Brian D. McLaren McLaren, Brian D., born in 1956, graduated from University of Maryland, College Park with degrees in English (BA, summa cum laude, 1978, and MA, 1981). His academic interests included Medieval drama, Romantic poets, modern philosophical literature, and the novels of Dr. Walker Percy. He is also a musician and songwriter. is the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in the Washington-Baltimore area and the author of two previous books on contemporary Christianity, including The Church on the Other Side: Doing Ministry in the Postmodern Matrix (2000).
	A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey
	A New Kind of Christian's conversation between a pastor and his daughter's high school science teacher reveals that wisdom for life's most pressing spiritual questions can come from the most unlikely sources. This stirring fable captures a new spirit of Christianity--where personal, daily interaction with God is more important than institutional church structures, where faith is more about a way of life than a system of belief, where being authentically good is more important than being doctrinally "right," and where one's direction is more important than one's present location. Brian McLaren's delightful account offers a wise and wondrous approach for revitalizing Christian spiritual life and Christian congregations.

From the Publisher
"Finally, an approach to Christianity that walks its walk by presenting Jesus' message of unconditional love in an open and non-threatening way. A New Kind of Christian offers tremendous tools for breaking down walls built fromprevious experiences with judgmental and fear-based religion." --Kim Corbin, Skipping activist and founder of iskip.com

From the Inside Flap
For all those who are burned out on church or who want to be spiritual without being "religious," A New Kind of Christian offers a tale of spiritual renewal that both instructs and inspires. After many years as a church planter and pastor, author Brian McLaren has found-as more and more Christians are finding-that neither the conservative evangelical nor the liberal mainline stream of Christianity fully expresses his own developing faith. McLaren's engaging story gives voice to this emerging understanding of what it can mean to be a Christian in these dynamic times, offering a constructive vision of what a postmodern Christian might look like. A New Kind of Christian recounts a lively and intimate conversation between a pastor and his daughter's high school science teacher, in which they reflect together about faith, doubt, reason, mission, leadership, and spiritual practice in the emerging postmodern world. The pastor is forced to grapple with the deeper source of his dissatisfaction with Christianity as he has understood, practiced, and taught it -his reluctance to let go of the "modern model" of Christianity. Ultimately, he comes to understand that beyond the constricted categories, cliched rhetoric, and rigid mechanisms of modern Christianity lies a new possibility: a revitalized and vibrant faith that explores and expresses the teachings and mission of Jesus in a fresh, engaging way for third-millennium people. The author reminds us that this is but the beginning of the journey, and "whatever a new kind of Christian is, no one is one yet. . . . But every transformation has to start somewhere." For all who are searching for a deeper life with God and a more honest statement of authentic Christian faith, A New Kind of Christian will open the way for an exciting spiritual adventure into new territory and new ways of believing, belonging, and becoming. Brian McLaren is the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in the Washington-Baltimore area and the author of two previous books on contemporary Christianity, including The Church on the Other Side: Doing Ministry in the Postmodern Matrix (2000).

From the Back Cover
A New Kind of Christian's conversation between a pastor and his daughter's high school science teacher reveals that wisdom for life's most pressing spiritual questions can come from the most unlikely sources. This stirring fable captures a new spirit of Christianity-where personal, daily interaction with God is more important than institutional church structures, where faith is more about a way of life than a system of belief, where being authentically good is more important than being doctrinally "right," and where one's direction is more important than one's present location. Brian McLaren's delightful account offers a wise and wondrous approach for revitalizing Christian spiritual life and Christian congregations. "This is a book that heightens the depths and deepens the peaks. Like all the best things in life, it is not to be entered into lightly, but reverently and in the fear of a God who is waiting for the church to stop asking 'What would Jesus do?' and start asking 'What is Jesus doing?'" —Dr. Leonard Sweet, E. Stanley Jones Chair in Evangelism, Drew University "Get ready to wake up your spirit and breath deep. McLaren's A New Kind of Christian is a street-level, lived excursion into this present millennium-a world where ministry by control, condescension, and smug certainty gives way to incarnational faith." —Sally Morgenthaler, president, SJM Management Co. and author of Worship Evangelism
 

McLaren, Brian

After several years teaching English and consulting in higher education, he left academia in 1986 to become founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church, a nondenominational church in the Baltimore-Washington region. The church has grown to involve several hundred people, many of whom were previously unchurched.[citation needed] In 2004, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity from the Carey Theological Seminary in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Many of the books that McLaren has authored, including the "A New Kind of Christian" trilogy, deal with Christianity in the context of the cultural shift towards postmodernism. McLaren is a proponent of the "Emerging Church" movement, which is often associated with a rejection of what emergents perceive as modernism in the Evangelical church in favor of an integration of postmodernism, though many Evangelical leaders are uneasy with this.

McLaren has been active in networking and mentoring church planters and pastors since the mid- 1980s, and has assisted in the development of several new churches. In spite of the intense criticism levelled at McLaren by Evangelical leaders, he remains a popular speaker for campus groups and retreats as well as a frequent guest lecturer at seminaries and conferences, nationally and internationally. His public speaking covers a broad range of topics including postmodernism, Biblical studies, evangelism, apologetics, leadership, global mission, church growth, church planting, art and music, pastoral survival and burnout, inter-religious dialogue, ecology, and social justice.

McLaren has also taken a hard stance against the narrow interpretation of the Bible offered by the more traditional evangelicals, noting in a 2006 interview, "When we present Jesus as a pro-war, anti-poor, anti-homosexual, anti-environment, pro-nuclear weapons authority figure draped in an American flag, I think we are making a travesty of the portrait of Jesus we find in the gospels." McLaren has opposed the invasion of Iraq.

Though McLaren is clearly opposed to certain oppressive evangelical interpretations of the Bible, his own interpretations of Christian Scripture remain somewhat latent. In fact, McLaren's own view on interpeting the Bible seems to call for us to rethink the whole process of interpetation. In his book, A New Kind of Christian, McLaren writes (via his main character Neo),

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"Our interpretations reveal less about God or the Bible than they do about ourselves. They reveal what we want to defend, what we want to attack, what we want to ignore, what we're unwilling to question..."

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Many will recognize, lying not too far behind this quote, the postmodern philosophy of language brought to us by the likes of Derrida and Foccault. For McLaren, the locus of meaning has clearly shifted from the author or the text to the reader. Accordingly, he questions not only the certain interpretations of evangelicals, but also the ability to interpret according to authorial intent in general (be it divine or human).

He is on the international steering team and board of directors for Emergent Village, a growing generative friendship among missional Christian leaders, and serves as a board member for Sojourners and "Orientacion Cristiana". He formerly served as board chair of International Teams, an innovative mission organization with 15 nationally registered members including the United States office based in Chicago, and has served on several other boards, including Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle, and Off The Map. When asked if he considers himself to be an evangelical, McLaren said: "I don't want to give any impression that I want to stay where I'm not wanted."[2]

McLaren is married and has four young adult children. He has traveled extensively in Europe, Latin America, and Africa, and his personal interests include ecology, fishing, hiking, kayaking, camping, songwriting, music, art, and literature.