Life after Doom A Guide to a Better Church a Better World with Brian McLaren gysis ep 164

“Never waste a good crisis,” Winston Churchill was quoted as saying. In Brian McLaren’s new book, “Life After Doom,” the pastor, author and American theologian urges us to confront the multifaceted crisis facing the world, especially climate change, political polarization, religious supremacy and growing economic inequality. With The United Methodist Church navigating its own crisis during the past few years, McLaren encourages those of us in the church to use the opportunity of all of these challenges to become something we wouldn’t have become any other way and to remember our Wesleyan heritage to claim our role to promote love and justice in the world.

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Guest: Brian McLaren

Learn more about McLaren's work and ministry at BrianMcLaren.net.

Check out and order "Life After Doom" here.

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This episode posted on May 3, 2024.

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At United Methodist News, we have been dedicated to providing fair, faithful, and trusted reporting on the news and events shaping The United Methodist Church For almost 85 years, United Methodist and individuals outside the denomination alike rely on news to tell the authentic story of the church. Get the latest news and subscribe to receive it daily at UMNews.org.

Prologue

Crystal Caviness, host: Brian, welcome to “Get Your Spirit in Shape.”

Brian McLaren, guest: I'm so happy to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Crystal: Thank you. I'm excited too. I shared with you before the podcast started, I have multiple pages of notes, so there's no way we're going to get through everything, but we'll jump right in and have as much of the conversation as we possibly can. I could honestly take the entire podcast to introduce you as a pastor and author, a speaker. I personally would use the term change maker, but maybe can you just take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself?

Brian: Sure. Well, those are all kind and, I hope, relevant. I guess I would probably start, I'm a grandfather, five grandkids, four adult kids, married to Grace for getting up in the 40 some years now. And as you say, I started as a, well, my first career was as an English teacher. I taught college English, then I was a pastor for 24 years. During that time, I started writing books and for the last 18 years I have been a writer and speaker. Most of my speaking is with clergy, although I do a lot of other things as well, including some interfaith work and topics relating to global crises that we face. And in the last several years I've been working with Richard Rohr and a wonderful faculty and staff at the Center for Action and Contemplation.

Crystal: Yes, and honestly, we could have a podcast episode on each of those things, but I love that you shared about your grandchildren and your children and your marriage because as I've read your books, I know that's a great source of joy for you. So thank you for sharing that. We are having this conversation in late March. Actually it is Holy Week when we're having this conversation. And we're four weeks from when The United Methodist Church will meet for its General Conference, which is really a historic event because of the four year delay, because of the worldwide pandemic and also because the church has been in the past few years undergoing some what I'll call a divisive era when a number of congregations have chosen to leave The United Methodist Church. So I'm going to be totally transparent when I invited you to be my guest, my invitation read.

I'm interested in having a hopeful conversation with you about the current state of The UMC and where we can go and what I believe is a historic moment for the church. I'd also ask if we could talk about how United Methodists can have a vital and loving role in this place in history. And I believe you Brian would bring wisdom and compassion to that conversation. In our email exchanges, you've let me know you had any book coming out, asked me if I'd like to receive a copy. I said yes. I was eager to get that book, which is “Life After Doom” and comes out May 14th. Now, I can imagine after reading the book that you chuckled when I wrote that I wanted to have a hopeful conversation with you.

And we're going to talk more about that word hope in a few minutes. But even though you chuckled, you graciously accepted the invitation. And here we are and thank you so much.

Brian: Yes.

Crystal: Before we dive into the conversation about The UMC, I'd love to spend some time talking about your book, “Life After Doom.” It will be impossible to talk about that book as much as I would like to. But I'd like to begin by saying that as I finished reading the introduction, I was in tears and I'm a person, I write in the margins of the book, I underline things, I put exclamation marks, and I actually wrote, “Why am I crying?” in the margin of the book? And then I also wrote, and I think you'll appreciate this, I also wrote, “Can we please get to the hopeful part?” But the introduction resonated so powerfully with me, and by the time I had read in the introduction, “When You dance with doom, doom changes you,” I felt ready to dance and I went on to chapter one and finished the book. So I realize we haven't even mentioned the subject of the book yet. And again, I won't do it justice. And I'd love for you, Brian, just to describe the book, please.

Brian: Sure. Well, first, thanks for sharing that with me. Crystal, growing numbers of people every single day join those of us who are really worried about our future. It's not just one problem, it's in fact, for some years, scientists and sociologists and social psychologists and political leaders have been speaking of a poly crisis, a multifaceted crisis. In the book, I try to avoid all the complex jargon. I just call it our current situation. It's a current situation where we more and more of us understand the reality of climate change. More and more of us are coming to understand that climate change is just the tip, pardon the pun, but the tip of a melting iceberg of larger issue of overshoot, meaning our relationship with the earth is not, it's dysfunctional on our part. We're sucking out more resources than the earth can replenish. We're pumping out more toxins than the Earth can detoxify.

In that way, we are damaging our life support system. Put that in conversation with other struggles that we know that we have. And the struggles in The United Methodist Church are not unrelated to these struggles where we have growing political polarization around the world. We have a resurgence of white supremacy and religious supremacy where Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and other religions as well, are acting as if their religion gives them permission to harm other people. And that lives of people who are not of their religion matter less than people of their religion. So we have this racial, religious supremacy fueled with authoritarianism and anti-democratic attitudes. And then meanwhile, we're funneling more and more money to a smaller and smaller group of people. If you were to take the 100 richest people or families in the world, they own more wealth than half of the world's population.

I mean, when you let that sink in, it's staggering. We're so used to it hearing this, that it's almost lost its ability to shock us. But here's how I think people understand it. When you realize that those under 100 individuals and families can use their wealth to influence politics, so that we thought it was a democracy, but suddenly we realized there are a very small number of people who have an outsized influence directly on politicians through giving them money and bribes and so on and on the public by buying media companies and controlling cable news stations and social media outlets and so on. You put all that together and more and more of us are waking up thinking the future isn't going to be the same as the past. And that gives us this deep sense of concern. And this is both a problem, but for, I would say for the church, it's a phenomenal responsibility and opportunity if we ever needed people who were in the saving business, A whole lot needs to saved right now. Wherever people who are in the business of teaching love, we need to learn how to love more than ever. So it's an opportunity as well as a crisis.

Crystal: As you explain in the book and was, I mean, it was a difficult read for the topic was difficult, but it also, you did such an excellent job explaining, and it's so multifaceted as you just said, and this hasn't just happened. We've been building to this place, to this time. So why now? Why the urgency to have this book written now?

Brian: Yes. Well, first, in terms of why now these problems seem to be coming together. Let me just say something briefly about that. When I was a college English teacher, and I'll never forget it, one day, one of my students, a very outspoken, fun-loving student, comes and makes an appointment, sits down in my office and says, Mr. McLaren, I don't have anybody to talk to. He said, I'll just be blunt. I've been using a lot of cocaine since I started college. And he said, I had my dad's credit card, so I was getting cash advances off of his credit card. And he said, I never thought ahead to what would happen when the credit card bill went in. And he said, now I don't know what I'm going to do. And I was an English teacher. I wasn't a therapist or a counselor, a pastor, but he just needed somebody to talk to.

And I think we've been like that as a civilization taking more from the earth, acting as if the earth could have unlimited resources for an unlimited number of people. So you could just say that the bills that we've been building up have now all come due. Why I wanted to address this now is first of all, I felt in my own life that I was expending more energy trying to keep these concerns at bay than I would expend to try to face them. And I had a feeling a lot more people are feeling that way. And then secondly, in my work with church leaders, denominational leaders, so many of us are consumed with church related problems. Meanwhile, the world is really, really in trouble. And I couldn't help but think of Jesus words. If you try to save your own life, you'll lose it. If you're willing to lose your life, for my sake, you'll find it. A lot of people think he was talking about martyrdom. I've become convinced what he's saying is, if you want to save your own agenda, your own wellbeing and survivals all you care about, it's not going to work out well for you. If you'll join me in my concern for the whole world, for everyone and all of creation, you join me in that you'll find everything that you need. And my hope is that more and more of our faith leaders can move into that space.

Crystal: As I read the book, I read it carefully, but honestly, I'll be honest, I feel like I need to read it again. I'm sure I missed some things. And so I was considering the key takeaways and I thought, well, I'll come up with three or four and I'll talk to Brian about these three or four. Well, I came up with 11, so we're not going to do that. But I would like to just discuss maybe three or four kind of overarching themes or key takeaways, if you will. And because I came up with 11, I thought maybe it was more fair if I let you choose the ones you would like to talk about. But if not, I have 11 we can pick from.

Brian: Oh, that's great.

Crystal: The very first one I wrote down was mind your mind, stop being controlled by fear.

Brian: Yes, yes. Well, I should say what I ended up doing, I had an outline for the book that got thrown away as I was working on it. And I ended up naming the chapters with, maybe you might call them self-talk, things that we need to tell ourselves. So if people remember the chapter title, they remember something that will help them. And when we're in stressful situations, whether it's denominationally stressful as the United Methodists are going through in the coming weeks, politically stressful as the United States will be going through between now and November, and no doubt afterwards or personally stressful or ecologically stressful, if we don't learn how to pay attention to our stress, if we act like the only problem is the problem in the outside world, we leave our inner life untended. When I was a kid, my parents encouraged me to memorize passages from the Bible.

And one of the passages I memorized when I was probably 13 or 14 years old, I still remember by heart from Philippians: “Don't be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication, make your request known to God. And the peace of God that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” And what I was so drawn to that verse, even as a teenager, obviously teenagers have a good bit of anxiety as they're trying to negotiate the social space and what's going on in their own bodies and psychology. But I felt like I was being given away to acknowledge that my anxiety is a problem. My problem isn't just that person or that problem on the outside world, it's also internal. And if we don't manage our anxiety, everything else will go wrong. And so mind your mind is a way that I think we need to become a little more knowledgeable about how we manage our internal life, especially in stressful times.

Crystal: Part of that, and you talked about it several times in the book, was this idea of letting go of binary judgment. And I appreciated that. And I actually shared that with a friend today. She was going to a stressful situation, and I just paraphrased what you had said. It's like, it doesn't have to be yes or no. It can be maybe, or you can just leave your mind open. And we do live in a world that's very binary in a lot of areas. And so I thought that was part of that minding your mind is opening yourself up to other places, and that can be liberating.

Brian: Yes, yes. And this relates to something we'll probably come to again, I notice in my own, as I mind my mind as I pay attention to my own thoughts and feelings that arise. I don't let myself either suppress them and ignore them, or I don't get sucked into them. I observe them. That's part of what mind your mind means. I notice that under stress, my brain wants to do one of two things. It either wants to say everything will be okay, don't worry. I want enough positive information that I can say everything will be okay, and then I can go back on autopilot or I can go back to my previously scheduled complacency or my brain wants to go to, it's hopeless, it's lost, it's too late. There's nothing we can do. And what I realized is that's a way my brain is tricking me to also say, oh, we can go back to your previously scheduled complacency.

There's nothing you can do anyway. And in between those two extremes, those two binaries, if someone says, is everything going to be okay? Well, if your only answer is yes or no, I'm not sure anybody's going to be honest in answering a question like that. So part of learning to mind your mind just as you say, is learning to say some things are going to be okay, some things are going to be better, some things might be really, really tough. That's how life, it's how has always been every day of our lives, and our brains kind of want to trick us into not realizing that.

Crystal: Absolutely. So a couple of years ago I read Richard Rohr's book ,”Falling Upward.”

Brian: Yes, yes.

Crystal: And I know you just mentioned working with the Center for Action and Contemplation that Father Richard developed. And in that book, I believe he encourages you to when you read something that causes you to have a reaction, an emotional reaction, to kind of stop and wonder, question why. And so I've really employed that once, learning that I've employed that as I've read. So I'll tell you, that's why there were a lot of exclamation marks in the book that you wrote, because there were a lot of things that caused me to go, huh, that makes me squirm a little bit. And one of the things that you wrote, well, two things. We'll go ahead and talk about “hope is complicated.” And then you also wrote “a story of doom can be a story of liberation.” Both of those sentences, statements just caused me to stop and just pause and think, okay, hope is complicated. Why is hope complicated? Because especially as a person of faith, I like to believe that I can be a source of hope for people around me. I like to believe that my church is a place of hope. And then you present this idea that, hold on, maybe hope's not the right word there, or maybe hope's not the right. See, I'd love to talk about that just a little bit.

Brian: Sure, sure. Well, I'm a big fan of hope as well. In fact, the word hope has shown up in a number of the titles of my books. But in writing this book and in some of my other work, I've noticed that this tendency to let a sort of resting place of hope become for people, a place of complacency. And when we need action, that kind of complacency, here's the irony. By being optimistic in a dangerous situation, optimistic enough that we don't take appropriate action, we decrease the chances of an optimistic outcome. So in that way, hope can be counterproductive. On the other hand, hope is one of the most important psychological indicators of a mature and healthy human being. And descending into despair can bring you to an even worse place because, but here's ironic. If I have despair, there's nothing I can do. I increase the chances of things turning out even worse.

I make myself, I take away my own agency. And if there's a kind of complacent optimism that infects me as well, I can increase the chances of worse outcomes. So that's when I say hope is complicated. That's what I mean. And in the Christian world, I have to admit, well, let me say it like this. Just to be really, really honest to the Bible, I grew up where we like to quote God's promises. But you know what? In the Bible, there are a lot of warnings too. And to act as if all that we get from our spiritual life promise, and we don't get warnings in that way, the more pious we are, the less wise we are because wise people accurately assess situations and face take danger seriously and take possibility seriously.

Crystal: I feel myself slipping into this place of wanting to go through every single thing, and I'm going to have to watch that. But I do want to ask you, so a story of doom can be a story of liberation.

Brian: Yes. Yes. Well, the example I give in the book is I quote Mary in the Magnificant, and this is not a part of Mary's. We often read this passage of scripture from Luke in the Christmas season, advent season, but we don't often focus, she says her vision of what the coming of Jesus will mean when she gives birth to the Son. What it will mean is that the rich will be sent away, hungry, and the poor will receive good things. Well, that doesn't sound very pleasant to us, especially if we realize we're rich. But I think what Mary is saying is there is a system right now, and this system funnels wealth and ease and luxury and leisure to the people who need at least the people who already have it. And the only way that the poor will be able to get their fair share is for things to stop going quite so well for the rich.

Now, there are a whole lot of people who'd be super upset at me for saying what I just said, because that violates their economic ideology. But all I'll say is a person should go and read that passage in Luke's gospel and meditate on it and consider what that passage is trying to tell us. Here's another way to say it. Based on American history, I don't think we realize in 2024, the degree to which in the 1820s, thirties, forties, fifties and early sixties, the entire United States economy depended on slavery. We might say, well, of course it did in the South, but the wealth of the north was made through manufacturing, and that manufacturing was using the raw material of cotton that had been harvested through slave labor. And so for life to be better for the slaves, it meant that the economic system that had been built on slave labor was going to have to be doomed in that sense. And so for life to be better for the slaves, the system had to be disrupted. By the way, that's the same really outrageously amazing thing that the book of Exodus tells us, that when God looks at the world and sees the pyramids of Egypt and the wealth of the Pharaohs, God says, yeah, but this is happening causing the cries of the people, the bottom of the pyramid. And God is willing to disrupt that kind of system. So that's behind that statement.

Crystal: And Brian, I'll be very, I'll just admit, I never looked at it through that lens until you presented it like that in the book. So thank you for saying it that way. And at somewhere another place in the book you said, if we love God, we have to truly love what God loves. And we know God doesn't love oppression, and we know God doesn't love hatred, and we know that. And so I just appreciated that you took what was a familiar that was familiar to me, and you created a space where I could look at it differently. So thank you.

Brian: Well, thanks for letting me know that. And I'm happy that that was helpful. But at the same time, it is a little disturbing, isn't it? Because I think we have this sort of baseline idea that the more devoted I am to God, it guarantees that life will go better and better for me. But we're connected to each other, we're connected to the earth. Part of, I think what we're waking up to is that our connections not only bring life and joy and wellbeing, but it also means that if we're connected to people who are filled with hate and they want to kill each other, we could be caught in the crossfire. So this requires us then to care not just about my wellbeing, but to care about the common good deeply Christian understanding. But I think it's been de-emphasized a lot in our culture.

Crystal: I was sadly, I would agree with that. And as we mentioned earlier in the podcast, if you'll allow me, I'd like to use some of what I learned in reading in “Life After Doom” to talk about the current state of both The United Methodist Church and maybe organized religion in a broader sense. I am a member of The United Methodist Church. I was raised in The United Methodist Church, and I've been disheartened, I've been angry actually. There's a long list of things that I've felt over the last few years regarding division and misinformation and the church not being who I felt like the church needed to be in the world. But I've also tried to minimize it. There have been times where I'm thinking, well, it's not as bad as it seems and that this ship is going to right itself. It was going to be fine. That place of false optimism really. But we are a changed denomination after this season. But then I read in “Life After Doom,” a new humanity can only arise when an old humanity is falling apart. And that gave me a sense of that was to read that, because I feel like that our old, to use your phrase, this old humanity, if you put that over what we've looked like as a denomination is falling apart, and that gives us an opportunity.

Brian: Yes, yes, yes, yes, That's right.

Crystal: I'd love to hear you talk more about that.

Brian: Well, first, let me say Crystal. I love The United Methodist Church. I have never been a member of The United Methodist Church, but for a period of time in my life, my spiritual mentor, kind of older brother in the faith was the United Methodist pastor who was so good to me. I will be eternally grateful for his kindness to me, Wesley in theology. The irony for me is I struggled through, I grew up in a very different theological framework. It was not working for me, and it was causing me a lot of pain and a feeling that I was being dishonest. And United Methodist theology when I discovered, I thought, where have you been all my life? The brilliance of the Wesley's. I remember the first time when I learned the term from John Wesley, social Holiness. Nobody needed to explain it to me because it was like this giant gap was there in my theological language.

And he gave a word for it. And because I'm in the United States, and I love the United States, most people don't understand how important United Methodism has been in American history. I think you could say it has been the single most important denomination to hold the center together through all of America's ups and downs, throughs history. And if you take all other mainline Protestant denominations and add up their numbers, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, disciples of Christ, the United Church of Christ and so on, add up all their numbers. They don't equal the size of The United Methodist Church, at least what it has been. But The United Methodist Church is also, it's not only an influence on American culture, it's influenced by American culture. And so for really my entire lifetime, there's been a widening rift in American culture, and we changed the slogans by which two different sides polarize over time.

There have been different slogans, but the polarization is the same polarization, and it has certainly made life so difficult for you all in The United Methodist Church. So my heart is with you, and I believe obviously there's been so much pain and so much wasted energy and so much wrongdoing and dishonesty. I know about more of it than a lot of people know, but is an opportunity as well. And as you say, well, we could talk about this. If I were to offer advice to my United Methodist friends, I think the great opportunity at this moment is to not to try to get things back to normal of what was normal before. I think the opportunity now is someone famous said, don't waste a crisis, and whatever happens a month from now, whatever happens in this critical time when decisions are made, including that they could be kicked down the road a little bit farther, perhaps. I would just say don't try to get things back to normal. Imagine the new normal that we need, and use this disruption as a chance to boldly go into that new and better normal.

Crystal: Thank you for saying well all of that. But thank you for cautioning us not to try to get it back because we don't need to get it back. We need to move and become something new and move forward as you wrote with wisdom, courage, and kindness. Thank you for that. One of the, when I was reading your book, you talked about creating these islands of sanity and mutual support, and you also, you used Jesus' words of where two or three are gathered there, you'll find me also and really likened that to you'll find I interpreted as to find Jesus's love in that space. And it seems that church can be the best demonstration of those spaces and providing those spaces where another part of the book was Find your light and shine it. And it seems that the church can be those spaces for us, but how can we nurture it because of our own bad behavior? I'll say, I don't know that people outside of the church are looking really to the church anymore for those spaces.

How can we nurture that and be that, not just for other people, but for ourselves?

Brian: Yes, yes, yes. Well, I think the first thing I would say to all United Methodists who are feeling the pain of this opportunity, and by the way, we should realize that's not all United Methodists. Some United Methodists are really excited about schism and can't wait to get free of these people that they don't want to be associated with. So there is a, there's a certain group of people who this is not causing pain to, but for people who are feeling this pain, what I would say is the way that you talk to yourself in the middle of this pain becomes super important. If you say to yourself, how can I hurt them before they hurt me? How can I protect myself from them? You're going to go in a certain direction, but if you say to yourself, how do I want to behave if the worst things happen, what attitude do I want to have?

What spirit do I want to have? In a way, what we were talking about before of a new humanity can actually be forged in people as they go through the pain and the struggle. I also think in some ways, all of our churches in some ways, we're more in love with the past than we are with the future. It doesn't have to be that way, but we have centuries and centuries of practice at being very, very much in love with the past. Sometimes I think we assume that God was really happy in the past and is sort of disappointed to have to deal with the present. But if we were to flip that around and imagine God being out in the future, looking at human beings in 2024 and saying, come this way, come this way. Come toward love, come toward justice, come toward peace. Come toward grace and forgiveness. Move in this way. Let that old stuff behind. Forget what lies behind, strain toward what I'm offering you in the future. If we could reverse that polarity so that the past doesn't have so much magnetism, but the future has that magnetism, I think we could come out of this so much better. In other words, none of us would wish this crisis on the united Methodist community, but we could say there's a way to use this crisis to become something we wouldn't have become any other way.

Crystal: Yes, and all the things that you were listing, they are so much a part of the United Methodist identity, the love for justice and to do good and to be a part of the world and a loving and kind way. And so to get back to the business or the business of the church really to do that work seems like really the right path. For sure.

Brian: And if we're in a time when institutions are struggling, one of the things I think church leaders and committed church people have to do is they have to say, this isn't our fault. Now, obviously, we have responsibility and we have all made mistakes in the past. We need to face and not deny, but look, higher education is one of the greatest inventions. It's going through a really rough time right now, the Democratic and Republican parties going through, it's not easy in either party right now to deal with reality. Brick and mortar stores are going through tough times right now. So almost every institution that we're familiar with is facing stress because the world is changing rapidly, and that's happening to our church institutions. But maybe it would take the shaking of some of those institutional structures to wake more of us up to say, you know what?

Jesus talked about wherever two or three are gathered in my name, and what did the Wesleys do? They looked at the Church of England and its institutional structures that were corrupt by money, corrupt, corrupted by comfort and complacency. And they said, we're going to create some very simple, flexible, new structures. We're going to organize people in classes and bands that then together create a larger society of people living in a new way. I mean, this could be the death of a certain kind of Methodist institution. It could be the new beginning of the Methodist vision and heart and spirit in so many ways.

Crystal: And steeped in what the Wesleyan culture, the Wesleyan heritage, to go out and be vile, as John Wesley said, the first time he preached in the fields to just do it differently.

Brian: Exactly right.

Crystal: Well, Brian, as we finish up today, and this has been such an amazing conversation, thank you. But I want to ask you, is there anything that you wanted to discuss? There's a lot of things I would've liked to have discussed. We just didn't have the time, but is there anything you wanted to make sure we talked about and we didn't?

Brian: Well, I hope we'll have a chat to carry on this conversation at some other time, Crystal. But no, I just want to say your love for The United Methodist Church resonates with so many other people for whom the Methodist community has been such a lifeline, and whatever other people do that's for the better or worse of the United Methodist community, your love is making the community better. And that's true for every other person who is in the midst of this with love and even heartbreak is an expression of love, and the love is what will really carry you through. So it's inspiring for me to meet you and hear your concern in these challenging times.

Crystal: Thank you. Thank you, Brian, for those kind words. Well, I'm going to ask you now the question that we ask all of our guests on “Get Your Spirit in Shape,” how do you keep your own spirit in shape?

Brian: Two things do it for me. One is creation. To be out in this beautiful creation, the wisdom of God, the love of God, the joy of God, the depth and beauty of God just resonates out every window and on every walk, and with every step I take. And then creativity, which I think is human beings, echoing that divine creativity. So whether it's reading poetry or listening to good music or reading someone's writings or the creative work even of a podcaster like yourself, all of that creativity to me is energizing.

Crystal: Thank you so much for being a guest on “Get Your Spirit of Shape.” This was such a joy for me, and thank you for your love for all of us in writing the book, “Life After Doom.” We will link to it on our episode page so that people can go and learn more and order if they'd like. And I just thank you again for being here with us today.

Brian: Thank you, Crystal.

Epilogue

That was a conversation with author and contemporary theologian, Brian McLaren. To learn more, go to umc.org/podcast and look for this episode where you will find helpful links and a transcript of our conversation. If you have questions or comments, feel free to email me at a special email address just for Get Your Spirit and shape listeners, GYSI s@cm.org. If you enjoy today's episode, we invite you to leave a review on the podcast platform where you listen. Thank you for taking the time to join us on Get Your Spirit in Shape. I'm Crystal Caviness and I look forward to the next time that we're together.

We'd like to share another message from UM News with you. At United Methodist News, we have been dedicated to providing fair, faithful, and trusted reporting on the news and events shaping The United Methodist Church For almost 85 years, United Methodist and individuals outside the denomination alike rely on news to tell the authentic story of the church. With general conference now concluding our mission to deliver unbiased, clear and transparent news is more important than ever. Get the latest news and subscribe to receive it daily at UMNews.org.

'Life after Doom': A Guide to a Better Church, a Better World