I am not really sure I'm the right guy to be reviewing Brian McLaren's Everything Must Change (2007), even though I was positively stretched by his Reinventing Your Church (1998). I have not read his most important titles, such as A Generous Orthodoxy, A New Kind of Christian, or The Secret Message of Jesus. I'm sure I'll get to those as McLaren has proven himself to be one of the most dangerous (in a good way) Christian thinkers today.
I'm just going to take his book chapter by chapter, and share some of the main points as I see them. I don't want to cover it so completely that you'll feel you don't need to read it yourself; I'm really hoping you'll want to pick up your own copy, and maybe some of McLaren's other titles. It would be really cool to have an informed conversation about these topics.
In chapter one, McLaren challenges the notion that Christianity is just about the afterlife: ...the versions of Christianity we inherited are largely flattened, watered down, tamed . . . offering us a ticket to heaven after death, but not challenging us to address the issues that threaten life on this earth. [1]•
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McLaren points out four global dysfunctions:
- the prosperity crisis - great wealth is produced for one third of the world's population, but is both unsustainable and causing environmental breakdown
- the equity crisis - the growing gap between the very poor and the very rich, and the resulting resentment by the poor and fear by the rich
- the security crisis - the danger of war arising from said resentment and fear among groups at the opposite ends of the economic spectrum
- the spirituality crisis - the failure of the world's religions (Christianity and Islam make up 54% of the world's population) to heal the three previous crises [2]
In the author's own words: This book is a first visit to a new way of seeing the world and hearing the message of Jesus. [3]
[1] Brian McLaren, Everything Must Change (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007), 3.
[2] Ibid., 5.
[3] Ibid., 7.
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