Preaching: How did you come to establish this church?
McClaren: I think that I have some kind of a gift of evangelism from the spiritual womb so to speak. When I was a teenager and I began to follow Christ, I started a little Bible study. Nobody told me to, I just did. I didn't even think of inviting Christians; I invited non-Christians. That ended up growing to 80 to 90 kids in my high school. When I was a graduate student and an instructor at University of Maryland, my wife and I started a little fellowship in our home that grew to 50 to 60 people. Again, my tendency was to invite non-Christians to that.
I never thought of being a pastor. I really loved the idea of being a college English teacher. In 1985 I heard Rick Warren speak. It was the first time in my life that I heard anybody talk about church work as being evangelistic work. For me, the church was really important, really necessary, but it sort of got in the way of evangelism. But when I heard Rick speak, I thought I could be a pastor in the way he was talking about -- my work as a pastor was evangelistic work. Now I think I tend to see evangelism and nurture under the broader heading of disciple making, so it is much more holistic for me.
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In 1985 that is when I first thought this is something that I really could do. That precipitated a beginning. Meanwhile we had started a little house group that eventually grew into Cedar Ridge. I started putting more and more of my effort into working with that group starting in 1986.
Preaching: Tell me about your church. What is a typical Sunday morning like for you?
McLaren: We are not any great model. We are just a church that is trying to be true to the gospel and reach our community -- to be disciples and make disciples. When people ask about our service I often jokingly say it is a cross between Willow Creek, Vineyard and an Episcopal service! The first 40 or 45 minutes of our service will be very much like a Willow Creek service. We have one song and some announcements. Very often we will have a drama that leads us into the theme of the sermon. I end the sermon with a prayer and the prayer is always an invitation for response. Not that we call people forward but that the prayer that I will lead will be in response to what has been said.
Then right after that we have communion every Sunday, and we do that in more of an Episcopal style where we actually us the liturgy out of the prayer book, and people come forward to take communion. I think that works here because Maryland is a very Catholic state, so for a lot of people, if they haven't had communion, they don't feel like they have really come to church.
I also think it is important in a postmodern context because I think we are going to see a resurgence of the value of ritual, ceremony and liturgy. We'll include confession of sin. Very often we will include a creed, reciting the creed as preparation for communion. Then we have communion and as people come forward then we will have twenty minutes or so of worship, singing. It might be a little more like a Vineyard kind of thing with contemporary music. That becomes a very experiential time because there are people coming forward, and there are people back in the seats singing and there is a lot to see as well as to hear what is going on.
