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Change is key to it all, author says

Q&A WITH ...

Brian McLaren's simple goal is summarized in the title of his new book: Everything Must Change. Christians need a new framework, he says, to tackle global crises such as the environment and terrorism.

Mr. McLaren, a former college English instructor, was a founding pastor in 1982 of Cedar Ridge Community Church, a nondenominational church in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area. Cedar Ridge was an early example of what's come to be known as the "emergent church" movement.

Named by Time magazine in 2005 as one of the "25 Most Influential Evangelicals," Mr. McLaren has been expanding his global networking efforts. He's on the board of several organizations, including Sojourner, led by Jim Wallis. His latest speaking tour began last weekend in Charlotte, N.C., and will bring him to Dallas on Feb. 22 and 23. He spoke recently by phone with Special Contributor Mary Jacobs . Here are excerpts.

You have an eclectic group of sponsors for your tour: Sojourner, the Sierra Club, Faith at Work. What's the common thread?

Things are changing. The old polarities of left and right, secular and religious – we're breaking down those barriers. We've got to come together to face our global crises, embrace some deep and very hopeful change. This is bringing together unlikely people and creating some exciting, fresh collaborations.

Which global crises are you talking about?

The first I call the "prosperity" crisis. Our economic system has produced great prosperity, but it's unsustainable in relation to the environment.

The second is an "equity" crisis. Our economic system works amazingly well for about 1 billion of the earth's 6.7 billion people, but for the rest, it's working much less well. For the poorest people it's hardly working at all.

These two crises lead to the third, the "security" crisis. When you have a poor majority and a rich minority, you have a problem. And when the environment is pushed beyond sustainability to a condition of instability, the people who suffer first are the poor.

The fourth crisis is one of spirituality – the question of "Why haven't we been able to address the first three?" I think we have a problem of our "framing stories," the stories that give us the set of values that lead us to respond. Usually it's our religious communities that give us these, but they are not. In many cases our world's religions are making the first three crises worse.

How so?

Over the last 300 years, the industrial revolution was fueled by a theological idea, which was that humans were given dominion over the earth. But that understanding carried with it very little in the way of stewardship. The Christian faith has by and large bought into a notion that God cares about souls and heaven but doesn't care about matter and the earth. The best of our theologians would never say this, but on a popular level, it's deeply rooted. So we let economics rule, with very little theological conscience.

When I think about the "crisis literature" of popular American Christianity in the past, a lot of it had an alarmist, conspiratorial feel – think The Late Great Planet Earth. Your approach seems different.

I couldn't think of anything more different from my book than The Late Great Planet Earth, which represents the "left behind" eschatology. That basically says the world is hopeless, the toilet has been flushed, and it's all going down. That God has no hope for the earth. ... God just wants to destroy it and extract the souls out of it. I know that view is popular, but I think it is deadly wrong and destructive and dangerous.

I think our Jewish friends have a much more biblical understanding when they speak of tikkun olam, which means "the healing of the earth." At the center of the Christian religion is a person, Jesus, and at the center of Jesus is the message of the kingdom of God. I believe that message is a lot more like tikkun olam than it is like Left Behind.

And Jesus was, after all, Jewish.

Exactly. I really think this eschatology of abandonment and despair is like a cancer that has gotten into Christian theology. It's deterministic. It makes it sound like God has the future all filmed, like a movie that's in the can. ... So now the film is just playing and we're stuck.I believe that God invites us to participate in the pursuit of justice and in the expression of compassion and in the work of reconciliation.