Author and activist Brian D. McLaren craves a Christian faith with a bit of substance.

I have been a committed Christian since my teenage years, and soon I’ll celebrate my 50th birthday. I just finished a 24-year tenure as a church planter and pastor. And I’m more excited about my faith than ever. I feel that my understanding of what it means to be a Christian is finally-after all these years-beginning to mature.

You may be thinking that I’m alone. Many people who attend church, along with many more who have dropped out either physically or mentally, share an unexpressed feeling that “there must be more to Christianity than I’ve yet seen. Is this all there is?”

A friend of mine describes the problem as “doughnut Christianity”-that our faith tells us about the origin of life “in the beginning” and the destiny of life after death, but there’s a big hole in the middle: What about life itself? What does being a Christian mean for our daily lives, not just as individuals, but also as societies and civilizations that share this planet? How does the Christian gospel integrate with economics, politics, art, homemaking, parenting, the morning paper and the evening news?

I remember a few years ago reading some books by Latin American theologian C. Rene Padilla. In his writings, he articulates an alternative to doughnut Christianity that he calls “integral mission,” or in Spanish, mision integral.

Mission integral has a certain feel to it in Spanish that is hard to convey in English. Across Latin America, the term pan integral is well known: brown, substantial, whole wheat bread. Padilla’s mission is integral in the sense that the bakers haven’t bleached out the gospel’s social fibre and historical substance to create a light, fluffy, white-bread faith. Mission integral is a richly textured faith, rooted in Jesus’ message of the Kingdom of God. As a result, it is none of the following:

Dualistic: speaking of saving souls while ignoring bodies;
Anti-creation: understanding salvation as the abandonment of creation, rather than its redemption;
Individualistic/Anti-social: believing that people are saved as individuals, not as societies;
Escapist: advocating a “left-behind” theology that wants to escape creation for Heaven, rather than seeking to welcome God’s will be done on Earth “as in Heaven,” as the Lord’s Prayer states;
Elitist: privileging the “righteous” at the expense of “the sinners,” instead of seeking to favour the poor, the outcasts, the sick, the children and the marginalized.

As a white, middle-class Christian, perhaps it’s surprising that my faith started making sense when I began to listen to my brothers and sisters of colour, many of them from poor countries in the global south-starting with people like Padilla and Samuel Escobar from Latin America. Integral mission is also what courageous leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Desmond Tutu have preached and lived. It’s what Canadian First Nations leaders like Terry LeBlanc and Ray Aldred are pointing to, along with their colleagues in the United States, Richard Twiss and Randy Woodley. Of course, there are many others preaching it too-like Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis, Rose Berger and Becky Garrison.

It’s time, they’re telling us, to put white-bread Christianity back on the shelf and to nourish ourselves, instead, on the whole- wheat Christianity of integral mission.

If your faith seems lightweight and of low substance, maybe this is what you’re looking for, too. It’s not that you need to change religions; it’s that you need to rediscover a more substantial version of the religion you’ve followed all along. This fresh and wholesome understanding of your faith will help you integrate belief in a good, just and loving God with your professional life, your political life, your economic life, your community life and so much more. And even better-it will motivate you to get involved in our world in ways that make a real difference.

Brian D. McLaren’s new book, The Secret Message of Jesus (W. Publishing), explores the theme of the Kingdom of God. This article first appeared in World Vision’s Childview magazine and is reprinted here courtesy of World Vision Canada.