(From a letter I wrote to author and friend of Highlands, Brian McLaren)

Hi Brian,

I heard from a sympathetic pastor today who was wondering what we are doing at Highlands to have good leaders in the future. I wrote back that we really feel the weight of finding and equipping the next generation of progressive evangelicals but right now this is our default process:

1. Get a solid biblical foundation from a conservative but Christ centered seminary.

2. Serve God and God's people well for half your life in conservative ministries.

3. Have some sort of existential crisis that makes you rethink everything but find that your faith in Christ is still your heartbeat.

4. Find yourself necessarily rethinking and adjusting your hermeneutic, because while you are still fully devoted to the Holy Scriptures, it is not in the way you'd been taught. They start coming alive again as you approach them as "living and active" rather than "inerrant".

5. Freak most of your friends and colleagues out who start to have real concern for you, if not your salvation.

6. Dare on a good day to start talking more openly about your changing views and find out that there are plenty of people who are eager to engage at this new level but have never had anyone initiate such conversations for fear of being dubbed a "heretic" or stretching things beyond scary.

7. Find some way, by hook or by crook, but more likely by the extravagant grace of God to find some odd pocket of people where your gifts and perspective are welcomed and you feel the beauty of freedom in Christ.

8. You wonder how so much of the Church has been taken hostage by fear and can so often seem to take the "good" out of good news.

9. You may or may not get yet another degree from a more liberal seminary, grateful that you already have the solid biblical foundation you got at the seminary that would never recommend you for anything at this point in your life.

10. Stumble upon other like minded people who may be headed in a similar direction.

So all together, with this methodology for Theological Formation, it takes between 40-50 years to create a progressive evangelical pastor.

Some tiny voice inside says, "There must be a better way."

Blessings,

Mark