always too scared to say out loud in fear of being branded a liberal!

My hairdresser recommended this book to me. The relationship one has with one's hairdresser means that you often end up talking about quite deep things and my hairdresser and I, both Christians, have done a lot of talking over the last ten years. He was obviously pretty much in tune with where my thoughts were as he told me about a book I had to read.

"A New Kind Of Christian" is that book. And my hairdresser was right - I really did have to read this book. Why? Mainly because it has given me fresh hope in Christianity in the 21st century when I had pretty much given up hope. Look around you at the people you work with, you travel on the train with. If you stopped one at random to describe what they thought a Christian was they would probably say something like "a nice person, a good person, but also very judgemental, bigoted, brainwashed and a hyprocrite." And I would agree with them. Most Christians I know - well, almost all of them - are really nice people. They can be very hospitable, wonderfully generous, they give up no end of time and money to charity, they want to invite non-Christians to as many events as possible to convert them (for their own good, of course) and they want to live a faithful, good, nuclear family kind of life. However, this worldview seems so out of touch with the real world - not because any of those things are necessarily wrong but because it misses out on a lot of what else is going on in today's culture. Issues of sexuality, scientific study, congruence with the postmodern society that we live in - these are issues that the secular world has a position on and the church is usually far behind. Christians often seem unable to think for themselves but only seem able to parrot the latest words of the pastor/leader, no matter how unloving it may seem to the modern gay person (for example), let alone often requiring belief in things that really shouldn't matter to be a `real' Christian (such as 7-day creation). Young people are often turned off because they feel the church isn't really connecting with them; others are so `into' the church that they don't actually have any real understanding of life outside it, of culture outside it and of issues that affect people deeply every day that they can blithely categorise as `wrong' or `sin'.

Brian MacLaren's book meets these issues head on. Rather than writing a treatise or theology of what he believes he presents his views in the form of a conversation between two people - a Pastor, Dan, who is beginning to wonder if he should become a school teacher as he can no longer preach with the certainty that he used to, and Neo, a school teacher who used to be a pastor. Within the conversations between these two men we read a sermon by Neo, hear of conversations between the pastor and his wife and get a little bit of an idea what it might be like for that pastor who is worried about his calling. And every page of this book just drips wisdom - I found myself constantly thinking "yes, that's exactly it!" and was generally able to only read a couple of chapters at a time as there was so much in them I had to go away and think about what I had read before consuming more.

Brian MacLaren puts his case for a new kind of Christian very strongly. The first half of the book is setting the groundwork to his idea - that the Church is "modern" but the world is "postmodern". The church's choice of the vital tenets of Christianity are often rather of a response to the world we have lived in since mediaeval times - the church needs to respond to the way that the world has moved on in terms of communication, global perspectives on individuals' lives and a right understanding of what Jesus started in his church. The second part of the book looks more at what "a new kind of Christian" would be like - how they might evangelise, how they might live their lives (with a strong focus on financial giving) and how they might live lives as Jesus commanded rather than living the narrow pharisaism of so many Christians.

I was really struck by a small thing in the middle of this book, where Neo quotes from 1 John 1 about heaven, referring to Jesus and saying "We shall be like him". I had been going around for weeks saying to people "if being a Christian means being like these people" - referring to Christians in the media, Christians I have come across in my daily life, who spout bigoted and unloving opinions at the drop of a hat and come across as very judgemental - "I would rather not be a Christian". I found it shockingly easy to say those words because I have become so horrified by the state of Christianity that I have experienced in the UK and US. And yet I was reminded that in heaven we would be like Jesus and I want that, very much. Jesus is the ultimate model of what a Christian should be like, and the vast difference between the character of Jesus and the character of most Christians has highlighted for me where Christianity has gone wrong - not in the essence of the faith but in its expression by people around me. It doesn't have to be like that, and Brian MacLaren's book shows a way in which we might become more like Jesus in today's postmodern world - this is a brilliant book and I strongly recommend it to anyone who despairs of modern-day Christianity, who fears they may be losing their faith, who finds it difficult to reconcile their God-given intelligence with the strange stuff being fed to them from the pulpit. It gives hope again to the message of Jesus, as relevant today as it has always been.