May 14, 2024 • 55 mins
With the continued decline of churches and denominations, many pastors and church leaders are facing a future filled with doom. In this conversation, Brian McLaren discusses his new book Life After Doom and how the four possible scenarios for the future of our world mirror the reality of institutional church: collapse avoidance, collapse rebirth, collapse survival, and collapse extinction. McLaren emphasizes the need for pastoral care and support in the face of these challenges and encourages individuals to show up for what they love. He also suggests reimagining the Christian faith as a series of movements rather than institutions. McLaren emphasizes the importance of small groups of people coming together to live simpler and more meaningful lives, focusing on conversation and enjoying the beauty of nature.
Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate for “a new kind of Christianity” – just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. He is a core faculty member and Dean of Faculty for the Center for Action and Contemplation. and a podcaster with Learning How to See. He is also an Auburn Senior Fellow and is a co-host of Southern Lights. His newest books are Faith After Doubt (January 2021), Do I Stay Christian? (May 2022), and Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart, (May 2024). Born in 1956, he graduated from University of Maryland with degrees in English (BA, 1978, and MA, 1981). His academic interests included Medieval drama, Romantic poets, modern philosophical literature, and the novels of Dr. Walker Percy. In 2004, he was awarded a Doctor of Divinity Degree (honoris causa) from Carey Theological Seminary in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and in 2010, he received a second honorary doctorate from Virginia Theological Seminary (Episcopal).
Past Episodes with Brian:
https://futurechristian.podbean.com/e/brian-mclaren-on-faith-after-doubt/
https://futurechristian.podbean.com/e/do-i-stay-a-christian-with-brian-mclaren/
Presenting Sponsor:
Phillips Seminary Join conversations that expose you to new ideas, deepen your commitment and give insights to how we can minister in a changing world.
Supporting Sponsors:
I Help Pastors Get Jobs: Use code 'futurechristian'
Torn Curtain Arts is a non-profit ministry that works with worship leaders, creatives, and churches to help avoid burnout, love their work, and realize their full creative potential.
Future Christian Team:
Loren Richmond Jr. – Host & Executive Producer
Martha Tatarnic – Guest Host / Co-Host
Paul Romig–Leavitt – Executive Producer
Danny Burton - Producer
Dennis Sanders – Producer
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
>> Paul (00:06):
Welcome to the Future Christian podcast, your source
for insights and ideas on how to lead your church
into the 21st century.
At the Future Christian podcast, we talk to
pastors, authors, and other faith leaders for helpful
advice and practical wisdom to help you and your
community of faith walk boldly into the future.
(00:27):
Now here's your host, Lauren Richmond, Junior.
>> Loren (00:35):
Welcome to the Future Christian podcast. Today,
we're welcoming Brian McLaren to the show.
Brian is an author, speaker, activist, and public
theologian. A former college english
teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate
for a new kind of Christianity, just,
generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common
(00:56):
good. He's a core faculty member and dean of
faculty for the center for Action and
Contemplation and a podcaster with learning how to
see. He is also an Auburn Senior
Fellow and is a co host of Southern
Lights. His newest book is
life after wisdom and courage for a
world falling apart. Born in
(01:17):
1956, he graduated from the University of Maryland
with degrees in English. His academic
interests include medieval drama, romantic
poets, modern philosophical
literature, and the novels of Doctor Walker
Percy. In 2004, he was awarded a
doctorate divinity degree from, uh, Carey
Theological Seminary in Vancouver, BC. And in
(01:39):
2010, he received a second honorary
doctorate from Virginia Theological
Seminary. Let's welcome Brian to the
show.
All right, welcome to the Future Christian podcast. This is Loren Richmond,
junior, and today I'm pleased to be joined by Brian
(02:01):
McLaren. So welcome to the show.
>> Brian McLaren (02:03):
Great to be back here with you, Loren
>> Loren (02:06):
Yeah, thanks. Uh, anything else you'd like our listeners
to know about you?
>> Brian McLaren (02:10):
Well, uh, they probably know that I write
books and that I used to be a pastor. I'm a
father of four adult children and five
grandchildren. And,
um. Yeah, that's, um, probably the most
important thing.
>> Loren (02:26):
Yeah. So I heard this joke the other day that it comes
to mind. I'm curious your thoughts. Um,
I forget the woman who said it first,
but parents, or, excuse me, grandparents and
children have a common enemy. I wonder if
that's true in your
observation.
>> Brian McLaren (02:44):
Well, I think the humorous
point, uh, obviously puts that
word enemy, uh, in quotes, I'm
sure. But there is a certain
sense that for children,
one of their most challenging realities and greatest
necessities is their parents. And,
uh, their parents weaknesses are
(03:07):
very hard for parents to often admit to children.
But those parents parents knew the weaknesses.
So I think that would create, uh, a
certain alliance, uh, and
deep, uh, connection.
>> Loren (03:21):
Well, as a parent of kids, I do appreciate.
Appreciate the support of grandparents. So thank you for your
support of your grandkids. I'm sure
your children appreciate it.
So uh, uh, you've been on the pod before,
so I'll link past episodes if people
are somehow unfamiliar with you.
(03:41):
Brian McLaren can hear your kind of backstory, but
I'm just kind of curious if you're willing to share just what has sustained
you, uh, these past year. Two
years.
>> Brian McLaren (03:51):
Yes. Uh, one of the things that
sustains me, Loren, is some friends,
uh, and family members with whom I can be
completely honest, to just have the
space with people to say, hey, look, I need
to tell you what I'm thinking or what I'm feeling. It
might not be true, it might not be real, it might not
(04:12):
be good, but I'll be better off if I can
just admit it to some other person. Um, those
sort of nonjudgmental friendships are super
important. Um, and then, I mean,
this sounds like a cliche, but I guess it's a cliche because
it's so true. But just about every morning,
I get up and take a walk a mile, two, 3
(04:33):
miles, and the act of
walking outdoors and seeing the sun rise
another day. And, uh, I have a little saying. I
repeat, uh, often to myself and anyone else who's
around. I'll say, human beings might be a mess,
but the birds are being awesome. Human
beings might be in trouble, but the trees are amazing.
(04:53):
And just to be reminded of the
stability and consistency and beauty and
brilliance of nature, that always does me good.
>> Loren (05:01):
Yeah. And you live still in Florida, is that
correct?
>> Brian McLaren (05:04):
I do, yes.
>> Loren (05:05):
So obviously, you get to really
enjoy nature,
at, um, least, I guess, depends. Some people might enjoy the cold
and snow, but I don't particularly love
it. So you get to really enjoy it on a, on a
day to day basis, it sounds like. And I imagine that's
really what kind of informed this latest
(05:26):
book. Yeah.
>> Brian McLaren (05:27):
Yeah, that's true. And I've been this way since I was a kid.
I was born in a very cold climate in the,
um, finger lakes region of upstate New York.
And, uh, one of my
earliest memories is, uh, trick or
treating in the snow.
Uh, but I always loved the outdoors.
(05:47):
And, uh, from flipping over
rocks in that little creek beside my house when I was a
kid, and virtually every rock was full
of fossils in that, uh, part of the
country.
>> Loren (05:58):
Oh, wow.
>> Brian McLaren (05:59):
And just gave me a sense not only for the
amazing nature that's alive today, but that
buried beneath our feet are the fossils telling us
of millions of years of life. So,
yeah, I think I've always, that's been
always very closely connected to my
sense of reverence and transcendence and
(06:19):
awe. And worship.
>> Loren (06:21):
Yeah, yeah. I've been hearing more and more of late
just about the importance of kids getting outside and
exploring, uh, both for their own
development. And then I think we could both add, certainly
for their connection to
transcendence and the world beyond,
both, uh, the physical world and then the
spiritual world. Yeah.
>> Brian McLaren (06:43):
So. That's right. And let me just say
this is one of the reasons why, you know,
the obsession and addiction and
attachment we all have to, um,
screens just
makes it all the more valuable and important when we just
kind of look up from the screen, look to our left, look to our right,
look under our feet and reconnect, uh,
(07:06):
with this beautiful creation we're part of.
>> Loren (07:09):
Yeah, I was thinking about this earlier
this week when I was at a conference
and I went for a run, kind
of around the block in the neighborhood and left
my smartphone. I was kind of like, oh
boy, if something happens, I'm in trouble. But also, humans
have been taking adventures without
smartphones for
(07:31):
hundreds and thousands of years and have somehow survived.
So I'll survive.
>> Brian McLaren (07:36):
I might survive around the block once without it.
>> Loren (07:39):
Right, right. Well,
we're here today to talk about, uh,
Brian's new book, life after
Wisdom and courage for a world
falling apart. So I've kind of teased it
here already, but do you want to just share kind of what
really inspired the book, brought it about?
>> Brian McLaren (07:59):
Sure, Lauren? Well, um, more and more
of us are hearing and understanding terms like
multi crisis or poly crisis. We all
have the sense that nothing's ever perfect in the world of
humans. We always have our problems and arguments and
so on. But, um, a lot of us are
having the feeling that we have a constellation of very big
(08:20):
problems and each one is making it
harder for the others to be seen,
addressed and solved. And when we
face that kind of, ah, of trouble,
I think it raises our levels of anxiety,
um, it raises the levels of desperation for some
people to find a conspiracy theory
(08:40):
to explain things or a scapegoat to
blame, uh, or some, ah,
little, uh, cultic group
to help us be in denial about a reality that's
pressing in on all sides. So when
we have a sense that things,
um, ah, that we're
in water beyond our depth,
(09:03):
um, the word we have for that
feeling is doom. In the title, life after doom.
I'm not talking about life after the end of the world.
I'm not talking about some sort of literal
apocalypse. I am talking about a very
real emotion that we feel, um, more
and more of us feel our institutions that
(09:23):
evolved and have served us very well, for a long
time seem to be incapable of
helping, helping us face the realities,
uh, around us on many levels. So that
feeling, I felt it in myself,
um, and I felt it's
socially unacceptable to talk about.
And then when I have the courage to bring
(09:46):
it up and others say I've been feeling it
too, there's this sense of relief that comes when we
can create some space to
face this feeling that we have, and then we can
explore how real it is, how deep it is.
Uh, first we need a little space, and in a
way that's what I'm trying to do in the book, is create some
(10:06):
headspace and heart space to face that
feeling, that more and more of us feel.
>> Loren (10:11):
Yeah, I think that's so important and so
helpful. So you kind of frame this,
the narrative, through the idea
of um, climate change, global
warming, the very real
danger we face both, uh,
collectively and individually through
(10:32):
um, the planet and the health
thereof of the planet. And
I spoke to you about this here before we start recording. But as
I read the book and began thinking about it more and
more, uh, I thought about it through what
you just said there, the idea of
the very real kind of collapse or
(10:53):
doom that we seem to be facing
societally. You certainly spoke
to the client of institutions,
and I think I'm glad you named what you
said there about this real sense of
danger, or that's not the right word. Um,
disillusionment, um,
(11:13):
I can't think of the right word to frame it.
Um, uncertainty.
>> Brian McLaren (11:18):
Yeah, I think danger, disillusionment,
uncertainty, disappointment in some
ways that the institutions that we
thought were going to work,
uh, end up failing or at least
stumbling. Yeah, I think all of those words are
part of it.
>> Loren (11:34):
So uh, I thought about this book in many ways
as like a pastoral
care book, and especially in the
context that I try to think and
be like with this podcast
around churches and pastors,
you lay out in the book four
scenarios around climate,
(11:57):
uh, change and the possibility of the
future of the earth and really society at large.
But I couldn't help but thinking about that. These kind of four scenarios
are very real possibilities
for our institutions, for
churches. Um, just
on a, a, ah, webinar this week about
denominational decline
(12:20):
as ah, churches individually and collectively,
trying to think about what is realistic to
plan for the future. So I wonder if you
can just talk about first, uh, just
name those four scenarios and then we'll kind of just talk through
um, the implications.
>> Brian McLaren (12:37):
Sure, sure. Um, so let me first
say, Lauren, that um,
that I think we face this
multicrisis, a combination of problems,
each of which makes the others harder to
solve. But at the center of
them is this problem of overshoot. Global
(12:57):
warming is uh, maybe most
urgent example of it, but there are so many
dimensions to it we could look at. We haven't
cared for soil around the earth. We thought soil
was worthless as dirt, but soil, it
turns out, is a uh, precious,
amazing, glorious,
wondrous reality that we took for granted.
(13:19):
We didn't understand. We literally tore it
up every year, not realizing that
soil is like a civilization in and of
itself. Um, what we've done to
our oceans, our rivers,
our ice. Who knew how important ice
was as a climate control center for the
planet? This problem that we're
(13:41):
sucking out more resources than the earth
can replenish and pumping out
more toxins than the earth can detoxify
and pollutants than the earth can neutralize,
that's what overshoot is.
And when you take that seriously,
you realize that um, we're
going to face a bumpy road ahead.
(14:04):
Um, because we uh, we've built,
ah, ah, an economy and a civilization
that is based on certain things that don't
fit with this environment. And as Charles Darwin
said, um, if you don't fit, survival
of the fittest means survival of those
that fit best. And so if we don't fit
(14:24):
well with our environment, then we're going to have real
trouble. And so, um, the four scenarios
that I tried to spell out after,
you know, immersing myself in the literature now
for something um, like 14 or
15 years, um, the four
scenarios are collapse avoidance is the
first. This is the idea that we can learn
(14:47):
what we need to learn quickly enough
that our civilization won't go through a
collapse. Uh, so that's collapse
avoidance. The second is collapse rebirth.
This says that no, we will not learn our
lessons and we will not have the political
and economic and social
capacity to make the changes
(15:09):
we need to make fast enough. And there will be
some kind of civilizational collapse, but
we'll learn enough on the way down that
we'll be able to have a new
ecological, sustainable, wiser
civilization be born. Um, from
the uh, aftermath of this one, the
third is a little more dire. We
(15:32):
could call it the collapse survival
scenario. That is where there will be
a collapse, but we uh,
will cause so much more damage in the process of
trying to stop the collapse from
happening or attacking each other on the way
down that we will
survive. Some number of us,
(15:53):
50%, 40%, 20%,
2% of us will survive, but we will not be able to
rebuild anything anytime soon like what
we currently enjoy. And then fourth is
collapse extinction, the possibility
that human beings could knock ourselves and a
significant part of, ah, Earth's
(16:13):
biosphere, uh, into extinction.
So, um, ah, those are the four
scenarios. Um, you might say, well, collapse avoidance,
that's the only optimistic one. But
even people who believe in collapse
avoidance, who are working their hearts out for
it and using their very best creativity for it,
none of them think it will be easy. So
(16:35):
I think we face challenges no matter
which scenario unfolds.
>> Loren (16:40):
Right, right. And I think this is where again,
I found so much crossover
because like you said, like there's so
much, there's so much complexity and
crossover in these elements. Like we've built
systems and institutions that are kind of dependent
on this kind of growth at all costs
mentality.
>> Brian McLaren (17:02):
Yes.
>> Loren (17:02):
And I mean, we could say like, oh, that's not
so much, at least like in my context in the mainline world.
But I imagine, I mean, I think that was fair of
the mainline world like 30, 40, 50 years ago. And
we're certainly seeing that, we're certainly seeing this trend play out
right now in evangelicalism where
it's the mega church kind of growth at all costs
(17:23):
mentality which has costs.
And I think this is more so in the mainline
world now, where there is, I think there are
these different schools of thought
here is the mainline collapse,
is it avoidable? There are some people who would say it's
all over, but uh, there's some people saying we can learn and
(17:45):
we can try to avoid it. Um,
obviously as a Christian, we have some kind of hope
that rebirth, the second scenario is
possible. Um, but I think
there's still a good bit of
humanity, there's still a good bit of us,
uh, and musing abroad, us broad, we thinking like,
(18:05):
we can define what the rebirth will be, right?
>> Brian McLaren (18:07):
Yes.
>> Loren (18:09):
And then there's some of us who are thinking like, there's going to be
a collapse and there's only going to be a small
survival remnant. And then there's
certainly some who think like, the church is
dying and it's not going to come back. Like God is going to do it
a new thing. Um, so the
church in itself or the institution of church in itself
(18:30):
is all but gone. I mean, those
are pretty four heavy
things, whether we think about it through the lens of
a church or an institution or even
existentially, like our climate, the home we live
on. Um, I'm not even
sure where to go from that because it's so heavy. So why don't you
share?
>> Brian McLaren (18:51):
Yes. Um, well, lauren, first, I
really appreciate the
direction you're going with this. First, I appreciate you
calling this book a pastoral book, because
I suppose the fact that I was a pastor for 24
years has left its permanent mark on me.
And I think that's just who I am.
If I could just tell a quick story that
(19:14):
I was participating in a march. It was
about in a protest, uh, several, uh,
years ago. I, uh, live in southwest Florida, and we
had some companies from Texas trying to come over and
frack the everglades. I mean, of all the.
>> Loren (19:28):
Sounds like a great idea.
>> Brian McLaren (19:29):
Oh, my gosh. It's just stupid and
idiotic of both the Texas
corporations and the Florida government that wanted to
welcome these companies in to make some money, no
doubt. Um, just idiotic. And so I
was participating in a march, and a
woman I respect a great deal, I don't know her
very well, but as we're marching together, she turns
(19:52):
to me and says, I don't think we're going to win this
one. And she said, um, in fact, I've
kind of lost hope. And
I think she's not a religious person, as far as I
know, but she knows that I'm a pastor when I show up for these
events. And I suppose she was making
a kind of confession to me, and I said, well, you're still
(20:12):
here. She says, yeah, I've kind of lost
hope. She said, the only reason I'm here is because of
love, that I love the earth, and I have
to show up for something I love. And
in that moment, I felt what she was going
through, described what so many of us are going through in
so many different areas.
If we could have gone back in time to
(20:34):
1960, which was the peak year
of mainline Protestantism, and
we could have sat down and said to the people, listen,
in the next 65
years, um, there will be less
than half as many people in mainline protestant
churches. There will be about
40% of the seminarians
(20:56):
m and a high percentage of them will not want to be
pastors. They'll be going to seminary for other
reasons. If we would have told them
those numbers, I don't think they could have imagined it to be
true, um, because they were right at their
peak. Right. And
I came from an evangelical background. In many ways, I
was like a refugee escaping a place where
(21:18):
my life was in danger. And so I've
been so grateful for the mainline world, and I had great
hope for the mainline world. But here's the thing I have to say.
65 years after the peak
and maybe 50 years after, just
about everybody knew that mainline protestantism was
in decline. I would have to say
that virtually nothing has changed. In other um, words,
(21:41):
some people are aware that there's decline,
but the liturgies are, are
virtually unchanged now, as we
speak, Methodists are in the process of making some
modest changes to their structure, but by and
large structures are intact.
Um, we've had to close down a whole lot of
seminaries, our concepts of
(22:02):
ordination haven't changed. And so what I would
say is, if
people normally don't change until the
pain gets great enough, I would just have to say,
yeah, the pain still isn't great enough. Um,
um, and here's the interesting comparison
to uh, issues of the environment. A lot of people
(22:24):
don't know this, but a couple of
scientists figured out before the
american civil war, they figured out global
warming, and in fact they made
incredibly accurate predictions about
what would happen if
people continued to burn fossil fuels before the
civil war. And so this was known among scientists,
(22:46):
scientists, but uh, it still
hasn't, even though more and more people
know about it, we still have huge numbers of
people, including the dominant party,
uh, in uh, at least one
house of Congress that
still deny it. And so uh,
(23:08):
it just reminds us that
some of us can wake up to what's going on
and change, and more and more of us can
know what's needed and yet change doesn't come,
and people in our situation
need pastoral care. I guess the circle back to what you
said, and we have to take care of each other
(23:28):
because we have to look and say, you're not
crazy, you see what's real
and you don't have to be
totally pushed into despondency.
Uh, and that's why that woman I was walking next to
in that protest m march, I felt like she gave me
a phenomenal gift when she said,
(23:49):
uh, I've given up hope, but I'm still here because
I haven't given up on love. And of course
her words, she probably didn't know it,
but they evoked one, uh, corinthians
13. There are three great lasting qualities, faith, hope and
love. And the greatest of these is love, which
Paul didn't say this, but I wonder if uh, a
(24:10):
relevant application would be when your faith
fails and when your hope fails, theres still
love. Hang on to love no matter what.
>> Loren (24:17):
Yeah boy im kind of
worried about, like you said, people dont change until the pain is
great enough because boy the pain of climate
change, I dont think its great enough. Um,
so that is what it is. Im thinking about,
too. You mentioned
kind of, again, im tying this back
(24:38):
to church context. I'm thinking
about how you said, you're here
to, I can't remember. You said, or the woman
said, she's here to show up for something she
loves, even though these institutions
or structures around her have
failed in some ways, yes. Um,
(24:58):
and with that, I imagine there's some sense
that the opportunity she might have normally
had or one might recommend for, you
know, community, uh, organizing or,
um, uh, lobbying Congress
to do the proper channels that really has the power.
So I guess this is a long winded way of saying, like I'm thinking
(25:18):
about for churches and pastors, like the normal
kind of, like you mentioned, the normal kind of ways
of, you know, going to college
and then signing up for div school and, uh, getting
the ordination track and then going to serve a church. Like
those models are falling away,
uh, if not rapidly, ever so surely.
(25:41):
How does a faith leader, someone who's passionate about the
christian faith, living out both
in word and deed, how does one
be m. Because how does
one, I don't even know what the word to use is, whether it's the
pastor, whether it's the chaplain, whether it's a faith leader, because so many of
those words are attached to institutions. How does one be
(26:01):
that role as a leader in these new
contexts? Where to go back to
your woman? That's why I'm resonating
with, how do I even show up for something I
love?
>> Brian McLaren (26:12):
Yes, yes, yes.
Well, so, uh, many things come to
mind. Let's see if I can untangle them, to say them in
some kind of useful way. Loren, the
first thing that comes to mind is when
Jesus, uh, said
words that we quote, but maybe now
we're in a position to understand their context. He said,
(26:35):
whenever two or three of you gather in my name there,
I'm in the midst. Let me take those words
from Jesus with another thing that Jesus said. When he
looked at the temple and he said,
1 st will not be left upon the
other, uh, he could
see, and by the way, I don't think you have to think that
(26:55):
Jesus had supernatural knowledge of the
future or that he was predicting something
that he was ready to make happen. In other words,
he was going to destroy or God was going to destroy the
temple. I think Jesus was smart, and he
knew that if,
uh, his fellow Jews
persisted in their current path, they would have another
(27:18):
revolution against the roman empire and it would
end catastrophically. He knew what the Romans would do to
the temple if the Jews tried another
rebellion. Uh, uh, and
so what he, I think is saying is, listen,
you can destroy the temple and still
survive. Um, it's going to
require two or three of you getting
(27:40):
together and remembering what this whole thing is
about and to live
out in a new way.
Um, and in fact, that's what happened,
ironically, when the Jews rebelled against the
Romans. The Romans came in and, and crushed the
temple. And ironically, it was
the pharisees that began to gather people.
(28:02):
It wasn't just two or three. They gathered people in a
quorum of ten. Um, and
those groups of ten would then become the
basis of the synagogue system that exists until
today. So after the collapse
of the institution, that they knew a
new way, uh, of living and gathering
would emerge that was far more flexible,
(28:24):
far more, uh, decentralized, far
harder to destroy, far more resilient.
Um, and something like that, it seems
to me, could be helpful for us to
imagine. If I would translate that into slightly
more abstract terms. Here's the way I'd say it.
I think we have to, at least for a time,
(28:45):
imagine the christian faith less as a
series of institutions and more as a series of
movements.
>> Loren (28:52):
That's good. Yeah.
>> Brian McLaren (28:53):
And we shift our confidence from the
institution to the movement. Now, for those of us who are
clergy, the institution
pays our salary, the institution pays
our health insurance, the institution pays
our pension. And so we've become highly
dependent on the institution.
But there are ways to be christian
(29:18):
that function in a movement mindset
rather than an institutional mindset. Uh,
and I mentioned I have a background in the
evangelical and fundamentalist and charismatic, charismatic
world. And, you know, for all
their serious problems and dangers and all the
rest, they have been operating as a movement for
100 years. And it's the
(29:40):
movement mentality. I don't think it's their
theology that was so great. I think
in a certain sense, they jumped ship
and started working as a movement, while others,
other parts of Christianity stayed
in an institutional mindset. So those would be
a couple of thoughts, and there's a lot more we could explore then, I'm
(30:01):
sure.
>> Loren (30:01):
Yeah, that's good. Uh, and I think I can even bring this back
to the broader climate
topic. Thinking about, you
know, I feel like that's what's going to have to be is small
groups of people, two to three people, ten people,
like, saying, like, hey, life is not about just like
this ever. This never
(30:21):
ending pursuit of stuff and consumption
and the bigger house and the bigger car. Um,
it's going to have to be small groups of people saying,
hey, boy, isn't life more
simple and meaningful when we're sitting together
in conversation, enjoying the beauty of
nature, not hustling
(30:42):
here and there and everywhere.
>> Brian McLaren (30:46):
As you say, that reminds me
of a story, something that
happened to me some years ago. I was in France, and I was at a
gathering that was, uh, called. That was convened
by catholics and evangelicals.
Uh, uh, and
I gave a few talks. They were translated into French.
(31:08):
My French is, uh,
bad enough that I should never inflict it upon
people, but good enough that I can usually
catch most of what goes on in a conversation. So we
open up for q and a. Uh,
and I had someone sitting beside me whispering in my
ear if I needed a translation.
(31:28):
Um, a woman stood up and she said,
uh, I'm a Baptist, and if I say my last
name, all the Baptists in the room will know it, because
my name is royalty in the baptist world.
In France, she said her name. Everybody shook their head.
She said, what will shock you is for you to know that for the
last seven years, I have not gone to church. I was a
(31:49):
leader in my church. My husband and I were on
every committee. We were the backbone of the church
in many ways, she said, but seven
years ago, I reached a point where I said,
uh, I'm totally burned out. I'm totally. I
remember she said, uh, complaisment fatigue. I'm
completely worn out.
(32:09):
Uh, and she said, so
we took a sabbatical from church, and after a
few months, my husband said to me, darling, we have a
problem. We still love Jesus Christ, but
we're not going to church. And he said, I have an
idea. He said, I love to cook. I will cook a
meal every week. And he said to his wife, you are a
(32:29):
wonderful hostess. He said, let's have a
meal, and we'll invite some of our friends who are not
religious, and we'll just see if over
some good soup and some good bread and some good
wine, that we could talk about things that really
matter. And so the woman said, I have not
been to church, uh, for these last seven years.
She said, but around my table, uh,
(32:52):
every Sunday night, we have a meal.
And she said, I think this is the greatest
experience of church I've had in my life. And then she
added, in all of my years of being a baptist
leader, um, I never really saw
people come to faith in Jesus Christ. She
said, but around my table, many people have
(33:13):
come to faith. And, uh, she said,
so she said, I don't know what you will do
with that. I don't know what you will say about me or if you
will judge me, but that's what's happened to me. Then
she sat down. And I just remembered at that moment,
I just thought, a wise woman has
spoken, and maybe we're all getting a little,
(33:34):
uh, message about even if our
institutions fail, it could
be not the worst thing that would happen by
any stretching.
>> Loren (33:42):
Yeah, that's a beautiful story, because the same
principles could apply, whether it be
climate, uh, change, just making simple
changes together on, uh, a neighborhood
block amongst a family.
>> Brian McLaren (33:58):
In fact, there's been a movement
among, um, people sort of on the
avant garde edge of christian ministry.
And they've called the gatherings that they create
different things other than churches. Sometimes they call them
urban monasteries or, um, an
abbey, an urban abbey or something like
this. And it reminds me that
(34:20):
at the end of another civilizational era,
when the roman empire's relationship with
the Celts in Ireland and
Scotland, uh, and Wales, is a
complicated relationship. The roman
empire enforced their
control on the Celts right
as the roman empire was falling apart itself.
(34:43):
And so the Celts, in a sense, had to
submit. But then, in another sense, they
still carried on some of their own, uh,
independence. And that continued when the
roman empire was severely
weakened. And what happened
is these celtic
monasteries became the
(35:04):
basis, uh, around which people would build
little villages and towns. Many of the
really important towns that still exist in
Ireland and Wales and Scotland
are towns that grew up around
monasteries. And one of the attractions is
all around us is violence. All around us
(35:25):
is ignorance. Um,
but in the monastery, they preserve
wisdom. They're actually copying those
manuscripts that other people have been burning.
And of course, as someone who lives in Florida, when we talk about burning
manuscripts, that has an interesting
resonance for me. Ignorant people
(35:45):
want to burn books because they don't
want the past and they don't want other
people's knowledge to be preserved.
But here's an island of sanity, and in a
monastery, you couldn't bring your weapons
inside the monastery. It was a gun free zone, we
might say. It was a little island of
sanity and a little island of peace.
(36:07):
And it just strikes me that
that's a lesson from the past
that we could be involved with in the present
and in the future. Uh, and in some
ways, if our
decline continues in many of our religious
institutions, the people who
(36:28):
have nowhere to go or who drop out
will either just sort of
fade into the woodwork or they will
find ways to create those little islands of
sanity and peace and love and wisdom.
>> Loren (36:42):
Yeah, yeah, that's good stuff. Here, let me ask you
two more questions before we take a break.
One, as you're talking, is just as
I think about the realities both in church
and in what feels
like where our world is heading
as a climate and really, frankly, as a global economy,
(37:03):
I feel like collapse is inevitable in some regard.
So I'm wondering, do you think that humans in some
sense control the outcome? And
I mean that by humans have some measure of volition
about what can come about from that collapse?
And I love your example about the
monastery example. That's what I'm
thinking, yeah.
>> Brian McLaren (37:25):
So my deepest
and most honest answer, Loren, is I don't
know what will happen. I don't have some,
some clear sense of what will happen.
It could be scenario one, two, three or four. I think
any of them are possible. And it's,
ah, human beings that are the unknown, because human
(37:45):
beings have
surprising, astounding
capacities for stupidity
and human beings have surprising,
awe inspiring capacities
for creativity and love. M
my most honest guess is that we should expect
both of those things to exist simultaneously.
(38:07):
I think we see right now levels
of stupidity that are, uh,
I mean, you would think it was a comedy or a movie
script, but it's reality that people are
acting this foolishly,
cravenly, pathetically, ridiculously,
uh, and at the same time,
the capacity is there and it's happening.
(38:30):
It's not happening enough, but it's happening where
people are saying, forget it. The
worst things get. I'm not just going to let that suck me
down, I'm going to stand up for something.
And, um. Yeah, my, and
so I suppose I dare to hope, and I
bet you feel this way too. It's the reason
(38:51):
I write books. I bet it's the reason you
do a podcast and the other good things you
do is we dare to hope that we could
together inspire one another to
stand up with that kind of creativity and love and,
uh. Joy.
>> Loren (39:07):
Yeah, yeah. So
one more question here before we take a break. I'm thinking about, and
I've heard this in some context,
where when we think about climate change,
there's this idea that like, we need a prophet
who's going to warn us of the impending doom, or we need a
wizard. So there's this idea we can either trust in the
(39:27):
prophet and respond to the prophet
and change our behaviors, or we need a wizard who's going
to magically, like, carbon capture and,
uh, renewable energies. It's, uh, kind of the
wizardry thing and we need to trust in the wizard and we
can don't really need to change our behaviors because we can trust
in the wizard. Um, so
(39:48):
I'm again, tie this back in the church. And I think the same kind
of thinking can go into church. There's the prophet
mentality that we need to
trust the prophet that everything is
collapsing and respond accordingly,
or trust in the
wizardry. And obviously there's some faith
aspect that God can and might
(40:09):
intervene, but still, sometimes this can look like in
churches, is trusting in a dynamic
personality or over an amazing, uh, new
system or structure that will save us. So
I'm curious whether it be in church world
or thinking about climate change. Do you like one
of those or the other or.
Certainly there's limitations to both. Do you think there's a
(40:31):
third or fourth, uh, mentality we need to think
about?
>> Brian McLaren (40:35):
Yeah, I, uh, really
love that question. And, uh, maybe we could
come back tomorrow. Let me have 24 hours to think about that
because it's such a good question. I suppose the
first thing I'd say is we definitely need the profit.
Dear friend and colleague, Richard Rohr is writing,
just finishing up what he says will be his last
(40:55):
book.
>> Loren (40:56):
I, um, hope not.
>> Brian McLaren (40:58):
Uh, we all love him so much. Uh,
and he said this several times before, but Richard is getting
up there in years now and his health is frail. But the book is
called the tears of things. And it's about the prophet. It's
about the role of the prophet.
And we need.
And the good news is we have many
prophetic voices out there now. But as is
(41:21):
typical, prophetic voices are
usually listened to by a very small
minority. Mocked, rejected,
uh, excluded, maybe even crucified by the
majority. So there's
not a shortage of profits. We also
have a lot of people claiming to be
wizards. I'm thinking about a certain
(41:43):
presidential candidate who several years ago
said, only I can fix this.
That's the kind of thing that a person claiming
magical, supernatural powers
makes. And, uh, it's,
uh, the truth is nobody
has that power. Um,
and so I think the idea of a
(42:05):
wizard, in that sense, a magician,
the modern day, the term for that is an
authoritarian or a demagogue.
And I think authoritarian
demagogue con artists will have a very
profitable future for a significant
amount of time, because desperate people
(42:25):
always turn to con artists and
demagogues who give them someone to blame, someone
to hate, someone to fear,
and then they can cast themselves in the drama as
an innocent victim or as the
warriors who are going to take things back and
make everything right again. Um, and so what
(42:46):
I would say is, uh,
the thing we need right now is
the prophet. And then the thing we need,
uh, let me switch religions for a minute from
Christianity to Buddhism. Someone asked the
Dalai Lama, uh, I believe it was the
Dalai lama who will be the next,
(43:08):
um, Buddha or Bodhisattva to lead the way.
And he said, the next buddha will be the
sangha. And what he meant by that? The sangha means
the people. And I think what he was
saying is what we need now is not a great
individual. We need a movement of people.
And to come back to that theme of movement, what we
(43:29):
need are prophetic voices and then
people willing to
form, uh, movements that are
full of leaders. So there's not just one leader,
but many leaders who learn how to play as a team
and fly in formation, so to speak.
That's our great hope in every
different endeavor. And no matter how bad
(43:51):
things get.
>> Loren (43:53):
Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I think that's so helpful and really
tracks with what you've been saying here.
Before we move on, I just want to kind of.
I think this is a fair wrap up. Like, uh, I'm
still thinking back to the quote you shared about the woman showing up for
something I love. I feel like. I feel like
in our current context, there's just this temptation
(44:13):
to kind of be stuck in
the misery and awfulness. Um,
and there's not that this.
It's not untrue, right. There's plenty of bad stuff
happening. But I believe at least, like, if
we can show up for something we love and maybe
show up for love, that might be a good place
(44:34):
to start.
>> Brian McLaren (44:36):
Yes. To be able to do that,
I think, requires a certain kind
of death within ourselves.
>> Loren (44:44):
Mhm.
>> Brian McLaren (44:44):
And it's a beautiful death. It's a needed and
good and life giving death. And it's the
death to the assumption that life is all about
me. Um, and
of course, we're all in pain. This
organization that I gave my life to might not be able to
pay my pension or might be able to pay
(45:04):
my pension, but can't do this and this and this. Right.
Um. Well, what that's really about is
I banked my efforts
on something and I'm disappointed that it didn't work
out for me. Um, well, that's
understandable. We feel that way. But eventually we need to get over
that. We need to grieve it,
acknowledge it. And then what we have to go through
(45:27):
is this death to where we say, oh, but life was
never about me. I'm about
life. And for us
to outgrow an obsession
with our own career and our own security and
all the rest but for us to say
I'm about life, I'm about something bigger than myself.
(45:48):
This might not get fixed. This
might not last through my lifetime. This might not get
fixed during my lifetime. But the things
I love, I love enough that I'm going to devote the
time and energy I have for
people who aren't even yet born to bear the fruits
of. And that to me, is a
beautiful kind of death and rebirth
(46:11):
that can happen within us.
>> Loren (46:12):
Boy. And that's really applicable. That's
really applicable here to, again, the theme of your book.
There's going to need to be some death to the belief that life is all
about me, and there's going to
be some willingness to. I tried to write
it down here for people who are not. Say that again.
This idea that living for people who are
(46:33):
beyond me.
>> Brian McLaren (46:34):
How do you say that? Yes. So life
is not about me. I am about life. And
that means I'm about the lives of people who haven't
even been born yet. Um, I want to
sow seeds, I want to create conditions
for a better life for people.
Generations yet to come.
>> Loren (46:54):
Yeah, well, this is good stuff.
Um, let's just roll into here some final
questions. Since, um,
we're running long here. Let me
phrase the question this way.
>> Brian McLaren (47:07):
Um.
>> Loren (47:10):
If you were, I guess we spoke,
this is really antithetical to what you've been talking about here, so I'm
struggling to even answer. Ask the question,
as you already spoke, against authoritarianism,
but let's say you were an all benevolent, I don't know,
a ruler. Uh, or maybe you could say
one thing you want to change, whether about the church or
(47:31):
about humans, um, response to
living in our climate, what would that
be?
>> Brian McLaren (47:37):
Okay, yeah, we'll get rid of all
benevolent dictator or anything like that since. Yeah. Uh,
but if. If I had the chance
to whisper something at everyone's.
>> Loren (47:47):
There you go.
>> Brian McLaren (47:48):
The hope that they would give it five minutes of
consideration. Uh, here's what it would
be. Um,
well, uh, let me say it in a
short version and then a slightly longer version. The short version
would be, many things need to
end for better things to begin.
(48:09):
Um, my dear friend Valerie Kaur,
a Sikh activist, says,
uh, that the darkness of
the womb can become the darkness.
I'm sorry. The darkness of the tomb can become the
darkness of the womb. What feels
like death could actually be,
(48:29):
uh, what's necessary for something new to be
born. And it's so funny. This has been in the
Bible my whole entire life, and I never
really noticed it until recently, but in
one of those apocalyptic passages where Jesus,
we, I think, grossly, foolishly
misinterpreted that he was talking about the end of the
world. He was really talking about the end of his
(48:52):
civilization, um, of his
society. Mhm. Um, it wasn't the end of the world.
It was the end of the world as his
contemporaries knew it. But here's what he said. He said, look, things
are going to get bad, and then they're going to get worse, and then they're
going to get worse, and this still isn't the end. They're going to get
worse. But then he said, these are
only the beginning of birth
(49:14):
pangs.
>> Loren (49:15):
Mhm.
>> Brian McLaren (49:16):
What's so interesting? He didn't say, these are the final
death throes. These are what's
necessary for something else to be born. And
what I could whisper to people is they're going to
be grieving about what
beautiful things that are being lost
in a
destabilized, turbulent time.
(49:38):
But at the end of the day,
our lives will either be about doom or they'll be about
a dream. And the dream is for what
can be born in a time of doom.
And, um, so that's what I would
want to whisper in people's ears.
>> Loren (49:56):
How about a word of. Again, I'm going to phrase it this way.
Pastoral wisdom or
encouragement to. Whether it be
pastors leading struggling
churches, institutions, whether it be
climate activists, leaders,
whether it be, um, folks
seeking justice, causes in their
(50:17):
communities, um, a
word of wisdom to them when
they're just struggling with so much of this
doom.
>> Brian McLaren (50:26):
So I just
had a conversation recently with a woman about
my age grandmother, who
first her stepson
and then her stepdaughter
abandoned their children because
of mental illness and drug addiction.
(50:47):
And so at an age around
70, she and her husband
found themselves having to take
in their grandchildren, and they
had a very happy retirement and a very
happy retirement plan. And that was
interrupted by a
sudden need, driven by love,
(51:10):
to make sure that their grandchildren have the best
life they can possibly have in a horrible situation
nobody would ever choose for them. Right
as we were talking, I said to her,
people, in your situation, you first
have to, in private and for a few
moments, congratulate yourself
(51:33):
for taking on a tough assignment.
Um, you could have walked away when
social services called. You could have just said, well,
I can't help you. Um, but
you heard the call and you responded.
And so part of what I want to do to every activist and every
pastor is I want to put my arms around him and
say, God bless you for hearing the call. God
(51:56):
bless you for hanging in there. You don't have
to do this, but to the degree you continue to.
And, uh, you do it out of love. I love you,
and I appreciate you, and I hope you
feel that deeply. The second thing I said
to her is that you
have to take care of yourself so that you'll
(52:17):
be in good enough shape to take care of
these children.
And part of taking care of yourself
means processing your own
feelings. And to circle back to
this book, one of the things I
think all of us who are in leadership in these times
feel is this feeling like, am I wasting
(52:39):
my time? What do I do, uh,
if things aren't getting better on my
timetable? And so
being able to process those feelings,
uh, that becomes really, really important. And the
thing, I guess, the promise I'd want to make to
people is that I think if we go through the process
(52:59):
in a careful
way, not alone in isolation,
I, um, think we will find some deeper wisdom
and some deeper and wider perspectives
that will need. And I
would want to say to a person, you're worth it
to go through that kind of deepening of perspectives.
>> Loren (53:21):
Yeah, I appreciate that, and I hope our
listeners appreciate it. Again, the book is life
after wisdom and courage for a world falling
apart. Brian, I think this is out for purchase.
Yes, yes.
>> Brian McLaren (53:34):
And it soon here. It started arriving. It started
arriving in people's mailboxes already.
>> Loren (53:41):
This episode should hear release soon, so
I think it's available for purchase. Brian, how can people
connect with you? Uh, otherwise, sure.
>> Brian McLaren (53:50):
My website is just my name,
brianmclaren.net
brianmclaren.net
dot. And there's links there for the book. And I
have a podcast and other resources they might be interested
in. So, yeah, that's the one stop place to make the
connection, Brian.
>> Loren (54:06):
So thank you so much for your time and for
your wisdom. And, uh, I wish
God's peace be with you.
>> Brian McLaren (54:14):
Thank you. And Lauren, I say that to you as well. And
thank you for the good work you do of,
uh, providing this context for
conversation. God bless you and all the listeners.
>> Loren (54:24):
Thank you.
>> Paul (54:26):
Thanks for joining us on the Future Christian podcast.
To learn more about Lauren or the podcast,
visit future dash christian.com.
One more thing before you go. Do us a
favor and subscribe to the podcast. And
if you're feeling especially generous, leave a
review. It really helps us get the word out to more
people about the podcast.
(54:49):
The Future Christian podcast is a production of torn
curtain arts and resonate media. Our
episodes were mixed by Danny Burton and the production support
is provided by Paul Romaglevitt.
Thanks.
>> Brian McLaren (55:01):
Mhm.
>> Paul (55:01):
And go in peace.
>> Brian McLaren (55:02):
It's.
Welcome to the Future Christian podcast, your source
for insights and ideas on how to lead your church
into the 21st century.
At the Future Christian podcast, we talk to
pastors, authors, and other faith leaders for helpful
advice and practical wisdom to help you and your
community of faith walk boldly into the future.
(00:27):
Now here's your host, Lauren Richmond, Junior.
>> Loren (00:35):
Welcome to the Future Christian podcast. Today,
we're welcoming Brian McLaren to the show.
Brian is an author, speaker, activist, and public
theologian. A former college english
teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate
for a new kind of Christianity, just,
generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common
(00:56):
good. He's a core faculty member and dean of
faculty for the center for Action and
Contemplation and a podcaster with learning how to
see. He is also an Auburn Senior
Fellow and is a co host of Southern
Lights. His newest book is
life after wisdom and courage for a
world falling apart. Born in
(01:17):
1956, he graduated from the University of Maryland
with degrees in English. His academic
interests include medieval drama, romantic
poets, modern philosophical
literature, and the novels of Doctor Walker
Percy. In 2004, he was awarded a
doctorate divinity degree from, uh, Carey
Theological Seminary in Vancouver, BC. And in
(01:39):
2010, he received a second honorary
doctorate from Virginia Theological
Seminary. Let's welcome Brian to the
show.
All right, welcome to the Future Christian podcast. This is Loren Richmond,
junior, and today I'm pleased to be joined by Brian
(02:01):
McLaren. So welcome to the show.
>> Brian McLaren (02:03):
Great to be back here with you, Loren
>> Loren (02:06):
Yeah, thanks. Uh, anything else you'd like our listeners
to know about you?
>> Brian McLaren (02:10):
Well, uh, they probably know that I write
books and that I used to be a pastor. I'm a
father of four adult children and five
grandchildren. And,
um. Yeah, that's, um, probably the most
important thing.
>> Loren (02:26):
Yeah. So I heard this joke the other day that it comes
to mind. I'm curious your thoughts. Um,
I forget the woman who said it first,
but parents, or, excuse me, grandparents and
children have a common enemy. I wonder if
that's true in your
observation.
>> Brian McLaren (02:44):
Well, I think the humorous
point, uh, obviously puts that
word enemy, uh, in quotes, I'm
sure. But there is a certain
sense that for children,
one of their most challenging realities and greatest
necessities is their parents. And,
uh, their parents weaknesses are
(03:07):
very hard for parents to often admit to children.
But those parents parents knew the weaknesses.
So I think that would create, uh, a
certain alliance, uh, and
deep, uh, connection.
>> Loren (03:21):
Well, as a parent of kids, I do appreciate.
Appreciate the support of grandparents. So thank you for your
support of your grandkids. I'm sure
your children appreciate it.
So uh, uh, you've been on the pod before,
so I'll link past episodes if people
are somehow unfamiliar with you.
(03:41):
Brian McLaren can hear your kind of backstory, but
I'm just kind of curious if you're willing to share just what has sustained
you, uh, these past year. Two
years.
>> Brian McLaren (03:51):
Yes. Uh, one of the things that
sustains me, Loren, is some friends,
uh, and family members with whom I can be
completely honest, to just have the
space with people to say, hey, look, I need
to tell you what I'm thinking or what I'm feeling. It
might not be true, it might not be real, it might not
(04:12):
be good, but I'll be better off if I can
just admit it to some other person. Um, those
sort of nonjudgmental friendships are super
important. Um, and then, I mean,
this sounds like a cliche, but I guess it's a cliche because
it's so true. But just about every morning,
I get up and take a walk a mile, two, 3
(04:33):
miles, and the act of
walking outdoors and seeing the sun rise
another day. And, uh, I have a little saying. I
repeat, uh, often to myself and anyone else who's
around. I'll say, human beings might be a mess,
but the birds are being awesome. Human
beings might be in trouble, but the trees are amazing.
(04:53):
And just to be reminded of the
stability and consistency and beauty and
brilliance of nature, that always does me good.
>> Loren (05:01):
Yeah. And you live still in Florida, is that
correct?
>> Brian McLaren (05:04):
I do, yes.
>> Loren (05:05):
So obviously, you get to really
enjoy nature,
at, um, least, I guess, depends. Some people might enjoy the cold
and snow, but I don't particularly love
it. So you get to really enjoy it on a, on a
day to day basis, it sounds like. And I imagine that's
really what kind of informed this latest
(05:26):
book. Yeah.
>> Brian McLaren (05:27):
Yeah, that's true. And I've been this way since I was a kid.
I was born in a very cold climate in the,
um, finger lakes region of upstate New York.
And, uh, one of my
earliest memories is, uh, trick or
treating in the snow.
Uh, but I always loved the outdoors.
(05:47):
And, uh, from flipping over
rocks in that little creek beside my house when I was a
kid, and virtually every rock was full
of fossils in that, uh, part of the
country.
>> Loren (05:58):
Oh, wow.
>> Brian McLaren (05:59):
And just gave me a sense not only for the
amazing nature that's alive today, but that
buried beneath our feet are the fossils telling us
of millions of years of life. So,
yeah, I think I've always, that's been
always very closely connected to my
sense of reverence and transcendence and
(06:19):
awe. And worship.
>> Loren (06:21):
Yeah, yeah. I've been hearing more and more of late
just about the importance of kids getting outside and
exploring, uh, both for their own
development. And then I think we could both add, certainly
for their connection to
transcendence and the world beyond,
both, uh, the physical world and then the
spiritual world. Yeah.
>> Brian McLaren (06:43):
So. That's right. And let me just say
this is one of the reasons why, you know,
the obsession and addiction and
attachment we all have to, um,
screens just
makes it all the more valuable and important when we just
kind of look up from the screen, look to our left, look to our right,
look under our feet and reconnect, uh,
(07:06):
with this beautiful creation we're part of.
>> Loren (07:09):
Yeah, I was thinking about this earlier
this week when I was at a conference
and I went for a run, kind
of around the block in the neighborhood and left
my smartphone. I was kind of like, oh
boy, if something happens, I'm in trouble. But also, humans
have been taking adventures without
smartphones for
(07:31):
hundreds and thousands of years and have somehow survived.
So I'll survive.
>> Brian McLaren (07:36):
I might survive around the block once without it.
>> Loren (07:39):
Right, right. Well,
we're here today to talk about, uh,
Brian's new book, life after
Wisdom and courage for a world
falling apart. So I've kind of teased it
here already, but do you want to just share kind of what
really inspired the book, brought it about?
>> Brian McLaren (07:59):
Sure, Lauren? Well, um, more and more
of us are hearing and understanding terms like
multi crisis or poly crisis. We all
have the sense that nothing's ever perfect in the world of
humans. We always have our problems and arguments and
so on. But, um, a lot of us are
having the feeling that we have a constellation of very big
(08:20):
problems and each one is making it
harder for the others to be seen,
addressed and solved. And when we
face that kind of, ah, of trouble,
I think it raises our levels of anxiety,
um, it raises the levels of desperation for some
people to find a conspiracy theory
(08:40):
to explain things or a scapegoat to
blame, uh, or some, ah,
little, uh, cultic group
to help us be in denial about a reality that's
pressing in on all sides. So when
we have a sense that things,
um, ah, that we're
in water beyond our depth,
(09:03):
um, the word we have for that
feeling is doom. In the title, life after doom.
I'm not talking about life after the end of the world.
I'm not talking about some sort of literal
apocalypse. I am talking about a very
real emotion that we feel, um, more
and more of us feel our institutions that
(09:23):
evolved and have served us very well, for a long
time seem to be incapable of
helping, helping us face the realities,
uh, around us on many levels. So that
feeling, I felt it in myself,
um, and I felt it's
socially unacceptable to talk about.
And then when I have the courage to bring
(09:46):
it up and others say I've been feeling it
too, there's this sense of relief that comes when we
can create some space to
face this feeling that we have, and then we can
explore how real it is, how deep it is.
Uh, first we need a little space, and in a
way that's what I'm trying to do in the book, is create some
(10:06):
headspace and heart space to face that
feeling, that more and more of us feel.
>> Loren (10:11):
Yeah, I think that's so important and so
helpful. So you kind of frame this,
the narrative, through the idea
of um, climate change, global
warming, the very real
danger we face both, uh,
collectively and individually through
(10:32):
um, the planet and the health
thereof of the planet. And
I spoke to you about this here before we start recording. But as
I read the book and began thinking about it more and
more, uh, I thought about it through what
you just said there, the idea of
the very real kind of collapse or
(10:53):
doom that we seem to be facing
societally. You certainly spoke
to the client of institutions,
and I think I'm glad you named what you
said there about this real sense of
danger, or that's not the right word. Um,
disillusionment, um,
(11:13):
I can't think of the right word to frame it.
Um, uncertainty.
>> Brian McLaren (11:18):
Yeah, I think danger, disillusionment,
uncertainty, disappointment in some
ways that the institutions that we
thought were going to work,
uh, end up failing or at least
stumbling. Yeah, I think all of those words are
part of it.
>> Loren (11:34):
So uh, I thought about this book in many ways
as like a pastoral
care book, and especially in the
context that I try to think and
be like with this podcast
around churches and pastors,
you lay out in the book four
scenarios around climate,
(11:57):
uh, change and the possibility of the
future of the earth and really society at large.
But I couldn't help but thinking about that. These kind of four scenarios
are very real possibilities
for our institutions, for
churches. Um, just
on a, a, ah, webinar this week about
denominational decline
(12:20):
as ah, churches individually and collectively,
trying to think about what is realistic to
plan for the future. So I wonder if you
can just talk about first, uh, just
name those four scenarios and then we'll kind of just talk through
um, the implications.
>> Brian McLaren (12:37):
Sure, sure. Um, so let me first
say, Lauren, that um,
that I think we face this
multicrisis, a combination of problems,
each of which makes the others harder to
solve. But at the center of
them is this problem of overshoot. Global
(12:57):
warming is uh, maybe most
urgent example of it, but there are so many
dimensions to it we could look at. We haven't
cared for soil around the earth. We thought soil
was worthless as dirt, but soil, it
turns out, is a uh, precious,
amazing, glorious,
wondrous reality that we took for granted.
(13:19):
We didn't understand. We literally tore it
up every year, not realizing that
soil is like a civilization in and of
itself. Um, what we've done to
our oceans, our rivers,
our ice. Who knew how important ice
was as a climate control center for the
planet? This problem that we're
(13:41):
sucking out more resources than the earth
can replenish and pumping out
more toxins than the earth can detoxify
and pollutants than the earth can neutralize,
that's what overshoot is.
And when you take that seriously,
you realize that um, we're
going to face a bumpy road ahead.
(14:04):
Um, because we uh, we've built,
ah, ah, an economy and a civilization
that is based on certain things that don't
fit with this environment. And as Charles Darwin
said, um, if you don't fit, survival
of the fittest means survival of those
that fit best. And so if we don't fit
(14:24):
well with our environment, then we're going to have real
trouble. And so, um, the four scenarios
that I tried to spell out after,
you know, immersing myself in the literature now
for something um, like 14 or
15 years, um, the four
scenarios are collapse avoidance is the
first. This is the idea that we can learn
(14:47):
what we need to learn quickly enough
that our civilization won't go through a
collapse. Uh, so that's collapse
avoidance. The second is collapse rebirth.
This says that no, we will not learn our
lessons and we will not have the political
and economic and social
capacity to make the changes
(15:09):
we need to make fast enough. And there will be
some kind of civilizational collapse, but
we'll learn enough on the way down that
we'll be able to have a new
ecological, sustainable, wiser
civilization be born. Um, from
the uh, aftermath of this one, the
third is a little more dire. We
(15:32):
could call it the collapse survival
scenario. That is where there will be
a collapse, but we uh,
will cause so much more damage in the process of
trying to stop the collapse from
happening or attacking each other on the way
down that we will
survive. Some number of us,
(15:53):
50%, 40%, 20%,
2% of us will survive, but we will not be able to
rebuild anything anytime soon like what
we currently enjoy. And then fourth is
collapse extinction, the possibility
that human beings could knock ourselves and a
significant part of, ah, Earth's
(16:13):
biosphere, uh, into extinction.
So, um, ah, those are the four
scenarios. Um, you might say, well, collapse avoidance,
that's the only optimistic one. But
even people who believe in collapse
avoidance, who are working their hearts out for
it and using their very best creativity for it,
none of them think it will be easy. So
(16:35):
I think we face challenges no matter
which scenario unfolds.
>> Loren (16:40):
Right, right. And I think this is where again,
I found so much crossover
because like you said, like there's so
much, there's so much complexity and
crossover in these elements. Like we've built
systems and institutions that are kind of dependent
on this kind of growth at all costs
mentality.
>> Brian McLaren (17:02):
Yes.
>> Loren (17:02):
And I mean, we could say like, oh, that's not
so much, at least like in my context in the mainline world.
But I imagine, I mean, I think that was fair of
the mainline world like 30, 40, 50 years ago. And
we're certainly seeing that, we're certainly seeing this trend play out
right now in evangelicalism where
it's the mega church kind of growth at all costs
(17:23):
mentality which has costs.
And I think this is more so in the mainline
world now, where there is, I think there are
these different schools of thought
here is the mainline collapse,
is it avoidable? There are some people who would say it's
all over, but uh, there's some people saying we can learn and
(17:45):
we can try to avoid it. Um,
obviously as a Christian, we have some kind of hope
that rebirth, the second scenario is
possible. Um, but I think
there's still a good bit of
humanity, there's still a good bit of us,
uh, and musing abroad, us broad, we thinking like,
(18:05):
we can define what the rebirth will be, right?
>> Brian McLaren (18:07):
Yes.
>> Loren (18:09):
And then there's some of us who are thinking like, there's going to be
a collapse and there's only going to be a small
survival remnant. And then there's
certainly some who think like, the church is
dying and it's not going to come back. Like God is going to do it
a new thing. Um, so the
church in itself or the institution of church in itself
(18:30):
is all but gone. I mean, those
are pretty four heavy
things, whether we think about it through the lens of
a church or an institution or even
existentially, like our climate, the home we live
on. Um, I'm not even
sure where to go from that because it's so heavy. So why don't you
share?
>> Brian McLaren (18:51):
Yes. Um, well, lauren, first, I
really appreciate the
direction you're going with this. First, I appreciate you
calling this book a pastoral book, because
I suppose the fact that I was a pastor for 24
years has left its permanent mark on me.
And I think that's just who I am.
If I could just tell a quick story that
(19:14):
I was participating in a march. It was
about in a protest, uh, several, uh,
years ago. I, uh, live in southwest Florida, and we
had some companies from Texas trying to come over and
frack the everglades. I mean, of all the.
>> Loren (19:28):
Sounds like a great idea.
>> Brian McLaren (19:29):
Oh, my gosh. It's just stupid and
idiotic of both the Texas
corporations and the Florida government that wanted to
welcome these companies in to make some money, no
doubt. Um, just idiotic. And so I
was participating in a march, and a
woman I respect a great deal, I don't know her
very well, but as we're marching together, she turns
(19:52):
to me and says, I don't think we're going to win this
one. And she said, um, in fact, I've
kind of lost hope. And
I think she's not a religious person, as far as I
know, but she knows that I'm a pastor when I show up for these
events. And I suppose she was making
a kind of confession to me, and I said, well, you're still
(20:12):
here. She says, yeah, I've kind of lost
hope. She said, the only reason I'm here is because of
love, that I love the earth, and I have
to show up for something I love. And
in that moment, I felt what she was going
through, described what so many of us are going through in
so many different areas.
If we could have gone back in time to
(20:34):
1960, which was the peak year
of mainline Protestantism, and
we could have sat down and said to the people, listen,
in the next 65
years, um, there will be less
than half as many people in mainline protestant
churches. There will be about
40% of the seminarians
(20:56):
m and a high percentage of them will not want to be
pastors. They'll be going to seminary for other
reasons. If we would have told them
those numbers, I don't think they could have imagined it to be
true, um, because they were right at their
peak. Right. And
I came from an evangelical background. In many ways, I
was like a refugee escaping a place where
(21:18):
my life was in danger. And so I've
been so grateful for the mainline world, and I had great
hope for the mainline world. But here's the thing I have to say.
65 years after the peak
and maybe 50 years after, just
about everybody knew that mainline protestantism was
in decline. I would have to say
that virtually nothing has changed. In other um, words,
(21:41):
some people are aware that there's decline,
but the liturgies are, are
virtually unchanged now, as we
speak, Methodists are in the process of making some
modest changes to their structure, but by and
large structures are intact.
Um, we've had to close down a whole lot of
seminaries, our concepts of
(22:02):
ordination haven't changed. And so what I would
say is, if
people normally don't change until the
pain gets great enough, I would just have to say,
yeah, the pain still isn't great enough. Um,
um, and here's the interesting comparison
to uh, issues of the environment. A lot of people
(22:24):
don't know this, but a couple of
scientists figured out before the
american civil war, they figured out global
warming, and in fact they made
incredibly accurate predictions about
what would happen if
people continued to burn fossil fuels before the
civil war. And so this was known among scientists,
(22:46):
scientists, but uh, it still
hasn't, even though more and more people
know about it, we still have huge numbers of
people, including the dominant party,
uh, in uh, at least one
house of Congress that
still deny it. And so uh,
(23:08):
it just reminds us that
some of us can wake up to what's going on
and change, and more and more of us can
know what's needed and yet change doesn't come,
and people in our situation
need pastoral care. I guess the circle back to what you
said, and we have to take care of each other
(23:28):
because we have to look and say, you're not
crazy, you see what's real
and you don't have to be
totally pushed into despondency.
Uh, and that's why that woman I was walking next to
in that protest m march, I felt like she gave me
a phenomenal gift when she said,
(23:49):
uh, I've given up hope, but I'm still here because
I haven't given up on love. And of course
her words, she probably didn't know it,
but they evoked one, uh, corinthians
13. There are three great lasting qualities, faith, hope and
love. And the greatest of these is love, which
Paul didn't say this, but I wonder if uh, a
(24:10):
relevant application would be when your faith
fails and when your hope fails, theres still
love. Hang on to love no matter what.
>> Loren (24:17):
Yeah boy im kind of
worried about, like you said, people dont change until the pain is
great enough because boy the pain of climate
change, I dont think its great enough. Um,
so that is what it is. Im thinking about,
too. You mentioned
kind of, again, im tying this back
(24:38):
to church context. I'm thinking
about how you said, you're here
to, I can't remember. You said, or the woman
said, she's here to show up for something she
loves, even though these institutions
or structures around her have
failed in some ways, yes. Um,
(24:58):
and with that, I imagine there's some sense
that the opportunity she might have normally
had or one might recommend for, you
know, community, uh, organizing or,
um, uh, lobbying Congress
to do the proper channels that really has the power.
So I guess this is a long winded way of saying, like I'm thinking
(25:18):
about for churches and pastors, like the normal
kind of, like you mentioned, the normal kind of ways
of, you know, going to college
and then signing up for div school and, uh, getting
the ordination track and then going to serve a church. Like
those models are falling away,
uh, if not rapidly, ever so surely.
(25:41):
How does a faith leader, someone who's passionate about the
christian faith, living out both
in word and deed, how does one
be m. Because how does
one, I don't even know what the word to use is, whether it's the
pastor, whether it's the chaplain, whether it's a faith leader, because so many of
those words are attached to institutions. How does one be
(26:01):
that role as a leader in these new
contexts? Where to go back to
your woman? That's why I'm resonating
with, how do I even show up for something I
love?
>> Brian McLaren (26:12):
Yes, yes, yes.
Well, so, uh, many things come to
mind. Let's see if I can untangle them, to say them in
some kind of useful way. Loren, the
first thing that comes to mind is when
Jesus, uh, said
words that we quote, but maybe now
we're in a position to understand their context. He said,
(26:35):
whenever two or three of you gather in my name there,
I'm in the midst. Let me take those words
from Jesus with another thing that Jesus said. When he
looked at the temple and he said,
1 st will not be left upon the
other, uh, he could
see, and by the way, I don't think you have to think that
(26:55):
Jesus had supernatural knowledge of the
future or that he was predicting something
that he was ready to make happen. In other words,
he was going to destroy or God was going to destroy the
temple. I think Jesus was smart, and he
knew that if,
uh, his fellow Jews
persisted in their current path, they would have another
(27:18):
revolution against the roman empire and it would
end catastrophically. He knew what the Romans would do to
the temple if the Jews tried another
rebellion. Uh, uh, and
so what he, I think is saying is, listen,
you can destroy the temple and still
survive. Um, it's going to
require two or three of you getting
(27:40):
together and remembering what this whole thing is
about and to live
out in a new way.
Um, and in fact, that's what happened,
ironically, when the Jews rebelled against the
Romans. The Romans came in and, and crushed the
temple. And ironically, it was
the pharisees that began to gather people.
(28:02):
It wasn't just two or three. They gathered people in a
quorum of ten. Um, and
those groups of ten would then become the
basis of the synagogue system that exists until
today. So after the collapse
of the institution, that they knew a
new way, uh, of living and gathering
would emerge that was far more flexible,
(28:24):
far more, uh, decentralized, far
harder to destroy, far more resilient.
Um, and something like that, it seems
to me, could be helpful for us to
imagine. If I would translate that into slightly
more abstract terms. Here's the way I'd say it.
I think we have to, at least for a time,
(28:45):
imagine the christian faith less as a
series of institutions and more as a series of
movements.
>> Loren (28:52):
That's good. Yeah.
>> Brian McLaren (28:53):
And we shift our confidence from the
institution to the movement. Now, for those of us who are
clergy, the institution
pays our salary, the institution pays
our health insurance, the institution pays
our pension. And so we've become highly
dependent on the institution.
But there are ways to be christian
(29:18):
that function in a movement mindset
rather than an institutional mindset. Uh,
and I mentioned I have a background in the
evangelical and fundamentalist and charismatic, charismatic
world. And, you know, for all
their serious problems and dangers and all the
rest, they have been operating as a movement for
100 years. And it's the
(29:40):
movement mentality. I don't think it's their
theology that was so great. I think
in a certain sense, they jumped ship
and started working as a movement, while others,
other parts of Christianity stayed
in an institutional mindset. So those would be
a couple of thoughts, and there's a lot more we could explore then, I'm
(30:01):
sure.
>> Loren (30:01):
Yeah, that's good. Uh, and I think I can even bring this back
to the broader climate
topic. Thinking about, you
know, I feel like that's what's going to have to be is small
groups of people, two to three people, ten people,
like, saying, like, hey, life is not about just like
this ever. This never
(30:21):
ending pursuit of stuff and consumption
and the bigger house and the bigger car. Um,
it's going to have to be small groups of people saying,
hey, boy, isn't life more
simple and meaningful when we're sitting together
in conversation, enjoying the beauty of
nature, not hustling
(30:42):
here and there and everywhere.
>> Brian McLaren (30:46):
As you say, that reminds me
of a story, something that
happened to me some years ago. I was in France, and I was at a
gathering that was, uh, called. That was convened
by catholics and evangelicals.
Uh, uh, and
I gave a few talks. They were translated into French.
(31:08):
My French is, uh,
bad enough that I should never inflict it upon
people, but good enough that I can usually
catch most of what goes on in a conversation. So we
open up for q and a. Uh,
and I had someone sitting beside me whispering in my
ear if I needed a translation.
(31:28):
Um, a woman stood up and she said,
uh, I'm a Baptist, and if I say my last
name, all the Baptists in the room will know it, because
my name is royalty in the baptist world.
In France, she said her name. Everybody shook their head.
She said, what will shock you is for you to know that for the
last seven years, I have not gone to church. I was a
(31:49):
leader in my church. My husband and I were on
every committee. We were the backbone of the church
in many ways, she said, but seven
years ago, I reached a point where I said,
uh, I'm totally burned out. I'm totally. I
remember she said, uh, complaisment fatigue. I'm
completely worn out.
(32:09):
Uh, and she said, so
we took a sabbatical from church, and after a
few months, my husband said to me, darling, we have a
problem. We still love Jesus Christ, but
we're not going to church. And he said, I have an
idea. He said, I love to cook. I will cook a
meal every week. And he said to his wife, you are a
(32:29):
wonderful hostess. He said, let's have a
meal, and we'll invite some of our friends who are not
religious, and we'll just see if over
some good soup and some good bread and some good
wine, that we could talk about things that really
matter. And so the woman said, I have not
been to church, uh, for these last seven years.
She said, but around my table, uh,
(32:52):
every Sunday night, we have a meal.
And she said, I think this is the greatest
experience of church I've had in my life. And then she
added, in all of my years of being a baptist
leader, um, I never really saw
people come to faith in Jesus Christ. She
said, but around my table, many people have
(33:13):
come to faith. And, uh, she said,
so she said, I don't know what you will do
with that. I don't know what you will say about me or if you
will judge me, but that's what's happened to me. Then
she sat down. And I just remembered at that moment,
I just thought, a wise woman has
spoken, and maybe we're all getting a little,
(33:34):
uh, message about even if our
institutions fail, it could
be not the worst thing that would happen by
any stretching.
>> Loren (33:42):
Yeah, that's a beautiful story, because the same
principles could apply, whether it be
climate, uh, change, just making simple
changes together on, uh, a neighborhood
block amongst a family.
>> Brian McLaren (33:58):
In fact, there's been a movement
among, um, people sort of on the
avant garde edge of christian ministry.
And they've called the gatherings that they create
different things other than churches. Sometimes they call them
urban monasteries or, um, an
abbey, an urban abbey or something like
this. And it reminds me that
(34:20):
at the end of another civilizational era,
when the roman empire's relationship with
the Celts in Ireland and
Scotland, uh, and Wales, is a
complicated relationship. The roman
empire enforced their
control on the Celts right
as the roman empire was falling apart itself.
(34:43):
And so the Celts, in a sense, had to
submit. But then, in another sense, they
still carried on some of their own, uh,
independence. And that continued when the
roman empire was severely
weakened. And what happened
is these celtic
monasteries became the
(35:04):
basis, uh, around which people would build
little villages and towns. Many of the
really important towns that still exist in
Ireland and Wales and Scotland
are towns that grew up around
monasteries. And one of the attractions is
all around us is violence. All around us
(35:25):
is ignorance. Um,
but in the monastery, they preserve
wisdom. They're actually copying those
manuscripts that other people have been burning.
And of course, as someone who lives in Florida, when we talk about burning
manuscripts, that has an interesting
resonance for me. Ignorant people
(35:45):
want to burn books because they don't
want the past and they don't want other
people's knowledge to be preserved.
But here's an island of sanity, and in a
monastery, you couldn't bring your weapons
inside the monastery. It was a gun free zone, we
might say. It was a little island of
sanity and a little island of peace.
(36:07):
And it just strikes me that
that's a lesson from the past
that we could be involved with in the present
and in the future. Uh, and in some
ways, if our
decline continues in many of our religious
institutions, the people who
(36:28):
have nowhere to go or who drop out
will either just sort of
fade into the woodwork or they will
find ways to create those little islands of
sanity and peace and love and wisdom.
>> Loren (36:42):
Yeah, yeah, that's good stuff. Here, let me ask you
two more questions before we take a break.
One, as you're talking, is just as
I think about the realities both in church
and in what feels
like where our world is heading
as a climate and really, frankly, as a global economy,
(37:03):
I feel like collapse is inevitable in some regard.
So I'm wondering, do you think that humans in some
sense control the outcome? And
I mean that by humans have some measure of volition
about what can come about from that collapse?
And I love your example about the
monastery example. That's what I'm
thinking, yeah.
>> Brian McLaren (37:25):
So my deepest
and most honest answer, Loren, is I don't
know what will happen. I don't have some,
some clear sense of what will happen.
It could be scenario one, two, three or four. I think
any of them are possible. And it's,
ah, human beings that are the unknown, because human
(37:45):
beings have
surprising, astounding
capacities for stupidity
and human beings have surprising,
awe inspiring capacities
for creativity and love. M
my most honest guess is that we should expect
both of those things to exist simultaneously.
(38:07):
I think we see right now levels
of stupidity that are, uh,
I mean, you would think it was a comedy or a movie
script, but it's reality that people are
acting this foolishly,
cravenly, pathetically, ridiculously,
uh, and at the same time,
the capacity is there and it's happening.
(38:30):
It's not happening enough, but it's happening where
people are saying, forget it. The
worst things get. I'm not just going to let that suck me
down, I'm going to stand up for something.
And, um. Yeah, my, and
so I suppose I dare to hope, and I
bet you feel this way too. It's the reason
(38:51):
I write books. I bet it's the reason you
do a podcast and the other good things you
do is we dare to hope that we could
together inspire one another to
stand up with that kind of creativity and love and,
uh. Joy.
>> Loren (39:07):
Yeah, yeah. So
one more question here before we take a break. I'm thinking about, and
I've heard this in some context,
where when we think about climate change,
there's this idea that like, we need a prophet
who's going to warn us of the impending doom, or we need a
wizard. So there's this idea we can either trust in the
(39:27):
prophet and respond to the prophet
and change our behaviors, or we need a wizard who's going
to magically, like, carbon capture and,
uh, renewable energies. It's, uh, kind of the
wizardry thing and we need to trust in the wizard and we
can don't really need to change our behaviors because we can trust
in the wizard. Um, so
(39:48):
I'm again, tie this back in the church. And I think the same kind
of thinking can go into church. There's the prophet
mentality that we need to
trust the prophet that everything is
collapsing and respond accordingly,
or trust in the
wizardry. And obviously there's some faith
aspect that God can and might
(40:09):
intervene, but still, sometimes this can look like in
churches, is trusting in a dynamic
personality or over an amazing, uh, new
system or structure that will save us. So
I'm curious whether it be in church world
or thinking about climate change. Do you like one
of those or the other or.
Certainly there's limitations to both. Do you think there's a
(40:31):
third or fourth, uh, mentality we need to think
about?
>> Brian McLaren (40:35):
Yeah, I, uh, really
love that question. And, uh, maybe we could
come back tomorrow. Let me have 24 hours to think about that
because it's such a good question. I suppose the
first thing I'd say is we definitely need the profit.
Dear friend and colleague, Richard Rohr is writing,
just finishing up what he says will be his last
(40:55):
book.
>> Loren (40:56):
I, um, hope not.
>> Brian McLaren (40:58):
Uh, we all love him so much. Uh,
and he said this several times before, but Richard is getting
up there in years now and his health is frail. But the book is
called the tears of things. And it's about the prophet. It's
about the role of the prophet.
And we need.
And the good news is we have many
prophetic voices out there now. But as is
(41:21):
typical, prophetic voices are
usually listened to by a very small
minority. Mocked, rejected,
uh, excluded, maybe even crucified by the
majority. So there's
not a shortage of profits. We also
have a lot of people claiming to be
wizards. I'm thinking about a certain
(41:43):
presidential candidate who several years ago
said, only I can fix this.
That's the kind of thing that a person claiming
magical, supernatural powers
makes. And, uh, it's,
uh, the truth is nobody
has that power. Um,
and so I think the idea of a
(42:05):
wizard, in that sense, a magician,
the modern day, the term for that is an
authoritarian or a demagogue.
And I think authoritarian
demagogue con artists will have a very
profitable future for a significant
amount of time, because desperate people
(42:25):
always turn to con artists and
demagogues who give them someone to blame, someone
to hate, someone to fear,
and then they can cast themselves in the drama as
an innocent victim or as the
warriors who are going to take things back and
make everything right again. Um, and so what
(42:46):
I would say is, uh,
the thing we need right now is
the prophet. And then the thing we need,
uh, let me switch religions for a minute from
Christianity to Buddhism. Someone asked the
Dalai Lama, uh, I believe it was the
Dalai lama who will be the next,
(43:08):
um, Buddha or Bodhisattva to lead the way.
And he said, the next buddha will be the
sangha. And what he meant by that? The sangha means
the people. And I think what he was
saying is what we need now is not a great
individual. We need a movement of people.
And to come back to that theme of movement, what we
(43:29):
need are prophetic voices and then
people willing to
form, uh, movements that are
full of leaders. So there's not just one leader,
but many leaders who learn how to play as a team
and fly in formation, so to speak.
That's our great hope in every
different endeavor. And no matter how bad
(43:51):
things get.
>> Loren (43:53):
Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I think that's so helpful and really
tracks with what you've been saying here.
Before we move on, I just want to kind of.
I think this is a fair wrap up. Like, uh, I'm
still thinking back to the quote you shared about the woman showing up for
something I love. I feel like. I feel like
in our current context, there's just this temptation
(44:13):
to kind of be stuck in
the misery and awfulness. Um,
and there's not that this.
It's not untrue, right. There's plenty of bad stuff
happening. But I believe at least, like, if
we can show up for something we love and maybe
show up for love, that might be a good place
(44:34):
to start.
>> Brian McLaren (44:36):
Yes. To be able to do that,
I think, requires a certain kind
of death within ourselves.
>> Loren (44:44):
Mhm.
>> Brian McLaren (44:44):
And it's a beautiful death. It's a needed and
good and life giving death. And it's the
death to the assumption that life is all about
me. Um, and
of course, we're all in pain. This
organization that I gave my life to might not be able to
pay my pension or might be able to pay
(45:04):
my pension, but can't do this and this and this. Right.
Um. Well, what that's really about is
I banked my efforts
on something and I'm disappointed that it didn't work
out for me. Um, well, that's
understandable. We feel that way. But eventually we need to get over
that. We need to grieve it,
acknowledge it. And then what we have to go through
(45:27):
is this death to where we say, oh, but life was
never about me. I'm about
life. And for us
to outgrow an obsession
with our own career and our own security and
all the rest but for us to say
I'm about life, I'm about something bigger than myself.
(45:48):
This might not get fixed. This
might not last through my lifetime. This might not get
fixed during my lifetime. But the things
I love, I love enough that I'm going to devote the
time and energy I have for
people who aren't even yet born to bear the fruits
of. And that to me, is a
beautiful kind of death and rebirth
(46:11):
that can happen within us.
>> Loren (46:12):
Boy. And that's really applicable. That's
really applicable here to, again, the theme of your book.
There's going to need to be some death to the belief that life is all
about me, and there's going to
be some willingness to. I tried to write
it down here for people who are not. Say that again.
This idea that living for people who are
(46:33):
beyond me.
>> Brian McLaren (46:34):
How do you say that? Yes. So life
is not about me. I am about life. And
that means I'm about the lives of people who haven't
even been born yet. Um, I want to
sow seeds, I want to create conditions
for a better life for people.
Generations yet to come.
>> Loren (46:54):
Yeah, well, this is good stuff.
Um, let's just roll into here some final
questions. Since, um,
we're running long here. Let me
phrase the question this way.
>> Brian McLaren (47:07):
Um.
>> Loren (47:10):
If you were, I guess we spoke,
this is really antithetical to what you've been talking about here, so I'm
struggling to even answer. Ask the question,
as you already spoke, against authoritarianism,
but let's say you were an all benevolent, I don't know,
a ruler. Uh, or maybe you could say
one thing you want to change, whether about the church or
(47:31):
about humans, um, response to
living in our climate, what would that
be?
>> Brian McLaren (47:37):
Okay, yeah, we'll get rid of all
benevolent dictator or anything like that since. Yeah. Uh,
but if. If I had the chance
to whisper something at everyone's.
>> Loren (47:47):
There you go.
>> Brian McLaren (47:48):
The hope that they would give it five minutes of
consideration. Uh, here's what it would
be. Um,
well, uh, let me say it in a
short version and then a slightly longer version. The short version
would be, many things need to
end for better things to begin.
(48:09):
Um, my dear friend Valerie Kaur,
a Sikh activist, says,
uh, that the darkness of
the womb can become the darkness.
I'm sorry. The darkness of the tomb can become the
darkness of the womb. What feels
like death could actually be,
(48:29):
uh, what's necessary for something new to be
born. And it's so funny. This has been in the
Bible my whole entire life, and I never
really noticed it until recently, but in
one of those apocalyptic passages where Jesus,
we, I think, grossly, foolishly
misinterpreted that he was talking about the end of the
world. He was really talking about the end of his
(48:52):
civilization, um, of his
society. Mhm. Um, it wasn't the end of the world.
It was the end of the world as his
contemporaries knew it. But here's what he said. He said, look, things
are going to get bad, and then they're going to get worse, and then they're
going to get worse, and this still isn't the end. They're going to get
worse. But then he said, these are
only the beginning of birth
(49:14):
pangs.
>> Loren (49:15):
Mhm.
>> Brian McLaren (49:16):
What's so interesting? He didn't say, these are the final
death throes. These are what's
necessary for something else to be born. And
what I could whisper to people is they're going to
be grieving about what
beautiful things that are being lost
in a
destabilized, turbulent time.
(49:38):
But at the end of the day,
our lives will either be about doom or they'll be about
a dream. And the dream is for what
can be born in a time of doom.
And, um, so that's what I would
want to whisper in people's ears.
>> Loren (49:56):
How about a word of. Again, I'm going to phrase it this way.
Pastoral wisdom or
encouragement to. Whether it be
pastors leading struggling
churches, institutions, whether it be
climate activists, leaders,
whether it be, um, folks
seeking justice, causes in their
(50:17):
communities, um, a
word of wisdom to them when
they're just struggling with so much of this
doom.
>> Brian McLaren (50:26):
So I just
had a conversation recently with a woman about
my age grandmother, who
first her stepson
and then her stepdaughter
abandoned their children because
of mental illness and drug addiction.
(50:47):
And so at an age around
70, she and her husband
found themselves having to take
in their grandchildren, and they
had a very happy retirement and a very
happy retirement plan. And that was
interrupted by a
sudden need, driven by love,
(51:10):
to make sure that their grandchildren have the best
life they can possibly have in a horrible situation
nobody would ever choose for them. Right
as we were talking, I said to her,
people, in your situation, you first
have to, in private and for a few
moments, congratulate yourself
(51:33):
for taking on a tough assignment.
Um, you could have walked away when
social services called. You could have just said, well,
I can't help you. Um, but
you heard the call and you responded.
And so part of what I want to do to every activist and every
pastor is I want to put my arms around him and
say, God bless you for hearing the call. God
(51:56):
bless you for hanging in there. You don't have
to do this, but to the degree you continue to.
And, uh, you do it out of love. I love you,
and I appreciate you, and I hope you
feel that deeply. The second thing I said
to her is that you
have to take care of yourself so that you'll
(52:17):
be in good enough shape to take care of
these children.
And part of taking care of yourself
means processing your own
feelings. And to circle back to
this book, one of the things I
think all of us who are in leadership in these times
feel is this feeling like, am I wasting
(52:39):
my time? What do I do, uh,
if things aren't getting better on my
timetable? And so
being able to process those feelings,
uh, that becomes really, really important. And the
thing, I guess, the promise I'd want to make to
people is that I think if we go through the process
(52:59):
in a careful
way, not alone in isolation,
I, um, think we will find some deeper wisdom
and some deeper and wider perspectives
that will need. And I
would want to say to a person, you're worth it
to go through that kind of deepening of perspectives.
>> Loren (53:21):
Yeah, I appreciate that, and I hope our
listeners appreciate it. Again, the book is life
after wisdom and courage for a world falling
apart. Brian, I think this is out for purchase.
Yes, yes.
>> Brian McLaren (53:34):
And it soon here. It started arriving. It started
arriving in people's mailboxes already.
>> Loren (53:41):
This episode should hear release soon, so
I think it's available for purchase. Brian, how can people
connect with you? Uh, otherwise, sure.
>> Brian McLaren (53:50):
My website is just my name,
brianmclaren.net
brianmclaren.net
dot. And there's links there for the book. And I
have a podcast and other resources they might be interested
in. So, yeah, that's the one stop place to make the
connection, Brian.
>> Loren (54:06):
So thank you so much for your time and for
your wisdom. And, uh, I wish
God's peace be with you.
>> Brian McLaren (54:14):
Thank you. And Lauren, I say that to you as well. And
thank you for the good work you do of,
uh, providing this context for
conversation. God bless you and all the listeners.
>> Loren (54:24):
Thank you.
>> Paul (54:26):
Thanks for joining us on the Future Christian podcast.
To learn more about Lauren or the podcast,
visit future dash christian.com.
One more thing before you go. Do us a
favor and subscribe to the podcast. And
if you're feeling especially generous, leave a
review. It really helps us get the word out to more
people about the podcast.
(54:49):
The Future Christian podcast is a production of torn
curtain arts and resonate media. Our
episodes were mixed by Danny Burton and the production support
is provided by Paul Romaglevitt.
Thanks.
>> Brian McLaren (55:01):
Mhm.
>> Paul (55:01):
And go in peace.
>> Brian McLaren (55:02):
It's.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.