Rick McKinley is the founding pastor of Imago Dei Community in Portland, Oregon. He is also on the faculty of Multnomah Seminary where he teaches applied theology. We spoke with Rick about his latest book The Answer to Our Cry: Freedom to Live Fully, Love Boldly, and Fear Nothing and the freedom found in the gospel.
1) A lot of people say, with sincerity, that "Jesus is the Answer." Yet to many this sounds like a cliché. What does this actually mean for the person who is hurting, lonely, or happily engaging in a life of sin?
Underneath that answer is this reality that there is a Father, Son and Spirit that you belong to, who has made a home for you. That love comes to us in the face of Christ. So it isn’t a nebulous answer but a concrete answer about the deepest longings that you have.
2) You talk a lot about freedom. To our contemporary ears, freedom seems like independence from restraint, the ability to do what I want without anyone telling me what to do. How does this differ from what Jesus offers?
When we think of autonomy as true freedom that promises a lie because we are never truly free. We can’t defy certain laws of nature and physics. Jesus’ freedom is a freedom that comes in relationship. The place where you are truly set free is in being loved and in being a lover of God and other people. A freedom that is based on my own independence that is self-serving is actually not freedom. It is love turned in on itself. It is an expression of self-love. The freedom that Christ brings is actually the freedom to be, to belong, and to be turned outward for the sake of other people.
The place where you are truly set free is in being loved and in being a lover of God and other people.
3) We're entering what many consider a post-Christian age in which it seems many are tuning out the message of Christianity? How do followers of Christ live faithfully in this age and communicate the hope of the gospel?
I think the post-Christian age is a more fruitful, fertile environment than a “Christian” age because a post-Christian age is very similar to a pre-Christian age. There the gospel can be imagined in fresh ways and in new cultures. People who are trying to follow Jesus are not called to protect a Christian sort of colonization of culture. Instead we are invited to create fresh expressions of fidelity to Jesus in the culture that we live in. Yes it does require a courage, but a courage that comes with an invitation to dream about what it looks like for the Kingdom of God to break in in our cultural moment.
4) How do pastors communicate the gospel's seeming paradox, that it is all of grace and yet compels us to a life of joyful sacrifice for Christ?
It’s only a paradox if you look at it from the standpoint of economics. If you look at it from the standpoint of economics then it’s like “I get grace and I’m going to do works.” But don’t forget that those works don’t earn anything, so it creates that sense of paradox that is difficult to understand. Now if you look through the lens of love then receiving and giving love is not paradoxical; it’s normative. That is how relationship works. So saved by grace is this active generous gift of love, and doing good works is responding to love with love. With love at the core of the gospel, I don’t think we’re caught in a tension of earning anything or paying back anything.
With love at the core of the gospel, we’re not caught in a tension of earning anything or paying back anything.
5) You are an influential pastor in Portland, which isn't exactly the Bible-belt. In your view, what are the questions people in your community are asking about faith?
I think they wonder if God is good. They wonder if the Bible is really authoritative and, if so, what does that mean. I think they would like all the rough edges taken off so that they can believe whatever they want without it being contested. At the same time I think they’re coming with a deep longing for a reality that has mystery and wonder and awe. It’s like their heart is drawing them to the God they are created for, but they can’t name or even conceptualize. Then they discover it’s Jesus and they are a little embarrassed by it. In the end there is this sense of awakening. If I can paraphrase Chesterton in saying that an open mind is like an open mouth. It is looking for something to bite down on. Otherwise it's like a sewer – rejecting nothing. So I think anytime you have a relativistic culture with complete open-mindedness it can seem all well and good but it betrays something that the heart needs which is to bite down and to have something concrete and I think the gospel gives us that.
Daniel Darling is vice-president of communications for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Activist Faith.
