As I sit here in my all too familiar spot at the crave cafe amidst piles of Barth, objections to Barth and commentary on Barth I need to take a break. I must say that Hans Frei was right when he said that reading Barth is far more interesting than reading restatements of Barth by others which just appear wooden next to his original work (although Hauerwas is doing a good job for me this evening). So in the midst of my hours of reading Barth this evening I want to take a break and reflect a bit on what happend this morning.
Congratulations to you if you clicked on the “read more” and wanted to know who the picture is of, if that’s Karl Barth and what any of this has to do with Brian McLaren (who is actually the above pictured).
This morning through afternoon I was down in “O-town” or “Olathe, Kansas” or “Stepford” as some are want to call it, at Mid-America Nazarene University with about 350 others (along with Mike King, who posted about the seminar here) to listen to a series of lectures by Brian McLaren. It was a good general overview of the shift towards post-modernism/post-colonialism in our world and what this new context might mean for our modern models of ministry. If you’d read Generous Orthodoxy, or A New Kind of Christian or any other of Brian’s works a lot of this was review, but very helpful for the throng of Mid-Westerners who showed up to see if this guy was a pluralist afterall, or who were getting some continuing education credit and had never thought of post-modernism in the first place. Anyway… great stuff. I think it was the first time that a lot of these pastors were confronted with the modern marriage of the nation to the church in Civil Religion or “sacramerica” as AKMA Adams likes to call it, as well as the value of habituating ourselves into obedience to Jesus. At one point Brian said, “it wasn’t until I was reading the sermon on the mount as a young man that I realized that I’d read about loving my enemy, but I’d never been taught how to do it!” He went on to talk about the value of fasting and how it taught him to not be a slave to his impluses and how after two years of fasting he was finally ready to turn the other cheek. He spoke about the intentionality of our liturgy being Christian spiritual and ethical formation. It was really just a very encouraging time, and I was so glad that so many of our pastors and seminary students were starting to think about following Jesus in ways that might challenge some of their modernist/colonial assumptions.

…well back to Barth!