Everything Must Change: When the World's Biggest Problems and Jesus' Good News Collide

In "Everything Must Change", Brian McLaren eloquently expresses what I've felt about Jesus' message, and the manipulation of that message, since middle school. With historical research, political savvy, and personal experience, McLaren thoroughly documents the ways in which Christianity could lead the way out of war, hunger, poverty, and environmental decay. And how instead power uses biblical interpretation and wedge issues like contraception as "weapons of mass distraction". McLaren is part of a wave, with links (which he acknowledges) to David C. Korten's "The Great Turning -- From Empire to Earth Community". Also see "This Present Paradise", an article by Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker in the Summer 2008 issue of "UU World" magazine. The only frustrating thing about McLaren's book is its lack of an index.

I've started to realize that I need to sit with a book before I can begin to reflect and review it. Books that are worth reviewing are typically engaging and charged, eloquent and moving and this book finds its place within that rubric. Everything Must Change. Is that just an audacious title to sell a book as this author has been accused of before? No. This title has a story. Perhaps this title is a story? In Brain D. McLaren's most recent book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis, and a Revolution of Hope we encounter the cumulative effect, the culmination of books that came before. As I worked my way through this audacious book Brian, in my mind, has now taken his place with those theologians of the academy. Except he isn't writing for research or to sell lectures (not that all or any professors do)--it's about capturing a vision. Perhaps being captured by a Vision? In this post, I will work my way through and review this fine book. Let me say as further preface I am an acquaintance of Brian's, a friend of Emergent Village, and align myself within the emerging church conversation. I am part of a church which embodies the church emerging and I reflect on his book as someone who has already come to many of the same conclusions before encountering this book. Namely that Jesus' mission was and is fundamentally concerned about this world and it came as a direct confrontation of domination systems of this world. Ironically, advent is the perfect time to review a book of this stock. In God's sending of Jesus into the world, through Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, God was saying in effect; everything must change, everything is changing, and everything will be changed. The preface sets out to inform the reader that four tasks are at hand. He is setting out to convince us that he is no another ranting author about how bad the world is and thus our guilt, and that we will traverse complex material with the promise of it to be engaging, and third by the end we will have a bigger understanding of the world and our place in it and how we can make a difference. Finally, perhaps most important, is that we are convinced making a difference matters and is not just another task--it's where real joy and happiness is found. At this point the book paints big promises with a big vision that coincides with its big title! The overall arc of this book is that we are in desperate need of a new (or perhaps recovered) framing story. We learn of "four deep dysfunctions" of the current dominant framing story in the world. (1) environmental breakdown - prosperity crisis, (2) expanding gap between wealthy and poor - equity crisis, (3) danger of cataclysmic war - security crisis, (4) failure of world religions - spirituality crisis (p.5). And so the current framing story which is the force through which people find meaning and direction is currently framed, in Brian's purview, by these four crises. We are warned that this is an invitatio

This book has given my life and my work a new focus. It has sharpened my vision of how the world works, of how institutions, including religious ones, have misunderstood the message of Jesus and of how I can reclaim the hope which keeps me getting out of bed in the morning. It is the best synthesis of a "Gospel" which is truly Good News and still grounded in scientific and human reality which I have ever read. It has changed my way of spreading Good News through my work as a leader of retreats and made me bolder in connecting the message I have always believed in with the world as it really operates. Brian McLaren puts the vision which guides my life into words I can not only understand, but which I can pass on.

While some of the lengthier reviews found below will perhaps do a more thorough job of summarizing the content of Brian McLaren's latest book "Everything Must Change," my intent is to offer a few of the insights and impressions of someone who has experienced both sides of the conservative/emergent debate and has the scars to prove it. As a pastor and philosophy professor I have encountered my share of anti-Christian or heretical ideas. I have studied Nietzche, wrestled with Darwin, and most recently read and re-read the latest anti-theistic polemics from Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great), and Sam Harris (The End of Faith). All of these writers and thinkers have elaborated on a host of ideas that call into question everything that even the most nominal Christian could hold dear. Their effectiveness is for another review, although I can say for myself that despite their prodigious gifts I am left unconvinced that God is dead, destructive, or a delusion. I preface my comments with these references to truly anti-Christian thinkers as a ways of putting into context what Brian McLaren seems to mean when he says that "everything must change." Despite the hyperbole and swooning pyrotechnics of those who have branded McLaren to be a sort of postmodern Pied Piper who is leading the next generation off the cliff of heresy, the actual book and writer behind it say nothing of the sort. Not even close. While all of Brian's theological conclusions might not jive with your own, my guess is that the majority of readers who take the text on its own merits will find that the a great number of the ideas espoused are not so strange or horrifying, but rather are practical and commonsense suggestions for a global church in an apocalyptic age (in the original sense of the term, not necessarily the "Left Behind" version). In "Everything Must Change," McLaren has presented a clear and thoughtful summary of the thinking spurring much of the energy behind the newest movements of the church, broadly termed Emergent. While some of the voices are new and the language is often non-traditional, this emerging movement (of which McLaren is the undisputed Papa Bear) is reinvigorating the sincere, Christ-centered faith of many of the disenchanted and disillusioned wounded from the evangelical and fundamentalist movements. It is uneccesary to critique those preceding articulations of the Gospel here; suffice to say, the language and focus of the modern church was insufficient in reaching many in the emerging generations. McLaren has created an elegantly detailed work that offers hope to many passionate people who desire to put their faith in a God with bigger plans for the world than simply providing their ticket to heaven. For these passionate followers, both new and "experienced," the doors to the church must be thrown open to the world. This is the power of change that McLaren describes - a church that is a light and

Passion and compassion. These are the two words that I would use to describe this book and its author. The passion is communicated in the main title-- everything must change. The compassion is communicated in the subtitle-- global crises, hope. McLaren continues building on his previous works, especially Secret Message of Jesus. Those looking for McLaren's theological underpinnings will find it there. This book is about exploring what such a theology will look like on the ground, in real life. With grace in his words, McLaren lets us in on his own journey of discovering that Christianity often does not do much, and the things it has done have often been very negative. Then exploring the theology discussed in Secret Message of Jesus, McLaren talks at length about his experiences with people and communities from around the globe-- his experiences of finding much pain, hurt, and suffering-- and the systems that exist in that world. In the spirit of Jesus himself, McLaren paints a way forward for the church (especially those of us who find ourselves in its northern and western expressions) to truly bring Jesus into the global crisis and challenge these global systems and their central narratives. McLaren challenges the church to have "glad tidings" gospel that rivals the "gospels" of our systems/empires. He implores Christians to address the problems in our day just as Jesus did in his. Christians today are often serving idols and emperors rather than Jesus Christ. Jesus inaugarated the kingdom of God on Earth, the will of God being done on Earth as it is in heaven. Truly McLaren is right-- everything must change. It is time for us to acknowledge Jesus as Lord rather than Caesar as Lord.