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

by Brian D. McLaren

I know this sounds complicated. It is. I understand why some of my friends want to be done with any talk of God for good, under whatever names or metaphors. And I understand why others of my friends want to cling to conventional notions, using the Bible and Christian tradition as the eternal ceiling for any and all conversation about God. God is perfectly defined there, they say, in black and white, so there’s no need for new approaches. Just read and repeat, again and again. Stay safely under that ceiling, they warn, or you will lose God, the Bible, the tradition, everything. But if we dare take a third option—of finding language appropriate to our context to describe the insistent holy mystery that is inherent to our experience of life—we have the opportunity to rediscover the You in ways that are as inspiring and liberating in our world as the old metaphors were for our ancestors in their world. We will indeed lose the Bible and the tradition as our ceiling, as we were warned. But we will get them back as our floor, the ancient foundation to build upon, the soil in which we plant new seeds, the launchpad from which we boldly go where no one has gone before.