Brian McLaren

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Brian D. McLaren is a prominent, controversial voice in the Emerging Church movement. He was recognized as one of TIME magazine's "25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America." He is the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Maryland.

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[edit] Biography

McLaren, Brian D., born in 1956, graduated from University of Maryland, College Park with degrees in English (BA, summa cum laude, 1978, and MA, 1981). His academic interests included Medieval drama, Romantic poets, modern philosophical literature, and the novels of Dr. Walker Percy. He is also a musician and songwriter.

After several years teaching English and consulting in higher education, he left academia in 1986 to become founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church, a nondenominational church in the Baltimore-Washington region. The church has grown to involve several hundred people, many of whom were previously unchurched. In 2004, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity from the Carey Theological Seminary in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Many of the books that McLaren has authored, including the "A New Kind of Christian" trilogy, deal with Christianity in the context of the cultural shift towards postmodernism. McLaren is a proponent of the "Emerging Church" movement, which is often associated with a rejection of what emergents perceive as modernism in the Evangelical church in favor of an integration of postmodernism thought that many Evangelical leaders are uneasy with.

McLaren has been active in networking and mentoring church planters and pastors since the mid- 1980s, and has assisted in the development of several new churches. In spite of the intense criticism levelled at McLaren by Evangelical leaders, he remains a popular speaker for campus groups and retreats as well as a frequent guest lecturer at seminaries and conferences, nationally and internationally. His public speaking covers a broad range of topics including postmodernism, Biblical studies, evangelism, apologetics, leadership, global mission, church growth, church planting, art and music, pastoral survival and burnout, inter-religious dialogue, ecology, and social justice.

McLaren has also taken a hard stance against the narrow interpretation of the Bible offered by the more traditional evangelicals, noting in a 2006 interview, "When we present Jesus as a pro-war, anti-poor, anti-homosexual, anti-environment, pro-nuclear weapons authority figure draped in an American flag, I think we are making a travesty of the portrait of Jesus we find in the gospels." McLaren has opposed the invasion of Iraq.[1]

He is on the international steering team and board of directors for emergent, a growing generative friendship among missional Christian leaders, and serves as a board member for Sojourners and "Orientacion Cristiana". He formerly served as board chair of International Teams, an innovative mission organization with 15 nationally registered members including the United States office based in Chicago, and has served on several other boards, including Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle, and Off The Map. When asked if he considers himself to be an evangelical, McLaren said: "I don't want to give any impression that I want to stay where I'm not wanted."[2]

McLaren is married and has four young adult children. He has traveled extensively in Europe, Latin America, and Africa, and his personal interests include ecology, fishing, hiking, kayaking, camping, songwriting, music, art, and literature.

[edit] Bibliography

  • The Church on the Other Side (Zondervan, 1998)
  • Finding Faith (Zondervan, 1999)
  • A New Kind of Christian (Jossey-Bass, 2001)
  • More Ready Than You Realize: Evangelism as Dance in the Postmodern Matrix (Zondervan, 2002)
  • A Is for Abductive (Zondervan, 2002)
  • Adventures in Missing the Point (Emergent/YS, 2003)
  • Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives (Zondervan Emergent/YS, 2003) Leonard Sweet (General Editor), with contributors Andy Crouch, Brian D. McLaren, Erwin Raphael McManus, Michael Horton, Frederica Matthewes-Green
  • The Story We Find Ourselves In (Jossey-Bass, 2003)
  • A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN (Zondervan, 2004)
  • The Last Word and the Word After That (Jossey-Bass, 2005)
  • The New Kind of Christian Trilogy - Limited Edition Boxed Set (A New Kind of Christian; The Story We Find Ourselves In; The Last Word and the Word After That) (Jossey-Bass, 2005)
  • The Secret Message of Jesus : Uncovering the Truth that Could Change Everything (W Publishing Group, April 2006)

[edit] External links and Articles supportive of McLaren

[edit] Articles Critical of Brian McLaren

[edit] Newspaper Articles

  • [[1] "Evangelical Author Puts Progressive Spin On Traditional Faith" (Washington Post-September 10, 2006)

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ The Sinner's Guide to the Evangelical Right by Robert Lanham, Penguin/New American Library, 2006.
  2. ^ The Sinner's Guide to the Evangelical Right by Robert Lanham, Penguin/New American Library, 2006.

[edit] See also

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