Brian D. Mclaren - The Great Spiritual Migration: How the Worlds Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian

The human story is a tale of people in motion.

Anthropologists tell us that our ancient ancestors lived in southern Africa some two hundred thousand years ago, but it didnt take long before many began migrating north, eventually crossing into the Middle East. Some then migrated west across Europe and others moved east across Asia. And that, we know, was just the beginning.

The Bible also tells a story of humans on the move, tracing the human journey from life as hunter-gatherers in a garden to nomadic pastoralists with their patriarchs to settled agriculturalists with tribal chiefs and warlords. From there, human beings transition to life in city-states and from there, we become uneasy citizens of jostling kingdoms and colonizing empires. Exodus and exile, two of the main story lines of the Hebrew Scriptures, are tales of a people in motion, and the biblical plot line seethes with the deeply human tension between settling down and moving on. Jesus himself was perpetually in motion, leading his disciples from town to town, their physical movements mirroring the spiritual odyssey on which he led them. Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, he said, but he had no such home. He was always on the move, never settling down anywhere for long. His first words were Follow me, and his final words were Go into all the world. Jesus, we might say, was a migrant messiah, and the Bible is a book of migrations.

As a boy I was an avid reader of the Bible, and this sense of movement was deeply embedded in me. Then as a teenager, I began reading science fiction, and my adolescent imagination was soon expanding with grand dreams of traveling among the stars.

Its no wonder that Homo sapiens has also been called Homo viator. We are human wayfarers and pilgrimsalways on the move.

Well, maybe not always. I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian tradition called the Plymouth Brethren. We didnt have an official motto, but if we did, it might have been We shall not be moved. We contributed to the larger Christian community several of Christianitys worst ideas, including dispensationalism and the Rapture and the whole left behind last-days scenario. (Youre welcome.) Our little sect was made slightly famous by the great American humorist Garrison Keillor. His stories about his childhood in the Sanctified Brethren often elicit from me a chuckle of familiarityand sometimes a wince or groan.

My paternal and maternal grandparents were dedicated members of the Brethrenmissionaries and elders, true loyalists. As a faithful firstborn son, I was predisposed to join their ranks as a good Brethren boy, to stay put and play by the rules. But by my teenage years, it was clear that I simply didnt fit in the rigid Brethren box. My love for philosophy, evolution, and rock and roll were three spiritual strikes that counted me out. Providentially for me, the Jesus Movement came along in those years, and my experience in that movement made it possible for me to stay Christian, but in a new way, no longer as a fundamentalist, but as an Evangelical.

Although Evangelicals are seen by many as archconservatives, folks like me who were born fundamentalist often experience Evangelicalism as a big step into more freedom. Scratch an Evangelical, you might say, and underneath the paint youll find a fundamentalist seeking a little room to grow. As a young nondenominational Evangelical in my thirties, I became a church planter and pastor and felt very much at home. I had already come a long way, and I wasnt going anywhere.

But just as I was settling down, politically ambitious fundamentalists staged a decisive takeover of Evangelicalism in the United States, pulling it firmly into the orbit of the religious right and reclaiming it as a camouflaged form of fundamentalism. As a result, by the age of forty, I found that I had moved to the progressive margin of the Evangelical camp. I began writing books from that vantage point, but I quickly learned that zealous conservative gatekeepers were eager to purge anyone to their theological or cultural left. So my location even in Evangelicalism grew more tenuous. Whether I emigrated or was deported is a question up for debate, but one way or the other, by fifty, I found myself on the move again.

Over the last ten years, something has changed for me. I havent simply moved to a new location where I am now settling downfrom, say, static fundamentalism to static Evangelicalism to static liberalism. Instead, Ive come to see that what matters most is not our status but our trajectory, not where we are but where were going, not where we stand but where were headed. Christian faith for me is no longer a static location but a great spiritual journey. And that changes everything.