I recently wrote about the change the evangelical* church will need to embrace if its
going to address its rapid decline in the west and maximise the opportunities presented by this unique cultural moment.
Perhaps the most significant change relates to the church’s message – the gospel.
I pointed out that we’ve mistakenly assumed that our methods need to change but that our message doesn’t.
It’s a refrain we hear often. “The message stays the same!” we assure ourselves. “It’s the methods that must change”.
However, I think it’s precisely the message that is the problem.
We’ve been reinventing our methods for decades and have never had more culturally relevant forms of ministry, but our message is not connecting and for good reason.
The current evangelical version of the gospel is a relatively recent caricature of the gospel preached by the first followers of Jesus and the one we find in scripture.
So what is wrong with the evangelical gospel?
The problem with the current version of the gospel would probably take a series of books to explain fully, but I will attempt to summarise my thoughts briefly as follows:
1. It is far too anthropocentric and individualistic.
By that, I mean it makes humanity the centre of the story, not Jesus.
The gospel may be good news for us, but it’s not good news about us.
The gospel is the good news about what God has done in and through the person of Jesus.
The gospel is not even good news about how we get saved. It’s good news about how Jesus becomes King.
In other words, it is His story, not our story.
That good news has implications for all humanity, but it also has significant implications for the entire cosmos and all creation.
It’s good news for sinners but also good news for the poor (Luke 6:20-21).
It’s good news for people but also good news for the planet (Romans 8:18-25).
While people have a special place in the heart of God, they do not have an exclusive place.
His love and compassion are over “all He has made” (Psalm 145:9), and His plan of redemption includes “all creation” (Colossians 1:13-15).
The evangelical version of the gospel message is too narrow in its scope and we have made it all about us.
2. It reduces sin to nothing more than personal moral failure.
While personal moral failure is a fruit of sin (and therefore a valid aspect of sin), it isn’t the root of sin or the complete biblical notion of it.
Sin is best understood as broken relationship, not broken rules, meaning it is fundamentally relational, not moral.
The truth is that sin is a complex idea in scripture and requires some elaboration and explanation to fully understand it.
Recently a good friend of mine, Allen Brown, wrote an insightful piece about why sin isn’t “missing the mark”, a common misconception about the nature of sin, and you can read more about my thoughts on the full scope and scale of sin here.
The point is that sin has personal, cultural, social, institutional, and national dimensions to it and simplifying it down to being nothing more than personal, moral guilt completely misses the mark (excuse the pun).
3. It reduces salvation to a one-way ticket to heaven.
While the New Testament is full of hope for our future beyond the grave, the biblical concept of salvation cannot be limited to an eternal disembodied existence beyond this life.
Salvation includes wholeness, healing, peace, liberation, restoration, forgiveness, and reconciliation, experienced both in this life and the next.
Salvation will find ultimate expression and fulfilment in the New Creation but it starts here and now.
Salvation is wonderfully expressed in the all-encompassing Hebrew concepts of Shalom (peace and wholeness) and Tikkun Olam (healing the world).
In other words, it has cosmological and communal dimensions as well as personal and individual ones and those dimensions include our present reality.
Reducing salvation to being nothing more than a golden ticket to the chocolate factory in the sky is just bad theology.
4. It assumes that “souls” are all God cares about.
I am using the word “soul” here, to refer to what many consider to be the immaterial aspects of human nature that are temporarily “housed” in the body.
The evangelical gospel holds up a hope that prioritises a disembodied spiritual existence in an other-worldly place called “heaven” and sees our bodies as a temporal, carnal, and unredeemable limitation.
The truth is, however, that the gospel is not just good news for all people. It’s good news for the whole person.
God cares deeply about our bodies and our souls precisely because they are so interdependent. In fact, it’s hard to know where one starts and the other finishes.
Theological anthropology is a complex area of study, and defining the nature of a human being is more challenging than you might think (we truly are fearfully and wonderfully made).
Still, It’s probably better to think of humans as being souls, rather than having souls.
By that I mean, we are whole beings, embodied souls and ensouled bodies, who will one day have a corporeal existence in the life after this one (1 Corinthians 15).
That means God plans to redeem and restore every aspect of our lives as humans, making every part of who we are valuable to God right now.
The gospel is, therefore, good news for every aspect of human experience.
The matter of what happens immediately after death is one of those great mysteries of life.
Whether an immaterial “soul” is consciously present with God immediately following the death of a body has long been theologically debated.
Personally, I think there is enough in the New Testament to suggest the existence of a conscious immaterial self prior to the resurrection of our physical bodies and the beginning of the New Creation, but I am not going to die on a hill for it.
I am happy to accept that whatever life after death may look like, when we die we are in the hands and care of God. Or as Paul put it, “absent from the body, present with the Lord”. (2 Corinthians 5:8).
My main point, however, is that God doesn’t just care about our immaterial selves. He cares about every aspect of who and what we are as human beings.
5. It defines faith merely as belief.
While belief (mental assent or intellectual agreement with propositional truths) is integral to faith, it is not the whole.
In a biblical sense, faith is best defined as “belief that leads to trust that leads to allegiance or faithfulness” (my definition).
To be true to the full semantic range of meaning associated with the Greek and Hebrew words used for faith in both the Old and New Testaments, we must hold all three concepts together.
The problem with assuming belief is the complete definition of faith is that our beliefs can be passive (James 2:14-24), and our beliefs can be wrong (how many things did you believe to be right or true about God and life only to discover they were incorrect or at least incomplete?).
Faith is best understood as a relational trust resulting in loyalty, which of course, requires some level of belief.
After all, you aren’t going to trust a God you don’t believe is there or one you don’t believe is good.
And you certainly aren’t going to pledge your loyalty to a God you don’t think you can trust.
So you can see how these three elements work together.
Belief might be the starting point of faith, but it’s not the end of it.
Belief must lead to trust, and the ultimate form of trust is allegiance (or loyalty).
6. It relies too heavily on the threat of hell.
I grew up as a conservative evangelical and have vivid childhood memories of the various portrayals of hell that were used to frighten us into loving and serving God.
The idea of unending torment in a lake of fire is about as terrifying a fate as one can imagine.
Understandably, some parts of the church have used this idea down through the ages to forcibly “persuade” people to convert and comply.
The message essentially goes something like this: “Bad news! You face the worst possible prospect imaginable – an eternity of irreversible and unrelenting conscious torment in a lake of fire. But, the good news is, Jesus died for your sins (think “moral failings”), so all you have to do is give mental assent to these propositional ideas about who Jesus is and why Jesus died on the cross for you, pray this short 10-line “sinner’s prayer”, and bingo! You’re in! You’ll avoid that terrible fate and secure your spot in heaven after you die.”
It’s the perfect marketing strategy, isn’t it? The ultimate problem followed up quickly and enthusiastically with the simplest possible solution. Who wouldn’t sign up for that?
Well, lots of people, apparently.
That’s because most people these days are thoughtful, rational, intelligent human beings who don’t like being manipulated and don’t like having the wool pulled over their eyes.
They instinctively sense that something is off with this type of presentation, and I’m willing to bet that deep down, you do too.
The problem, however, is that our hellish notions of the afterlife are largely syncretistic, the combined product of Greek mythology (Hades and Tartarus), early Jewish conceptions of Sheol, and medieval depictions of the afterlife that often employ generous amounts of artistic license (e.g., Dante’s Inferno).
When coupled with a particular hermeneutical approach to biblical passages that seem to support the idea of eternal, conscious torment (ECT) for the damned, it’s not hard to see how and why the evangelical church has embraced such an idea.
However, anyone who has done any serious study on the subject of Christian perspectives on the afterlife will readily acknowledge that there are a number of legitimate possibilities, with ECT being only one of them.
Of course, a never-ending, fiery judgement may await on the other side of this life, but, personally, I think it’s highly improbable.
I don’t have time here to elaborate on why I think this is the case, but if you’re interested in exploring the subject in more detail I recommend you start here.
In any event, threatening people to love you or be eternally banished to everlasting torment is hardly a strategy I imagine God would use.
It sounds more like something an insecure, controlling, manipulative, corrupted human institution would do.
At the end of the day, we follow Jesus because He is Lord and because He is lovely.
We follow Jesus because He is the clearest, most compelling revelation of God the world has ever seen.
We follow Jesus, not to escape hell or even to gain heaven, but to know God, whom to know is life abundant and eternal.
We follow Jesus because He has been given all authority in heaven and on earth and there is no-one else as deserving of our love and allegiance.
7. It sacramentalises the “sinner’s prayer”.
Jesus gave us two sacraments: communion and believer’s baptism in water.
These precious and significant experiences mark the beginning of devotion to Jesus (baptism) and continually remind us of the humility and obedience of our Lord demonstrated in His willingness to give His life for us and call us to follow His example into a cruciform life (communion).
However, in evangelicalism (particularly the Pentecostal and Charismatic kind), we have added a third sacrament – the sinner’s prayer.
When and where the practice began is somewhat disputed (depending on who gets given credit for coming up with it), but it’s fair to say that it’s a recent development. It has only been practised in Protestant circles for the past 150 years or so.
The idea is that people can pray a short prayer, usually at the end of the sermon or some other presentation of the gospel, acknowledging their sin (usually defined as personal guilt for their individual immorality) and their need for salvation, and doing so ushers them decisively into the Kingdom of God.
They go from being “unsaved” to “saved” at that moment. The prayer essentially seals the deal.
I think this whole approach is a gross oversimplification of the process of coming to faith in Jesus and is seriously misleading.
For a long time I have felt very uncomfortable about the practice.
I don’t doubt that many people have prayed that prayer with sincerity and it has had spiritual significance for them, but to assume that everyone who prays the prayer is automatically a Christian (follower of Jesus, saved, born-again, etc.) is naive and irresponsible.
Now, I am not for a moment suggesting we shouldn’t be calling people to follow Jesus or that we shouldn’t be ready and willing to pray with people who are reaching out to God. I believe wholeheartedly in the value of prayer.
All I am saying is that the “sinner’s prayer” is not some kind of sacramental imperative and it certainly isn’t a prerequisite for “receiving salvation”.
Too many evangelicals, and I stress not all of them, have made an unnecessary priority out of “the decision moment” and all the “follow up” that goes with it.
8. It falsely offers people the option to receive Jesus as “Saviour” or “Lord”.
I have found it fascinating that people assume you can have one without the other.
Jesus is often presented as “Saviour” and received as such (by praying the sinner’s prayer), but the call to receive Him as “Lord” is then added on as an extra option for the seriously committed.
It’s almost as though receiving Jesus as Saviour makes you a convert but receiving Jesus as Lord makes you a disciple, as if those two things were somehow different.
I recently saw a quote attributed to Billy Graham: “Salvation is free, but discipleship will cost you everything”.
Whether or not he actually said it is beside the point. It’s the fragmented thinking represented by this statement that is the problem.
The truth is you cannot have Jesus as “Saviour” and not have Him as “Lord”.
If He isn’t “Lord”, He isn’t “Saviour”. Our salvation is inextricably linked to His lordship.
We are saved only in recognising and receiving Jesus as Lord (Romans 10:8-10).
That means what we should be calling people to is not a passive belief in some ideas about God and Jesus but rather submission and surrender to Jesus as God’s designated ruler of the cosmos.
Recognising Jesus as Lord and leader implies more than just “thinking the right thoughts about God” or praying a particular prayer.
It implies following Jesus, which means forming our lives around the wisdom of His way, revealed in His teaching and His example.
This is the essence of what discipleship is. In doing so, we come under His authority and are reconciled to our Source, Creator, and Heavenly Father.
9. It creates a false sense of security about who is “in” and “out”.
Evangelical Christianity is tainted with a culture of exclusivity we can’t deny.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time in evangelical circles knows that a deeply embedded “us and them” thinking permeates the various forms of the broader movement.
The assumption is that if you believe what we believe, behave how we behave, and worship the way we worship, you are in, and everyone else is out.
Every form of evangelicalism has this underlying current running through the ethos that shapes it.
There seems to be an obsession with defining who is “in” and who is “out” based on degrees of conformity to specific criteria – a statement of faith, a creed, a set of core values, or a mission statement.
Building fences, defining boundaries, and drawing lines in the sand are favourite pastimes of evangelicals.
The truth is only the Lord knows those who are His (2 Timothy 2:19).
Discerning the “wheat from the tares” (Matthew 13:36-43), and trying to remove the latter, is not our job.
“Separating the sheep from the goats” (Matthew 25:31-46) is above our pay grade.
We are called to love everyone, faithfully proclaim the gospel’s good news of what God has done in and through Jesus, and disciple those who choose to become followers of Jesus.
10. It emphasises the cross at the expense of the Resurrection.
I am deeply grateful for the cross and for the death that Jesus was willing to embrace on it.
I don’t for a moment pretend to fully grasp the magnitude and mystery of what happened that day at Calvary.
The death of Jesus is deeply significant and an essential part of God’s redemptive work in the world, but precisely what happened on the cross and why has been the source of much debate since the day it happened.
Theologians have developed various theories in every age (Penal Substitutionary Atonement, Christus Victor, Moral Influence, Ransom, Governmental, Scapegoat, etc.). Still, none of these alone captures the full import of what took place on the cross.
Personally I’m inclined to think that each one of these metaphors captures something important about the death of Jesus and they needn’t be antithetical to one another. They can and should be synthesised and brought together.
So I’m comfortable embracing the uncertainty and ambiguity around the Atonement. Whatever God facilitated through the death of Jesus, it was life to me; for that, I will be eternally thankful.
In evangelicalism, however, the cross has become so prominent and central that it has almost eclipsed the resurrection.
More sermons are preached on the cross than on the resurrection (when was the last time you heard a sermon on the resurrection, other than Easter Sunday?).
However, without the resurrection, the cross is pointless and powerless.
Paul makes this fact abundantly clear in 1 Corinthians 15:17 – “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.”
Whatever happened at the cross, without the resurrection, it was futile.
The resurrection is, therefore, the defining moment in God’s redemptive work in the world.
It was the moment in history that changed everything.
I’m not saying this to diminish the cross in any way. I simply want to point out that the resurrection is as, if not more important, than the cross in fulfilling the redeeming work of God through Christ in the world.
So, we need to preach and teach both.
11. It doesn’t correspond to the gospel preached by the first-century church.
Other authors far more articulate and qualified than me (Scott McKnight, N.T. Wright, James Dunn, to name a few) have written extensively about the need to recover the apostles’ gospel as recorded in Acts, particularly in the epistles.
They highlight that the gospel message we find there differs significantly from the gospel preached by many in the evangelical church today.
Recovering this gospel which centres on the person of Jesus, His resurrection as the defining moment in God’s redemptive work in the world, and His appointment to the place of highest authority in heaven and on earth will be essential to realigning our mission and recovering our purpose.
So what is the gospel?
I’ve been asked numerous times to clarify the essence of the gospel message, at least in my opinion.
If I were to sum it up as simply and succinctly as I can, I would say,
“The gospel is the good news that Jesus is alive and Jesus is Lord!”
That’s it. That’s the message we are called to proclaim.
Without these two foundational truths, there is no gospel. There is no hope and there is no salvation.
Of course, the implications of these two truths need to be explained and expounded upon, but the essence of the gospel is the good news that God raised Jesus from the dead and appointed Him to the highest place of authority in heaven and on earth.
Jesus is alive!
Death has been defeated. The ultimate enemy of humanity has been overcome. The resurrection reverses the curse of sin and death and we have the hope of eternal life.
Death might still have the power to take us, but it no longer has the ability to keep us.
Death must give us up to the resurrection life that becomes ours through Jesus’ triumph.
Jesus is Lord!
Earth has a new King!
The world has a new leader, and Jesus is precisely the kind of leader the world has been waiting for.
He is kind, just, merciful, wise, gracious, powerful, faithful, and generous, and He has begun restoring God’s rule and reign over the earth.
One day He will set it right, once and for all, but His work has already begun, and we are called to follow Him and serve as His fellow workers.
Who wouldn’t want to follow a leader like that in service of a mission like that?
Paul, the apostle, endeavoured to summarise his understanding of the gospel message halfway through his doctrinal treatise in the book of Romans:
This is the message of faith we proclaim: If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. – Romans 10:8-10 (NIV)
The fact that Jesus is alive and Jesus is Lord means that we all can be reconciled to God the Father through Him.
The curse of humanity’s rebellion (Genesis 3) has been broken.
We have been forgiven. Restored relationship with our Creator is now possible.
Follow King Jesus as Lord and Leader, and He will bring us safely back to God.
A Final Thought
I sense that the broader evangelical church is already showing signs of reform around some of the above-mentioned issues.
There seems to be, at least at an intuitive level, a recognition that something isn’t quite right, and we really do need to rethink some of the concepts and practices that have shaped evangelical church life for the last few decades.
More formally, prominent thinkers and authors from various parts of the movement (like Tim Keller, David Gushee, Con Campbell just to name a few), have been critiquing the movement and calling for repentance and reformation.
Hopefully, the ideas expressed here will help move the conversation forward, at the very least, by providing some food for thought.
Helen Healy
Very interesting and thought provoking Tim.
Thank you !
Dave
The highlight of my first day at Bible College. Thanks Tim