I read Kathy Escobar's book, "Faith Shift: Finding Your Way Forward When Everything You Believe Is Coming Apart" back in 2014 and I believe that was the first time I heard of James Fowler's book, "Stages of Faith."

Brian McLaren is drawing on Fowler's idea along with many others, including Richard Rohr's book, "Falling Upward", as he synthesizes research into a four-stage faith model. He uses an analogy of the rings of a tree that include and build on the previous stages. He tries to emphasize that later stages are not better or more advanced but it's hard not to think that they are. And as the title of the book suggests, McLaren sees doubt as vital to our process of moving and growing between stages. on our faith journey.
The four stages he discusses are:
Stage One: Simplicity - dualistic/binary thinking, a focus on right or wrong, and pleasing authority figures.
Stage Two: Complexity - pragmatic, focused on success or failure, achieving goals, being free and independent
Stage Three: Perplexity - critical/relativistic, values honesty/authenticity, sees through appearances to reality; skeptical of everything, beliefs, and institutions
Stage Four: Harmony - integral/holistic, focus on inclusion and transcendence, wants to find connection, make a contribution, values being compassionate, seeking the common good, assumes we are all connected, part of a greater whole.

Overall, this is a great book that I think many will find very helpful if they have been through any kind of "deconstruction" period in their faith. It is one of my favorites by Brian McLaren and I've read a lot of his books! (A Generous Orthodoxy was wonderful and a big catalyst for some of my own evolving faith journey.)

I read this book alongside another recent book on the experience of doubt and so appreciated McLaren's approach. After a decade or two or reading his work, I found this to be one of the more helpful of his books, as he navigates the human complexity of faith amidst a quickly shifting world.

I love Brian McLaren and at times I struggle with my faith so you can imagine my excitement when I saw this book title!
This book had a lot of really good points and I learned a lot. I really liked that he broke faith into four different stages and uses them to explain our faith journey.
This book drug for me though. I'm not quite sure what my issue was but some chapters I flew through and others I struggled to stick with and want to finish reading.
Overall I'm happy I read this book but it wasn't my favorite by this author.
Thank you Netgalley for giving me this book for my honest opinion.

It's often painful when when we’re in the middle phase between an old belief and a new belief. It’s a season of doubt. But Brian McLaren assures us it doesn't have to be a negative time. It's part of maturing our faith.

In this book, McLaren addresses the doubt that millions of people in the U.S. and around the world experience when their faith is shifting.

McLaren starts by saying this:

“You and I don’t have to keep our doubts a secret any longer.”

He frames doubt not as a fault or failure to be ashamed of, but as an expression of our humanity, and as an opportunity for growth in faith itself.

The book is organized in three movements:

* Your Descent into Doubt
* All in Doubt
* Life After (and with) Doubt

Throughout the book, McLaren shows us that doubt isn’t a death knell to faith. Quite the opposite, it can actually be our saving grace as it shifts us more toward God and less away from shaky religion.

“The greatest threat to our moral and spiritual health wasn’t questions or doubts but rather dishonesty or pretense about our questions or doubts.”

But it isn't easy. And it isn’t always linear. McLaren describes our faith growth not as climbing a ladder or a stairway, but as climbing a tree with branches. He gives many other helpful analogies as well, including this one:

“Think of your current stage of faith as a base camp. On any given day, you might venture back a stage or forward a stage to cope with what life throws at you.”

The four stages of faith that McLaren posits are these:

* Simplicity
* Complexity
* Perplexity
* Harmony

They don’t come to us in a straight line. We may be in stage one in one area while in stage four in another area.

“Love isn’t like calculus, which can’t be taught until after one learns geometry and advanced algebra. No, love is more like music. We expose the youngest musicians to the most sublime music so that, as they learn the basics of scales, keys, tone, tempo, and timing, they know why the basics matter and what they can produce.”

And the end result we all want is love.

I recommend this book and thank NetGalley for the review copy.

In Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It, Brian D. McLaren (A New Kind of Christianity; A Generous Orthodoxy) explores the effects of doubt on faith, and how doubt can be a tool to strengthen one's faith. McLaren, long appreciated by progressive Christians, begins by talking about how threatening doubts can feel to believers, especially those from very conservative communities. As McLaren says, "It's scary to be a sinner falling into the hands of an angry God, but it can be equally scary to be a doubter falling into the hands of angry believers."

McLaren gently guides readers through the four stages of faith development that he has defined: Simplicity, Complexity, Perplexity and Harmony. Believers in the first stage, Simplicity, honor being right, and "see dissent as a danger to avoid." As doubt begins to creep in, however, believers cycle through varying mini-stages of Complexity and Perplexity, finally ending with Harmony, which seeks holistic inclusion and sees doubt as necessary.

Although McLaren writes from the Christian tradition, Faith After Doubt has appeal for people of all faiths who have ever doubted the status quo or sought a more inclusive path. His thoughtful analysis of how something as intimidating as doubt can be used for the greater good is encouraging and optimistic. Filled with personal stories about pastors and lay people who have shared their doubts with McLaren, Faith After Doubt is both insightful and anecdotal, drawing in a broad range of readers.

As a person who struggles with doubt after growing up in a fundamentalist home, this book is a balm to the soul. Brian McLaren’s books are always full of wisdom and this one is no exception. He’s a true scholar and his books always give me greater insight into the Christian life.

Thank you NetGalley, Brian McLaren, and St. Martin's publishing for sharing this eARC!

In this book, Brian McLaren presents four stages of faith after much research into psychology and human development. In part one, McLaren presents the four stages of faith (Simplicity, Complexity, Perplexity, and Harmony), and he explains that these ultimately lead to one leading a life revolving around love. In part two, McLaren explains how doubt propels individuals from one stage to the next giving examples from both his his life and his friends. In the final section of the book, McLaren shares what it looks like to have faith after doubts as individuals struggle to find a faith community and embrace hope. His ideas were easy to grasp, and any most readers would be able to easily apply these ideas to their own faith development. I also appreciated that his examples came from Christianity as well as other religions.

There's definitely a lot to think about when reading this book, and it isn't meant to be read as a novel. Instead, I'd recommend that readers really take the time to contemplate the ideas presented. Each chapter closes with a list of questions and references that were noted within the chapter. The questions would work well for group discussion or they could serve as individual journal prompts. It seems that Rachel Held Evans wrote "Searching for Sunday" to share her experience of finding faith after doubt to give readers hope, and Brian McLaren has written this book to guide others so that they may also find faith after (and with) doubt.

Too Much Faith, Not Enough Doubt. I've read McLaren for a few years and knew him to be of the more "progressive Christian" bent, so I knew what I was getting myself in for in picking up this book. But as always, he does have at least a few good points in here, making the book absolutely worthy of reading and contemplating. However, he also proof texts a fair amount, and any at all of this particular sin is enough for me to dock *any* book that utilizes the practice a star in my own personal war with the practice. (Though I *do* note that he isn't as bad as other writers in this.) The other star removal comes from the title of this review, which is really my core criticism here. As is so often in his previous books as well as so many other authors, McLaren has good points about the need for doubt and how to live in harmony... but then insists on praising cult figures on both sides of the aisle such as Greta Thurnberg and David Grossman. In encouraging evaneglicals to doubt their beliefs, he seems rather sure of his own beliefs in the religions of science and government - seemingly more comfortable worshipping these religions than the Christ he claims. Overall, much of the discussion here truly is strong. It simply needed to be applied in far more areas than McLaren was... comfortable... in doing. Recommended.

Faith After Doubt is an interesting book settled around the idea of just that.... Faith After Doubt. However, I felt it was missing something. As much as I wanted to love this book, I felt it wasn't enough to absorb myself in it.

I did love the concept though as I am sure there are many individuals out there that struggle with the same thing.... Faith After Doubt.

Faith After Doubt by Brian D. McLaren is a non-fiction title that shares a four-stage framework for deepening your faith. Throughout the book the author highlights the importance of challenging typical assumptions in faith and instead to use questions to explore your faith. The author explains why doubt can be paralyzing and then follows up with explanation on how you can change your mindset to see doubt as a growth opportunity rather than a lack of faith or an obstacle. In addition, the author extends this approach to daily life and how it is important and normal to challenge our current assumptions in all areas. I found the reflection questions and actionable items at the end of each chapter helpful to integrate this approach. Importantly, the author normalizes working with a counselor, psychologist, or other professional to discuss your doubts which is not always open in some faiths. The author's writing is easy to read and includes citations for further reading which is helpful. Overall, I enjoyed and recommend this book for those who want to explore their relationship with faith.

Many thanks to the publisher St. Martin's Essentials and Netgalley for the ARC in return for an honest review.

Faith After Doubt by Brian D. McLaren was not a book I could get into Had to quite after a couple of pages. I'm sure it will appeal to some, jut wasn't for me.

Faith has been equated with certainty, but that is its opposite. Faith is choosing to believe even though you don’t know for certain; it embraces doubt and gives it space. Certainty leads to stagnation because we know it’s in the bag. Doubt is scary because it’s out of our control and that’s why we avoid it.

Unfortunately, most of post-modern Christianity still views doubt as sin, a result of sin, or the devil’s influence. So your options are limited. From my experience, discussing it with others led to them doubting, judging, belittling, discounting, and/or shaming me.

My experience seems to mirror a lot of what McLaren discusses in “Faith After Doubt”. He gives very personal accounts about his development over time and includes others’ experiences of how they have outgrown initial faith and are looking to develop a new, more mature faith. He is honest about his own thought process, situations he faced while being a pastor, and isn’t afraid to explain how the church could better handle current crises to promote growth.

The first 3 stages of his model of faith development, Simplicity, Complexity, and Perplexity, mirror Richard Rohr’s 3 Containers from “Falling Upward”, Order, Disorder, and Reorder, adding Harmony as the final, fruitful stage of faith. He gives a lot of detail on how to manifest these changes individually and how to help others. Simplicity is the foundation, Complexity is its application, Perplexity comes with doubting aspects of faith, and then there is the peace of Harmony, which sounds like Maslow’s self-actualization at the top of his hierarchy.

Each chapter has its important points listed at the end in case you want a review, but isn’t needed because the book is an easy read. McLaren does mention some of his earlier works, but you don’t need to have read them to benefit from this book. His appendixes are very thorough and detailed if you’d like more specific detail.

I wish I could have read something like this 20 years ago. But even Brian McLaren hadn’t arrived at these conclusions then. Faith evolves; it changes over time because we change. God doesn’t change, but our understanding of him does because of our experiences, we continue to develop over time.

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Essentials for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

In my time as a practicing Christian, I’ve had some doubts about my faith and what I believe in. Sometimes, I have a hard time believing in the concept of God – especially since other religions have other gods (so which one is the true god?) and because God is someone or something you cannot see. At the same time, I have trouble with the theory of evolution. How was it that humans were created from a single cell mutating over time? That seems problematic to me. Still, if there is a God, who created God before God was created?
It is questions like these that make my head hurt from time to time. So you might say that a book such as Brian D. McLaren’s Faith After Doubt was made for me. I’m not so sure, though. The author is a (former?) evangelical Christian who works for the Center for Action and Contemplation, so the book appears to be – at least on the surface – targeted at evangelicals who are doubting their faith and want to leave thorny issues such as gay marriage behind them. That said, there’s stuff here that will appeal to Christians of all stripes but be prepared for a difficult read.

Faith After Doubt can be read over a few days, as it is short enough, but this is the sort of book that you might want to put down after a couple of chapters to think over the implications of what it’s trying to say. You might need to spend a good month with the book to suss out its nooks and crannies, and I feel that I might have to re-read the volume again later to get a handle on where it was going. Basically, the book introduces a schema of four stages that a maturing Christian will go through on the way to expressing their faith in their community. However, as McLaren notes, each stage in and of itself isn’t wholly bad or good in equal measure (which might, at first blush, be a way of saying that the book undermines itself at times).

I might not do the best job of this, but here’s what Faith After Doubt is trying to say. Essentially, most evangelical Christians are at Stage One, or Simplicity, where concepts are understood to be binary and are taught down to the Christian from an authority figure. Thus, you’re either good or evil, faithful or unfaithful and so on – so it goes around issues such as straight versus gay marriage. One is “good”, the other “sinful.” Stage Two, Complexity, is a kind of adolescence that the Christian moves into by looking for new leaders who will help augment their faith. They will start to think for themselves at the stage. Stage Three, called Perplexity, is kind of a fallow season for the Christian who goes out on their own to wrestle with their faith, leading to Step Four, or Harmony, where the Christian will view things through the prism of unconditional love and come to see that concepts such as God existing or not existing are the same.

That might be an oversimplified explanation of the main thrust of the book, and the book spends a lot of time in Stage Four and arguing for the need of a faith community to spring up and sustain Christians moving into this stage to, well, make the world a better place, it turns out. I found the book to be fascinating. I can see myself as being in Stage Two with a toe or two in Stage Three, but McLaren offers no quick fixes or How To’s in getting to Stage Four. All he says is that this is work that the individual will have to do by themselves. Fair enough, but I did feel that the book would have been strengthened by showing us what real love looks like in Stage Four for those of us who were raised in rather dysfunctional families.

Sure, McLaren throws around Bible and other quotes to illustrate what Stage Four is like, but it felt rather abstract to me. If this is something I need to work toward on my own, it might be good to have a few examples of what it is that I’m supposed to be working towards! (This is a criticism I have for the Center for Action and Contemplation at large: I’ve joined their e-mail list on the advice of my Stage Four pastor looking for spiritually nourishing content to read first thing in the morning, but I find much of the essays on the list to be rather obtuse and hard to parse for those of us without Divinity degrees.)

All in all, I’m not sure what to think about this book. For the most part, though with a few exceptions, my questions were answered. (And any questions left unanswered might have arisen from the explanations McLaren gave to the original questions I had.) I also thought that the author’s rationale was sound – though I don’t think it is concrete. After all, are there only four stages of spiritual growth? What about the Donald Trumps and Hitlers of the world? If they were moved to doubt by Christianity, why is it that they would become who they are and not progress from a Stage One to a Stage Two and so on? Thus, the book is probably not perfect and doesn’t offer the one size fits all solution to toxic Christianity that it promises to be.

However, all of that said, this is an intriguing book and one worth reading and thinking about on a deep level.
As this book seemingly points out, I don’t deny the fact that Christians need to practice the teachings of Jesus more than they probably are in their day-to-day lives by perusing social justice goals in their communities, for instance. I know I’m one of them. Whether or not, though, Faith After Doubt will resonate with you probably hinges on the fact that you have any doubts at all as a Christian. For all its seemingly imperfection, Faith After Doubt is a book that is probably best experienced in a group setting where you can talk about it. It got me using my gray matter, at least – a refreshing concept for a book about Christianity. Finally, a book that doesn’t talk down to you, but a book that talks with you. For that, Faith After Doubt is a relief.

This book was such a refreshing, honest take on faith, spirituality, belief, and what happens when those things are shaken. I really enjoyed reading this book for how it reinforced things that I have gone through, how I am moving in my own faith, and the experiences of those that have gone before me.

Such a solid read for those who are in the second half of f life, spiritually. For further on that phrasing, I refer you to Richard Rohr. I found myself nodding my head throughout the book. And an honest attempt to read this book and review it in a timely fashion, I did not stop to journal the questions at the end of each chapter. I intend to go back and do this at a later date and I think it would be invaluable to the experience of this book. Thanks to NetGalley for a complimentary copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

Brian McLaren’s “Faith After Doubt” is one of the best books out there on the subject of faith and doubt. For Christians who feel like they are walking on a waterbed rather than solid ground, Brian offers a deeply wise, pastoral, and dare I say even clinical, roadmap for a path toward healing and integration. For those who are dechurched, done, ex-vangelical, and even faithfully Christian, this book will be vital for their journey!

How frustrating is it to be told by all the different sources the things you must do to be successful in life? This book definitely does NOT do that. It instead takes an empathetic approach and gives bite size approaches and allows you to have kindness and patience with yourself when dealing with life. This is so necessary for everyone to read in life. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I believe this may be a timely book for many people; it was for me. I believe we all have doubts about our faith at times. But rather than try so hard to dismiss them., maybe we should examine our doubts and examine them. Faith is a journey, and doubt may be part of that journey for many of us. An informative and interesting book.

I was raised in a cult; finally left and spent a few years in a great non-denominational church. I got disillusioned working and volunteering there, though. Also, I began to realize that I really needed a church that was affirming of all people regardless of sexual orientation. Needless to say, this is very hard to find in the Christian community. So for the last couple of years I've been drifting, angry at times, and lonely - always lonely. Years ago I read "Stages of Faith" by James Fowler on the recommendation of my therapist. I liked it but it was pretty heavy and dense. This book by Brian McLaren is the book I have needed, explaining in perfect detail why some people (my cult family and friends) are so stuck in "we're right, you're wrong", and why all the great folks at the non-denominational church were not enough to sustain me. I've been stuck in McLaren's "stage 3", pretty disillusioned. I wish he had more hope to give in regards to community in late stage 3 and 4, as we realize that organized church is not likely to meet our needs. I mean, I'm glad I don't have to give up on love and my connection with God - and I do attend conferences like Evolving Faith, which help. But for someone who loved a lot about the church experience, it's kind of sad to think that I might not ever find that again. This is such a great, thought-provoking book and hopefully all the people who have given up on "organized religion" will find it.

This would be a great book for those who grew up in conservative or fundamentalist religious environments. The author tells you that it's okay to have doubts - those doubts are a healthy sign of spiritual growth and emerging maturity.

I love Brian McLaren's books. This one has a lot to unpack. I was most intrigued by a short section in which he talks about clergy who have subconsciously sabotaged their careers when struggling with ministry burnout or spiritual crisis. He could have written a whole book about this (and I hope he will at some point).

Most of this book focuses on McLaren's 4 point stages of faith theory. I think it works for those who works for those who grew up in fundamentalist religions. Personally, I'm going to stick with James Fowler's stages of faith. The big aspect of faith that McLaren misses in his theory is the mystical wonder and acceptance of God that small children experience. He clearly appreciates the mystics in the church, but I'm not sure his stages of faith allow for them in his structure.

Towards the end of the book, McLaren touches on where the Christian faith and the church is going. I think he's got some insightful ideas on this topic, but I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to these questions for sure yet. Overall, this was a great book and highly recommended.