By Greg Warner

What can the mating habits of tortoises teach us about our spiritual connection to God? You probably would never think to ask -- unless you are Brian McLaren.

Since childhood, McLaren has always been fascinated with nature. "Turtles, birds, all wildlife, geology, weather. It's kind of a spiritual thing for me."

Nature, tortoises and evolution figure prominently in McLaren's new book, The Story We Find Ourselves In. It's a sequel to his popular, but somewhat controversial, A New Kind of Christian. Both books are written in an unusual narrative non-fiction style -- using fictional characters, rather than sterile discourse, to incarnate theological truths.

Much of The Story We Find Ourselves In is set in the Galápagos Islands, the same islands that helped Charles Darwin forge his evolutionary theories. Gigantic tortoises are among the famous wildlife of the islands (galápagos is Spanish for turtle). And the storyline allowed McLaren to indulge his passion for tortoises -- 10 make their home in his Maryland backyard and winter in his basement.

The central character is once again Neil Edward Oliver (Neo for short), a Jamaican preacher-turned-science teacher whose easy manner and unorthodox views somehow manage to guide Christians and seekers through crises of life and faith.

Neo is the prototype in Brian McLaren's experiment to reimagine evangelism for a post-apologetic world. Neo's latest adventure is likely to stir some controversy as well, if not for the tortoise sex scene then perhaps because the hero extols evolution as testimony of God's creative imagination.

"Nature is God's artwork, God's text, showing us so much about the Creator," McLaren told FaithWorks. "I am very respectful of what I can learn from nature."

The author is in fact a teacher-turned-preacher, aformer English professor who's now pastor of a non-denominational church outside Washington, D.C. But he's is more than a pastor with a knack for writing.

McLaren is cited by Robert Webber as the leading voice of the next generation of evangelicals. And he's a key figure in the "emerging church," a mostly under-the-radar movement of Christian leaders in their 20s and 30s that is beginning to toss a few waves on the shores of evangelicalism.

In The Story We Find Ourselves In, McLaren is not just teaching spiritual object lessons from nature. His goal is much more ambitious. He wants to show that faith and science are not natural enemies, that together they tell the story of God's creative purpose.

"One of our crises, as we enter the postmodern world, is that Christianity has presented itself as a system of belief instead of a story. And we got on adversarial terms with science." When science sought to explain the world without God, it produced a story without meaning, McLaren says. And Christians, trying to recast the gospel in the language of science and reason, produced a propositional belief system that lost touch with the story that gave it power. "I am interested in seeing science and faith as collaborators," McLaren says.

Diverse and interdependent

What can nature teach us? Two key lessons are diversity and interdependence. Both will characterize the future church, in McLaren's view.

"Life evolves to thrive in many different niches." The same should be true among Christians, he says. "We need incredible diversity to fill many, many niches."

Interdependence, though imbedded in nature, is foreign to the Western individualism so ingrained in American Christianity. That's why McLaren's "new kind of Christian" often uses words like "journey" and "conversation" to describe Christian life beyond the postmodern divide.

Conversation implies Christians can learn a lot by interacting with -- and listening to -- the world, especially non-Christians. "Their questions are an essential facet of our discipleship," McLaren says. "They change us."

"Jesus said we shouldn't worry when people ask us questions; the Spirit will guide us. That says to me there are things we're going to learn when we engage people missionally that we would not learn any other way."

He illustrates with the biblical encounter between Peter and Cornelius in the book of Acts. While Cornelius was the "seeker," Peter was the one most profoundly changed by the relationship. "To be the people of God doesn't make us isolated from the people of the world. … We're in the milieu. It's like growing a tree in the real weather, not in the greenhouse."

McLaren and his cohorts emphasize dialogue over debate, community over individualism, experience over proof. They willingly shed the modernist expectation that Christians should have all the answers. Critics accuse them of abandoning all absolutes. But most postmodern Christians don't deny absolutes exist -- only that they can be proclaimed unequivocally, without hesitation or humility.

"Certainty is overrated," McLaren declares. "God calls us to faith and to seek the Kingdom." There is great danger in the quest to be right, he warns. "History teaches us that a lot of people thought they were certain and we found out they weren't."

Likewise, cookie-cutter formulas and go-it-alone strategies will be ill-suited for the church in the new world.

"Our theology and the way we treat people, this to me is really the big issue," McLaren says. He quotes a fellow staff member who contends their church could trade its contemporary worship style for the Episcopal liturgy and it wouldn't change the character of the church.

"All of the things people focus on -- style of music and so on -- are all much less significant than we realize. One reason we have to pay so much attention to 'cosmetics' is because we are trying to market a message that is very much flawed. We think the gospel is about how to get individual souls into heaven when they die, when for Jesus the message was about the Kingdom of God, which is a here-and-now experience, not just a heavenly one, and a communal experience, not just an individual one, and involves all of creation, not just an invisible part of us called our soul."

Uncredentialed misfit

Such bold statements can sneak up on the listener, who's easily lulled by McLaren's soft-spoken and winsome manner. The unimposing pastor is not a likely suspect to lead a theological movement, or even to lead a church.

"I'm a total misfit," he admits. "I'm a middle-aged bald guy without proper credentials."

His training is not in theology but in English -- a bachelor's and master's from the University of Maryland -- and he backed into the pastorate. While in graduate school, McLaren and his wife, Grace, started a Bible study in their home. It attracted mostly graduate students and faculty and in 1982 took the shape of a house church. McLaren led the church while teaching English composition at the university. But as the congregation grew, so did the demands. "I was either going to have to step back or step in." In 1986 he left academia to become pastor of the congregation, which became Cedar Ridge Community Church.

Although he never went to seminary, McLaren first bumped up against postmodernism much earlier than most seminary students or pastors. "In graduate school in the '70s, postmodernism was first hitting the academy through literary criticism. I was exposed to deconstructionism and postmodern thought. I remember thinking, if this kind of thought catches on, Christianity is in real trouble."

It would be another two decades before the conversation would migrate into Christian circles. But for McLaren, the questions raised in those classroom discussions always "simmered on the back burner." Then he began to detect something different about the young nonbelievers Cedar Ridge was attracting. "I thought, oh no, that new way of thinking is the way all the people who walk through the doors of our church are thinking."

He began to re-examine the way he understood the gospel story, particularly the modern, rational formulations and apologetic evangelism he picked up from his Reformed background. "I went through a real personal theological and faith struggle in the mid-'90s," he recalls. "I didn't know any other Christians who were struggling with these issues."

He stumbled upon Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be, by Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh (1995), and later the writings of Leonard Sweet. "I was so relieved to find at least a few people talking about these things." In 1998, he tried his own hand at voicing the new challenge for Christians with The Church on the Other Side, his first book. But then he began to explore "evangelism in a different key" with four books -- Finding Faith (1999), A New Kind of Christian (2001), More Ready Than You Realize (2001), and his newest, The Story We Find Ourselves In (2003).

McLaren writes "to help get a conversation started" about the Christian faith, he says modestly, but also "to free our understanding of the gospel from these modern categories." A New Kind of Christian provoked a lot of conversation within the evangelical establishment, not all of it pleasant. Although most reviews were positive, a few were "blistering." The book was the subject of a four-part analysis in Books and Culture last year.

The book questioned Christianity's sometimes clumsy, sometimes costly, accommodation to modern rationalism. Critics said McLaren either offered nothing new or abandoned centuries of essential tradition.

"The people who dislike the book the most tend to be strict, high Calvinists," McLaren says. That makes sense, he adds, because Calvinism "is the highest expression of modernism." But he is heartened by the response he receives from other readers, most of whom praise its fresh approach. "I've gotten three negative emails and thousands of affirming ones." Some of that affirmation comes from older evangelicals who nonetheless recognize that traditional expressions of the gospel "have turned off their children and grandchildren."

Slim pickings

McLaren seems untroubled that he may not be embraced by the evangelical mainstream -- "I'm not interested in that."

"I have a sense of calling that I should just risk everything to deal with some of these barriers and constraints," he says. "What I'm really excited about is the next 20-to-30 young leaders who are planting churches, who are in seminary, women as well as men, minorities. They're getting to start so much further along."

This "misfit" has quietly earned the respect of the thought leaders, innovative pastors, church planters and entrepreneurs who make up the rag-tag "emerging church" movement. Although McLaren, 46, is older than many in the movement, they usually look to him for leadership. As one of them, Tony Jones, explains: "You know how they say that Neil Young is the 'grandfather of Grunge'? Well, that's what Brian is to the emerging-church movement."

"He's a hippie without hair," offers Doug Pagitt of Minneapolis, an Emergent colleague. The "hippie notion," he explains, involved "committing with one's life to the attempt to change the world, a passion to care about people, the earth and our future, a desire to live to a different end."

Those young leaders value not only McLaren's insights but the charitable tone he sets for the postmodern conversation. "Brian has moved beyond simple deconstruction and stone-throwing to a much more productive combination of healthy critique along with future-thinking and praxis," says Mark Oestreicher of Youth Specialties.

"They probably have slim pickings," McLaren says of the younger leaders who look up to him. "I've heard so many stories of boomer pastors who have such a disparaging attitude toward young leaders in their 20s and 30s."

Some of those older pastors have trouble envisioning these "postmodern Christians" -- who question evangelical tradition and shun megachurch pragmatism -- as the vision of the future.

But to these younger leaders, McLaren -- the "unschooled" theologian who is ready to redraw the categories -- is a balm. He knows his outsider status gives him credibility. "I wasn't indoctrinated. I wasn't socialized into that. There's a certain perspective you have on the fringe of things," says McLaren, who serves on FaithWorks' editorial advisory board.

Raised among the tiny Plymouth Brethren, shaped by the Jesus Movement, trained in the secular academy, impassioned by art, music, philosophy and nature -- McLaren doesn't fit neatly into any evangelical stereotype. But that works to his advantage in an era whose zeitgeist is eclectic, holistic and global.

"I'm not interested in saving evangelicalism or reforming evangelicalism, although others might have that calling. My dream is that there could be a conversation and a friendship among grass-roots leaders and theologians in evangelical, mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox communities, and in some small way that this kind of broad friendship could bring new possibilities to Christian churches around the world."

"I really see a convergence happening," he adds.

Lowering barriers

One means to that lofty end is Emergent, a grass-roots network of young Christian leaders of many traditions, which McLaren has helped shape. The group, through its website emergentvillage.com, offers resources, networking, gatherings and theological conversation. Emergent's first large-scale national gathering, Feb. 25 to March 1 in San Diego, is part of a new partnership with Youth Specialities.

"A lot of us are asking, What are the structures that we need next? Not a new denomination but ways to connect across denominations, new ways to disseminate resources, new ways to connect learning communities. … I think websites like Emergent Village, publications like FaithWorks, and conferences are all ways of creating new kinds of networks."

Already McLaren sees evidence that young Christians are more willing to look past doctrinal differences to find fellowship. They see denominations as "structures for connection rather than barriers for isolation." They are more open to the wisdom and practices of the ancient church and non-evangelical traditions -- "resources grossly undervalued in recent decades."

"The thing I can tell you about the people I have met in this emerging movement is they are thoughtful. They read broadly. They are interested in spiritual practices." And they prefer a model of leadership that is laid-back and collegial, not authoritarian or success-driven. "These young leaders lead by being the lead seekers," McLaren says. "They don't necessarily have all the answers. But that looks like a buffoon to modern expectations."

Many of those young leaders are pastors of start-up churches, often meeting in inner cities or living rooms. The emerging-church movement places a lot of emphasis on church planting, largely because it's so difficult to get traditional churches to "transition" into something else. But McLaren says no one approach will suffice.

"I'm for all of it," says the non-denominational pastor, whose own church looks pretty mainstream on the surface. "We need new churches and we need transitioning churches. And we need for other churches to stay the way they are. There are resources we are gaining from the Orthodox tradition that, if they had not been very conservative, those theological perspectives would have been lost or even more marginalized than they are. The beautiful thing God does in the church is some people conserve things and they don't even know who they are conserving them for. And that's a beautiful thing."

"I am very against people being pressured to change who aren't called by God to do so."

- Greg Warner is executive editor of FaithWorks. (greg@faithworks.com)