The songs (for individual download:) Sailing Out On Life Becoming Depersonalization Blues I Wonder How You Love Me Learning How To Love Every Step I Take Publican And Pharisee Simple Things Mary And Martha Immanuel I Believe In Him Psalm 95 Or you can download the entire album at once

Brian McLaren
Learning How to Love (1978)

A little while back, the Emergent leader Brian McLaren wrote a piece entitled "An Open Letter to Worship Songwriters" (included here with "An Unauthorised Postscript" by John Mortensen.) There he opens with the following:

FOR THE LAST FEW YEARS, I have been privileged to be “on the road” a lot, speaking mostly with young emerging leaders. I suppose I was asked to speak to them because of some over-forty quota system, and also because many emerging leaders are grappling with the issue of postmodernity, an issue I lost most of my hair grappling with myself—and about which I have written some books...One of the side benefits of travel—as a musician myself, I have truly enjoyed hearing dozens of worship bands and worship leaders, and spending literally hours at almost every event being led in worship.

There's no doubt about the hair loss, and it's interesting that one of the main testaments to that is the album cover to the left (compare it with his photo in the open letter.) But there's no doubt about the musician either.

Learning How to Love is a very nice piece of Christian folk, with above average guitar work and reasonable vocals. In a Fisherfolk era when guitars were strummed and "praise and worship" music was frequently simplistic, McLaren does a nice job with folk that you can "sink your teeth into." Whether is meets the criteria he sets forth in his open letter is something we'll leave up to you.

It's interesting to note that, for all the subsequent fame he's achieved, McLaren has never commercially reissued this album. Unlike similar music from contemporary Wayne Monbleau, it is left to sites like this to disseminate the early music of an individual whose main claim to fame comes from other sources.

In his open letter, he also states the following:

In the modern world, theology was done by scholars, and was expressed in books and lectures. In the postmodern world, many of us believe that the theologians will have to leave the library more often and mix with the rest of us. And the best of them will join hands and hearts with the poets, musicians, filmmakers, actors, architects, interior and landscape designers, dancers, sculptors, painters, novelists, photographers, web designers, and every other artistic brother and sister possible…not only to communicate a postmodern, Christian theology…but also to discern it, discover it. Because one major shift of this transition is the shift from left-brain to whole-brain, from reductionistic, analytic rationalism to a broader theological holism—a theology that works in mind and heart, understanding and imagination, proposition and image, clarity and mystery, explanation and narrative, exposition and artistic expression.

Would McLaren have achieved the notoriety he has if he had taken his own advice to its logical conclusion up front and pursued musical expression as his primary vehicle? We'll never know, but this album gives some intriguing evidence that this path would have been an interesting one.