Everyday Liturgy: When I started this blog a year and a half ago I did it in part to begin to explore ways to expand my relationship with God.  I had recently graduated from a Bible college and wanted to build on the foundation in Scriptures I had been given.  The evangelical answers, quiet time and prayer cards, no longer seemed capable of leading me further in my spiritual journey.  Bible-software, inductive study, and individual petitions no longer seemed adequate.  What role do you see "Ancient Practices" having in our technological, individualistic world?

Brian McLaren: Thom, I think you've really diagnosed a key dimension of the problem: individualism. I think our spiritual lives languish in a "Jesus and me" isolation chamber, but they become robust and deep when we realize that God calls me into an "us for all of us" way of life. To echo Paul's amazing words in Ephesians 3, I come to know the love of God "with all the saints." Knowledge in this sense is a knowing with - knowing God with people of different periods of history, different cultures, different denominations, and so on. So the ancient practices draw us into a wider, deeper way of knowing God that includes but also transcends my individual experience.

EL: One of the biggest challengers and provokers in my life has been an Eastern Orthodox friend.  Through his entrance into the Eastern Orthodox church a whole new world of spiritual practice has been opened up to him, and I have been able to see glimpses of how he is being shaped in community with God and others.  What role does community play in spiritual practice?

BM: Like your friend, I have been enriched by Eastern Orthodox practices and values. In the book I use an example - limited and flawed, admittedly - to schools of cooking. There are certain flavors that Italian cooking specializes in - and very different ones in Thai or Mexican or Indian cooking. So various spiritual traditions maintain various rich flavors of the spiritual life ... we might even say that different traditions nourish in different ways. When we enter a community, we can learn their way, discover the "ingredients" they specialize in, and be nourished by what they uniquely offer.  This becomes quite dynamic in our time, I think, because we're realizing that if you want to be nourished in evangelism, Evangelicals have a lot to offer, and if you want to be nourished in sacramentalism, you need to go to the Orthodox or Catholics or Anglicans. If you want to be nourished in peacemaking, the Mennonites carry on that tradition in a special way, and if you want to be nourished in deep Biblical study, the Presbyterians excel. I believe the time has come for us to share our treasures and specialties with one another and not try to keep our "flavor" as proprietary. We can have a big banquet and each bring our specialties to share.

EL: I enjoyed Everything Must Change because in a sense it stayed away from statistics and ideology---the book served to not be a five point message on how to change the world but instead to call people to the narrative of God's kingdom as the answer to global problems.  Thinkers like William Cavanaugh and John Milbank have begun to explore how spirituality and religion are affected when the whole world is knocking at door. What role do you see spiritual practices playing in making everything change on a local, national, and global scale?

BM: I'm glad that you're seeing a connection between Everything Must Change and Finding Our Way Again. In my mind, these two books are tightly connected. Here's one way to say it. If I want to see change in the world, the change needs to begin in myself. If I want to see the world become more peaceful, for example, I need to become a person of peace. If I want the world to become less consumptive, I need to become more self-disciplined, and so on. So, to be the change we want to see in the world, we need spiritual practices that help us change. If you imagine a bunch of greedy people trying to make the world more generous, or a bunch of bitter people trying to make the world more forgiving, you see the folly of seeking local, national, or global change without paying attention to spiritual formation.

But it's never either or. You don't sit around in your church building waiting to become perfect before you go out to make a difference, because it turns out that making a difference involves spiritual practices as well - working for justice, building relationships with "the other," showing hospitality and kindness, giving away money to those in need, and so on. We are formed through the practices of service, advocacy, hospitality, and so on ... just as we are by fasting and prayer.

EL:  My "Eureka!" moments that defined my journey into ancient spiritual practices came from James K.A. Smith's view of postmodern worship and Eugene Peterson's spiritual theology of hospitality.  They encouraged me to finally suck it up and make all the theology swimming around in my head actually be lived out daily and purposefully.  In Smith's Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? he writes:

"For we embodied creatures, whether ancient or postmodern, the rhythms of ritual and liturgy are gracious practices that enable discipleship and formation."

In spiritual practices, do we begin "finding our way again" out of modernity as Smith sees it or do you see the pull of ancient spirituality arising from a different source?

BM: Again, I think you've nailed it. One of the corrosive dimensions of modernity was the sense that old was bad. Another was the sense that ideas transform apart from practices. Part of moving beyond modernity is retrieving things we have largely forgotten as a culture: that there are rich treasures in the ancient ways, and that we are transformed by our thinking, yes, but not apart from practices - and we are transformed by practices, yes, but not apart from thinking.  

EL: Now to the more practical side.  I felt one of the conscious ways I needed to pull myself out of a lackadaisical spirituality was to bring physicality back into my worship.  I sensed a quasi-Gnosticism surrounding my spiritual life that needed to be discarded.  I needed to get away from the "head games" and begin worshipping in the environment God has placed me in: I needed to kneel, I needed to stand, I needed to make prayer beads with my own to hands.   What are the ways in your daily life that you immerse yourself in ancient practices?

BM: Like you, I reconnected with physicality. In public worship in the church where I served for 24 years, we rediscovered the importance of the eucharist - not just as a symbolic act, but as an embodied act. We made space for kneeling, for lighting candles, for writing prayers, for being anointed with oil, all things that involved a reconnection of our spirituality and our embodiment. In the book, I talk about the flip side of "practicing our faith" which is "faithing our practices" - so for me, this means that I in a sense sacramentalize the grinding of coffee beans in the morning, or taking walks in God's beautiful creation, of noticing birds and trees by name. I also benefit greatly by practicing what some people call "body prayer" - from kneeling to dancing to lying prostrate in prayer in private.

EL: Sometimes I wonder about taking my spiritual practices to the next level, about the radical view of life the early church had.  They sold all their property, they lived in radical community, and they shared stuff!  It seems like a surreal dream to me, and when I think about making it a reality, I get scared and turn away.  The early church haunts me sometimes.   How do you see the more radical spiritual practices of the early church as applying to today?

BM: I think we make a mistake when we turn the early church into a template or blueprint that we try to duplicate, but I also think that we make a mistake when we try to domesticate it. One idea that has helped me is to remember that there are times and seasons in life. There was radical economic sharing in Jerusalem for a time, but later on, the Jerusalem community was scattered, and economic community wasn't normative everywhere. So, my wife and I lived in community with some other people early in our marriage. We took in refugees and practiced radical hospitality. Then we had four kids, and for many years we moved away from radical hospitality as we focused on child-raising. Now our kids are grown, and new possibilities are opening up to us. So it's important to remember that we're practicing a way - not an inflexible list of regulations.  

EL:  To sum it up, if we find our way again with these ancient practices, do we become new kind of Christians who participate in a generous orthodoxy that insists everything must change?  In other words, how do the ideas in this book tie into your train of thought?

BM: My critics used to say that I wanted to "water down" the gospel and accommodate it to postmodern culture. Of course, this wasn't my goal at all. What I was more interested in was trying to discern how we have already watered down the gospel and accommodated it to modern Western culture. Whenever we let our lives - or our faith - be "conformed to this world," we lose our transformative dynamic. So, really, all my books are about seeking to be transformed by the Holy Spirit, conformed not to this world but to the image of Christ, so we can participate with the risen Jesus in his ongoing mission of bringing good news and healing to our world which God so loves. In that context, internal transformation through spiritual practices connects with communal transformation of our local faith communities, which in turn integrate with our mission of social and global transformation as we seek God's kingdom and God's justice in this world. So - I would be very happy if people see all my books - not as separate trains on different tracks - but as cars linked together on one track. What does it mean to be and make faithful disciples of Jesus Christ, living in authentic community, for the good of the world which God loves? That's really the big question that ties all my work together - at least, I hope that's the case!