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.

---

All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

"A New Kind of Christian", 2008-07-18
Brian D. McLaren, in his book, "A New Kind of Christian" does a superb job of getting at the heart of what needs to happen within Christianity as society moves into the future. While his friend "NEO" seems larger than life, the issues raised and insights given are exactly what needs to be addresed in our time. A refocusing of our own faith and how we look at "church" becomes a major issue in our widely diversified church culture. The old and current way of being church is breaking down and new concepts must emerge. The one quote which will stay with me is, "...church doesn't exist for the benefit of its members. It exists to equip its members for the benefit of the world" That says it all.


4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

A new kind of What?, 2008-05-02
WARNING...If you are looking for a review that dances around what I think or tries to be nice this is not the one for you. If you want a gut reaction to this book keep reading...
Brian Mclaren is everything you ever imagined of a snakeoil salesman and more. He is able to manipulate the english language in ways that I had not imagined possible. But if you read carefully and take meaning from the entirety of what he says it is clear that what he advocates does not even resemble the Christianity of the Bible at all. Of course that is not a problem for mclaren and those "new" gnostics like him because they don't really believe the bible is really needed to understand this new christianity. As he will allude to, but not come out and admit here, what he desires is a kind of religion of the month club. We should find the "good" parts of each and make a religion that more suites us and not worry about truth, or right and wrong or anything so modern. As a matter of course mclaren misrepresents Christians as an evil with no redeaming values unless they decide to come over to his special new knowledge of what a good christian should be. Of course he has no basis for this special knowledge unless you sermise from his so called prayers that God has made a special revelation to him. The only use of scripture he makes in this book is misrepresented to support points of view that scripture as a whole clearly refutes. But I must give him credit, he is able to soft peddle evolution, syncritism, universalism, relativism, and denegrate the truth of scripture all in one sitting. I was also struck with the irony that he preaches postmodernism throughout this book while at the same time proving that he has no understanding of postmodernism because of his insistence that he has the "new" truth and spending an entire book telling us what that new truth is. If I were to sum this book up in one word it would be a word so "modern" it was used the first few centuries after Christ the gnostics of those days....Heresy.


1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

A place to start, 2008-04-26
I am just starting to examine emergent Christianity and come at McLaren's book from a different perspective than many previous reviewers as a liberal mainline Protestant (the bogey man for some here). I think McLaren's analysis of the state of the church today is pretty much on target. I especially appreciated his perception that both evangelical and liberal Protestant churches are essentially modern institutions now floundering to adjust to the emerging postmodern world. Despite the criticisms here, I actually found McLaren's "evangelical skirts" showing a bit too much for me and I am not sure how far he has really moved beyond modern evangelicalism. But the whole point is that we are in transition (and this was written eight years ago) and not yet arrived on the postmodern side, so this may not be a big concern.

What I found increasingly irritating as I read the book, however, was just the whole narrative format. McLaren doesn't pretend to be a great fiction writer, but in the introduction he asks us to imagine Plato's dialogs! We are a LONG way from those. I think the main problem is that the story of a pastor with a faith/vocation crisis just isn't a substantial enough framework for the book. McLaren seems to recognize that by introducing the character Neo, who he is actually more interested in. His side story becomes increasingly distracting, however, especially when he leaves to attend to his dying mother--with Alzheimer's! Fiction can be used effectively to present philosophical ideas (one that comes to mind is the early 70s tour de force, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig) but in this case I am afraid it just gets in the way. There are some very good passages and genuinely provocative ideas, however, and they are worth slogging through the rest to find.



1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Jaded about Church? Here's an attitude shift., 2008-03-16
An attitude shift of looking at how we do our Christianity, how we live it, and how it is expressed by us. There are some controversial points in the book however at it's core, it is calling us to be real and doesn't compromise the message of the Bible at all. It calls us to work with a new paradigm that runs at another level that the traditional church offering it's ministries to its congregation. This is a view on what it means to embrace the attitude of being "missional" or living our life as if we are on mission everyday. The impact of living this way has changed how I view my Christian walk. I encourage you to consider reading this book as well.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Creative but Superficial, 2008-03-12
The book contains a creative and interesting discourse between a burnout minister and his postmodern Christian teacher friend. I don't know what's happened to the 'modern' churches in America, but the concepts Brian McLaren expounds in the book aren't new at all. Christians have always been called to "act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with God." (Micah 6:8) A lot of the issues discussed in this book have been much more thorougly explained and illustrated in books about the kingdom community by such renowned Christian authors as John Stott and Howard Sydner first published in the 1980's. This one is comparatively superficial, but apparently much easier to read.

Price is accurate as of the date/time indicated. Prices and product availability are subject to change. Any price displayed on the Amazon website at the time of purchase will govern the sale of this product.