Brian McLaren, heralded as one of America's 25 most influential evangelicals by Time magazine, is an author, speaker, social justice activist, and pastor. His work has been covered in the New York Times, and Christianity Today. In his newest book, Naked Spirituality, McLaren shares practical wisdom for living a truly spiritual life as he presents 12 exercises for beginning and sustaining a meaningful relationship with God. Brian was kind enough to answer 5 Questions posed by ConversantLife.com.

In Naked Spirituality, you list four typical answers to the question, “What do you mean by spiritual?” Since these are all generic answers to some degree, how do you nudge people from a general desire to be spiritual to Christianity, or more specifically, to Christ?

I'm so glad you distinguish between Christianity and Christ. The longer I live, the less interested I am in adding adherents to a religion called Christianity, and the more passionate I am about helping people to discover what it means to live, move, and have our being "in Christ." My hunch is that there are people in the Christian religion who aren't living "in Christ," and there are people "in Christ" who are nervous about affiliating with the Christian religion because of what it seems to stand for in too many cases - things that, in their perception at least, are contrary to Christ. Speaking personally, I am a committed Christian and also, I trust, a follower of Christ - imperfect, unfinished, full of imperfections, and need of grace, to be sure, but I think that's true for all of us.

I can't speak of spirituality without speaking of my own experience, and all of my experience centers in Christ and is rooted in the Scriptures. So in the book, you'll notice I'm constantly connecting what I'm talking about with stories from the gospels, episodes from the Bible, insights from other followers of Christ, and so on. I find that the more I talk about Jesus and the Bible, the more people are interested. By the way, I also find that the more Christians attack other religions, the less people are interested in Jesus. It may be that they sense something sinister in any form of Christianity that can only lift itself up by putting others down.

Your 12 “spiritual practices” upon which Naked Spirituality is based, are very practical, yet very different from the classic spiritual practices, or disciplines (prayer, solitude, worship, etc.). What are the advantages of your practices over the traditional ones in the life of the Christian?

I'm a little surprised you'd think they are different. Really, you could say that all twelve of the practices I consider in the book are classical forms of prayer - invocation, thanksgiving, worship, confession, petition, intercession, aspiration, agony, lament, meditation, surrender, and contemplation. Sadly, many of us haven't thought much about prayer beyond the first five or six kinds, so I try to explore a wider range of spiritual practices than contemporary people may be used to. But if you go back in our tradition, you find that this full range was celebrated and cherished.

I also try to use fresh language to explore these classic practices, and I do so for at least two reasons. First, for us Christians, familiar words sometimes create a kind of false security: the words feel familiar, so we assume we're also familiar with the full depth of meaning to which the point. Second, for folks who aren't Christians, some of these words carry baggage that actually gets in the way of encountering the meaning to which they point. I'm not against the traditional words in any way, but I try to augment or complement those words as I am able.

In your chapter on “O” (as in O God, O Lord) you talk about the importance of living in the tension between God’s accessibility (immanence) and God’s otherness (transcendence). Why is it so difficult to live this tension? It seems as though we pick one or the other and live there, or we vacillate back and forth depending on what we think of God at any given time.

Yes, I think this really is a struggle. We face it in all our relationships, I think. For example, I can wake up day after day with my wife and think, "I know her." This familiarity can breed complacency. But even after almost 32 years of marriage, I keep discovering that there are new mysteries to explore in my wife's personality, and she discovers the same in me. And if we can keep this in mind, our marriage is wonderfully enriched. We have the depth of experience and shared memories to share, and we also have the continual discovery of newness and surprise.

I think one of the reasons contemporary Christians struggle so much with the beautiful integration of knowability and mystery is that we are contentious people. As Isaiah said, we are people of unclean lips. So much of our speaking of God is polemic - intended to persuade others that they're wrong and we're right in our understanding of God. Now I'm all for honest disagreement and spirited debate, but if we spend more time and energy arguing about God than in communion with God, I think our hands will begin to clench. And real worship, real adoration, real communion with God require open hands. I don't think it's accidental that the Psalmists invite us to raise our hands - not our fists - to God.

You divide your 12 spiritual practices into four seasons. Given that we are quickly approaching Easter, how do you see the seasons following the path of Jesus in his birth, growth, death, and resurrection?

Maybe I could offer this brief quote from the book (p. 185). This is from a chapter where I talk about those deepest, darkest valleys of the shadow of death that we sometimes pass through.

When you practice lament, when you are stretched and suspended on the cross of abandonment, you do not feel heroic. you do not feel like a runner about to cross the finish line. You do not feel that a hopeful Sunday is coming after a nightmarish Friday and a blank, lifeless Saturday. You feel exhausted and finished. You feel as though you're fading, dying, letting go. And so you do. Having kept the question [Why have you forsaken me?] open as long as you can, you let go. Dare you do so now? Dare you drop, crying why, falling not from the God above you, but into the G-d below you?

You might say that of the four stages I explore in the book—Simplicity, Complexity, Perplexity, and Harmony—simplicity is like birth, complexity is like growth, perplexity is like death, and harmony is like resurrection. Of course, we all want to get to resurrection as soon as possible, but each stage is essential. Each has much to teach, and we are formed by each.

You get a lot of criticism from evangelicals, yet you seem to always maintain a very winsome and open spirit. What keeps you in such a positive and calm frame of mind when just about everybody else seems agitated for one reason or another?

I grew up in an extremely conservative and contentious fundamentalist movement or sect. It was filled with wonderful people who loved God, but the sociology of the group depended on exclusion and exclusiveness. When I "emerged" from that exclusive fundamentalism into a broader evangelicalism, I was hoping to find less contention. And I think I did. But in recent years, I think a contentious form of fundamentalism has been making a comeback and is in the process of a takeover attempt in evangelicalism. (I think similar movements are afoot in Catholicism and Mainline Protestantism too.) When I see this, I am not impressed by it, because I grew up with it and saw what it does to people.

I've learned in my own experience that it's way easier to think oneself right than to be loving. So Paul had it dead right when he said that knowledge puffs up, but love builds up, and that without love, no matter how right you are, you gain nothing but produce a lot of noise.

So really, I'm grateful for my religious heritage in fundamentalism. It taught me many things including that if you live by contention - theological swordplay, if you will - you will die by it. If you seek to argue and fight against an argumentative and combative spirit, you become what you are against. (Paul said that if you bite and devour each other, you'll consume each other, which describes our situation pretty well.) So my background forced me to seek a better way—what Paul calls the most excellent way, the way of love, the way of the Sermon on the Mount that transcends the way of the scribes and Pharisees.

Of course, I often trip up and slip back into things I am trying to grow beyond, but even that experience of failure humbles a person and makes it harder to try to put oneself in the position of an equal, much less a superior, in relation to one's fellow Christians. I guess so much comes back to Paul's words in Philippians 2, where he urges us to consider others as better than ourselves and to follow Jesus downward into servanthood. I suppose that to whatever degree I am, albeit imperfectly, able to maintain a winsome, calm, open, or positive spirit, it's because God has used the practices I explore in Naked Spirituality to form me. I still have a long, long way to go, so even though I wrote this book, I need its message as much as anyone else.

Thanks for the interesting questions! I hope these replies will be helpful.