Spiritual Friendship

"Good books make you want to put them down and go do something."  So says Brian McLaren in his book, More Ready Than You Realize.  That "something" for this book is spiritual friendship.  Do not read this book if you are looking for new ways to do "outreach" to pomo types.  If new methods are what you are looking for I'd recommend looking elsewhere.  However, if you have been frustrated over the seeming lack of fruit in your evangelistic efforts or have been discouraged because you weren't good at the sales pitch, then this shoud be an encouraging read.  For those coming from more conservative backgrounds expect brother McLaren to push a few buttons.  He's not proposing a few tweaks to the techniques but a different way of being evangelists.

McLaren calls us to engage in spiritual friendship with those not yet in the Kingdom.  "Good evangelism," says Brian, "is the process of being friendly without discrimination and influencing all of one's friends toward better living, through good deeds and good conversations."  Evangelism, or making disciples, seems to be much less about exploding and more about stewing, not confrontational so much as conversational ir, as he puts it, dancing instead of wrestling.  Threading through the book is an e-mail conversation with "Alice", a non-Christian college student.  This conversation serves to illustrate a different way of seeing evangelism.  Although there is some explanation of postmodernism the book does not bog down in the same old discussions.  The author doesn't spend time railing on the shortcomings of the church but offers an encouraging invitation to try something new.

Thanks to people like McLaren I can't go back to where I've been.  (I stunk at that approach anyway, though I did leave my fair share of tracts laying around.)  "I would like to imagine that because you are engaging in this new approach to evangelism, your whole system is being deconstructed and reconstructed, realigned, recalibrated strand by strand."  You can say that again.  My system has been in the shop for a couple of years now.  If you are just beginning to question the evangelism approaches of the past few decades then prepare to have your chair tipped back a little more.  For those of you in the process of becoming a new kind of Christian this book will fit right in.  And, if you are tired of wrestling and ready to dance, maybe you are more ready than you realize.  Shall we?

More Ready Than You Realize:  Evangelism As Dance In The Postmodern Matrix.  Brian McLaren.  Grand Rapids:Zondervan, 2002.  188pgs.

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