Brian McLaren has become one of the key thinkers and writers on the issue of doing ministry in a postmodern age. A former English professor at the University of Maryland, he left academia in 1986 to become founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in the Baltimore-Washington metro area. He is author of The Church on the Other Side: Doing Ministry in the Postmodern Matrix, and Finding Faith, both published by Zondervan.
Preaching: In your book, The Church on the Other Side, you talk about doing ministry on the other side of the modern/postmodern transition. How do you describe that transition? What is going on culturally that is making an impact?
McClaren: One of the best ways to frame it I think is to look back in history at other major transitions. We talk about pre-history which is before people have the ability to write. Generally we put that about 2500 B.C. Then people talk about the ancient world, which was the world of a number of significant civilizations: the Sumerian, the Egyptian, Greek, Roman empires -- that brings us from about 2500 B.C. to about 500 A.D. That is really a period during which the whole Bible takes place except creation. Then the medieval period from about 500 A.D. to about 1500 A.D. Then the modern period from 1500 to the present. For us, modern tends to just mean now, but if we think of it as a period, we realize that some day it is going to end, and something else will takes its place, if past history is any model.
What would it look like if the modern world came to an end and something new took its place? We would expect there to be a change in philosophy; we would expect there to be a change in economy, a change in organizing structures, a change perhaps in lifestyles of people. A lot of us believe that we have this fascinating convergence of change in all of those areas going on right about now. That is very, very analogous to that last major change around 1500 when you had Columbus and the new world opening up. You had the decay of the feudal economic system, the rise of the modern capitalist system. You had the rise of the nation-state which didn't exist before 1500, the rise of the industrial regime and technology. There were no complex machines before 1500. The printing press, huge new communication technologies -- we can take every one of those changes in 1500 and find their counterparts today, which then creates this moment of cultural transformation.
The change in communication technology -- just as the printing press made literacy much more widespread which changed Christianity. In some ways, Protestantism is a form of Christianity that could only exist after the printing press because you couldn't have literacy because you couldn't have books in large numbers.
Well, what happens when we become a screen-based world rather than a paper-based world? What happens when the primary modes of communication are electronic rather than through books? Huge change. Change in the way people think. Change in the way they process information. Change in the way we've got to preach to them. So there is a huge area.
