Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed and the Disillusioned

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By the time I was a young pastor, all things Jewish were downright trendy, and many Evangelicals started celebrating “messianic Passover Seders” and many joined “messianic synagogues.”

Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters [PDF] [EPUB] Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters

In the letter I explained that my approach to parenting was strongly influenced by Christian leaders whose teachings I am now repulsed by.1 I trusted those leaders because they were respected in the Evangelical community to which I belonged and because they used a magic word, biblical, to describe their teaching. Now, I’ve come to see that what they called biblical was actually authoritarian, and I am coming to terms with how much better a parent I could have been if I had found better teachers. This breaks my heart, I wrote, because fatherhood has been the most meaningful experience of my life and I sincerely wanted to do it right.So it is for reasons of moral integrity that I must ask myself: might it be necessary to turn off the religious network that turned so viciously on its own mother, and that continues to put her under threat? Might a religion that could make me a worse father also make me a worse neighbor or citizen? Don’t I owe it to my neighbors, especially my Jewish neighbors, to seriously reconsider my involvement in a religion that has been so cruel to them for so long? Since 1900, the Christian Century has published reporting, commentary, poetry, and essays on the role of faith in a pluralistic society. After laying out reasons to leave and stay, McLaren, in the third and final section of his book, begins by reframing the questions: “ Will we stay Christian? and Will Christianity survive? are less important questions than these: How shall we humans survive and thrive? What good future shall we strive for? How can we align our energies with the divine energy at work in our universe?” In this section, McLaren lays out an agenda that humanists both Christian and secular will likely agree on.

Do I Stay Christian? with Brian McLaren - Leadpages Do I Stay Christian? with Brian McLaren - Leadpages

McLaren informs us that he thinks it is "highly likely that Jesus existed and that he was a uniquely extraordinary human being. But that does not mean I take every story about him literally."

Dubbed "a heroic gate-crasher" by New York Times bestselling author Glennon Doyle, Brian D. McLaren explores reasons to leave or stay within the church and if so how...

Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the

A refreshing invitation to consider many reasons why Christianity may or may not be a path for each one of us. Woven with beautiful personal stories, this book will give you many things to consider as well as some clarity .”THIS is a book about conversion. Brian McLaren, an American pastor and writer, poses his title question to those who can’t quite accept a Christianity that they have outgrown. I was born a decade after the Holocaust, at a time when fundamentalist Christians like Jerry Falwell, Sr., seemed to embrace Judaism as Christianity’s equal partner in creating the West in general and the United States in particular. Falwell constantly spoke of the “Judeo-Christian tradition.” (A rabbi friend of mine noted, with appropriate skepticism, “Judeo-Christian usually just means Christian.”) Falwell’s son carried on the pairing.11 Along with TV preacher John Hagee and many others, the Falwells became fervent supporters of the nation of Israel, offering further evidence, to some at least, of their anti-anti-Semitism. It’s clear, however, that their brand of Christian Zionism bears only superficial resemblance to Jewish Zionism. In the end, Christian Zionism reduces Jews to the status of pawns in the fulfillment of end-times prophecies that many Christian preachers love to speak and write about.