Navigating the Slippery Slope of Faith Transitions

Time magazine’s pick for “most influential Evangelical in 2015” tells his own story of leaving behind traditional Evangelicalism.

Over the past five years, we’ve interviewed many people who are “Recovering Evangelicals” … people who were handed an Evangelical/Fundamentalist faith that they eventually found they had to reject.  As they explored their faith from different angles, they found it just didn’t work anymore: they had to keep giving up one belief after another until they thought they had nothing left.  We have a web-page that collects over a dozen such stories.

But recently, we thought it was important to show that these “slippery slope” experiences are had not only by “average” lay-people: Christian leaders, pastors, and theologians are also prone.  So a few weeks ago we heard from John James Kirkwood, who was a pastor of an Evangelical church during the years that he was giving up on traditional Evangelicalism (#180).  And then we heard from Peter Enns, who was a professor and theologian at an Evangelical College when he walked the same path (#181).  Both had to contend with the tension of helping other Evangelicals build up their Evangelical faith while tearing apart his own.

In this episode, we hear from Brian McLaren: also a pastor at a large and flourishing Evangelical church during the years that he was giving up the traditional Evangelicalism he grew up with.  But he was not “just another pastor”: he assisted in the development of several new churches, was a guest lecturer for denominational and ecumenical leadership gatherings around the world, and a prolific Evangelical author with a couple dozen book titles to his credit.  In 2015, Time magazine named him as one of the 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America! 

He, too, became a Recovering Evangelical.

This is his story.

We’ll hear about how he grew up in a Plymouth Brethren environment, steeped in Biblical literalism and Young Earth Creationism, and at the ripe old age of 12 defiantly declared he’d renounced that form of Fundamentalism because it couldn’t handle evolution and was too obsessed with sex.  About a transcendent spiritual experience on a hill-top in his teen years that crystalized his faith in a God of love.  About his slippery slope experiences while he began to pursue a career as a college professor of English literature, then stumbled into a career as a pastor, an author, a seeker, a culture warrior, and a Jesus freak.

And about where he’s at now in his Christian worldview …. faith expressing itself in love.

And the cherry on top in this interview was a sneak peak at his next book to be released: the first in a trilogy of sci-fi novels that will add a new dimension to his message of pursuing meaning and fulfillment.

Find more about Brian McLaren and his many books at his website.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might want to check out a similar conversation we had with another world-class Exvangelical author … Philip Yancey (#113) … as well as our collection of other “slippery slope” life stories.

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