Transcript: “Brian McLaren’s Thoughts from DAVOS” 

Posted on You-tube February 1, 2008

Hi, everybody. This is Brian McLaren. I’m in Davos, Switzerland at the moment. You can see behind me and the television, the World Economic Forum is going on. And I was invited to be part of a dialog between Muslims and the West. And that was a way to say Muslims, Christians and Jews. It has been an amazing several days. And I thought I would share with you just a couple of the highlights.

One of the first people I met after arriving was an Anglican archbishop, Archbishop John Shehan Che. And Archibishop Che—and you can see a picture of him here. Here is his photograph. They gave us this nifty little, or big fat book with pictures of each person who is participating. But Archbishop Che made a real interesting point. He said, as someone who lives in Singapore and is a committed Christian, for Christianity to be considered a subset of the West doesn’t really make sense now. He’s a Christian, but he is not western. And he went on to point out that in Singapore, Malaysia, a number of other places in the Far East, the relationship between Christians and Muslims is actually much better than it is in the West.

It made me think, as a Christian in the West, how many of the issues between Christians and Muslims right now are actually issues between the West as a political/economic/cultural entity? And to what degree do we as Christians in order to be peacemakers and neighbors to our Muslims friends, how much do we have to learn to extract ourselves from being too imbedded in an identity as Westerners? You see? And I think this actually is a place where our Muslim friends can help us Christians a great deal. By being in conversation with them—and I have experienced this this week—we can begin to see some ways that our Christianity and our being part of Western civilization have been syncretized or mixed in an unhealthy way.