Everything Must Change: Book Review

The very earliest Christians were known as followers of ‘The Way’. The very first of these people came from the various Jewish sects that were functioning in the first century CE. They did not commit themselves to a system of belief. Rather, they committed themselves to a way of life which followed Jesus of Nazareth who, they came to see, was Messiah and Lord. Indeed, Jesus’ resurrection and ascension was not understood primarily as a static event which secured their place, as believers, in Heaven and, thus, saved from hell. It seems that they, instead, got involved with trying to figure out what it was they were saved for.

It is this simple but profound shift in emphasis that has inspired much of Brian McLaren’s writing up to this point. In introducing his recent book, Everything Must Change: When the World’s Biggest Problems and Jesus’ Good News Collide, he writes,

…more and more of us are realizing something our best theologians have been saying for quite a while: Jesus’ message is not actually about escaping this troubled world for heaven’s blissful shores, as is popularly assumed, but instead is about God’s will being done on this troubled earth as it is in heaven. So people interested in being a new kind of Christian will inevitably begin to care more and more about this world, and they’ll want to better understand its most significant problems… (p.4)

The book begins with McLaren  declaring the two preoccupying questions which drove him to write the book: 1) What are the biggest problems in the world? and 2) What does Jesus have to say about these global problems (pp.11-12). When my wife and I took a group of Grade 12 students to India in 2006, I asked the young people to reflect on one key question during our time away: What does the gospel mean to the poorest people you encounter while here? They and I had inherited a Christianity with its major focus on the death and resurrection of Jesus leading to eternal life in heaven. While our experience of extreme poverty does not change God’s purposes for Jesus’ crucifixion , it may lead us to ask if we have indeed understood God’s plan for the cosmos.

The book has two major premises from which McLaren  puts forward his vision of what it means to be a new kind of Christian. The first premise is that we all function according to a framing story, a metaphor synonymous with ‘world view’ or meta-narrative. The second premise is that our world is a suicide machine which has co-opted ‘the main mechanisms of our civilization - our economic, political and military systems.  This suicide machine has caused four major dysfunctions in our world: the prosperity crisis, the equity crisis, the security crisis and the spiritual crisis. And for McLaren, the final crisis needs rectifying if the first three are going to be transformed.

From here, McLaren presents an involved, complex and persuasive view of the troubles facing our world. McLaren takes an interdisciplinary approach to discuss the key economic and political ideologies that lie at the heart of the system that governs our world. And, importantly, he seeks to show how we as a people - and as Christians - have become captive to the framing story from which the system stems. Throughout the pages, the reader is offered reinterpretations of key bible passages - particularly from the teachings of Jesus - to help them understand how Jesus actually seeks to begin the restoration of the world here and now.

McLaren is very aware that imagining a world riddled with crises could actually be transformed seems naively utopian. He writes, ‘because we are so fully indoctrinated by the imperial framing narrative of our day, it is difficult for us to imagine for us to imagine how different it would be to live in the framing story of Jesus’ (p. 139). Moreover, he acknowledges that simply focusing on the big picture issues and then essentially creating slogan responses is not what God’s kingdom is about. Instead, we need to identify the systemic issues facing this world and then seek to deal with these in manageable ways. Such a concept (eg. seeing injustice in our world as a systemic problem) is not new. Nor is any solution to the world’s problems going to be simple or easy. But Mclaren is also not interested in capitulating to despair. While acknowledging that defeatism is an understandable response to the condition of our world, he suggests that we ‘hope and pray for a radical transformation of our framing story so that we switch sides from Caesar’s way to Jesus’ way’ (p.168).

As we continue to become more and more connected to the rest of the world and come to confront global issues such as terrorism and climate change, Christians must (re)discover their faith as a public way of life rather than as a personal system of beliefs. This latest book from Brian McLaren is a wonderful challenge and resource for those seeking to live as God’s people in the twenty-first century.