Don’t you just love these rock group-like names. In his current DeepShift Newsletter Brian McLaren says, "We’ve got our eleven cities confirmed for the DeepShift/Everything Must Change tour in early 2008. These will be Friday night/Saturday gatherings with all-new original music, liturigical resources, conversation, special guests, and an amazing art/reflection experience."

In an interesting coincidence the tour happens within a few months of McLaren’s forthcoming new book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope which is scheduled to be released this October 2. And now here’s an excerpt:

… by postponing the essence of salvation to the afterlife, and by assuming God plans to destroy the earth, the conventional view leads us to assume that the world will get worse and worse, and that this deterioration is in fact God’s will or plan. This assumption would tend to create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Not only that, but in some versions of the conventional view, the worse the world gets, the better we should feel since salvation – meaning post-mortem salvation after the world is destroyed – is approaching. In too many cases, the conventional view can lead people to celebrate humanity’s “progress” in self-destruction rather than seeking to turn it around. To put it bluntly, in terms of humanity and this earth, the conventional view too easily creates – unintentionally, of course – a kind of religious death wish. (84)