Is Our Gospel Too Small?

The truncated gospel versus the holistic gospel, Part 1.

Many pastors, including myself, were trained in seminary that we had to “preach the gospel.” What was it we were to preach? That Jesus Christ died on the cross to save you from sin and give you the hope of heaven. We were taught that this is the simple gospel, the “good news” for each individual. No matter whatever else we preached, we had to boil it all back down to sin and salvation.

But now that I’ve been in ministry for over three decades, I have come to the conclusion that a truncated gospel does as much harm as good. We need to jettison it as something that was developed for a certain need for a certain time but has long outlasted its usefulness because of all the unintended consequences it has wrought.

The Medium is the Message

Let’s go back in history. Imagine yourself on the American frontier in the late 1700s or early 1800s. A circuit rider would come into town and set up his tent. Inside, people would gather to hear a preacher fervently and emotionally proclaim the simple gospel:

“You are a Sinner. Christ died for your sins. Repent of your sins and come to the altar and you will be saved! You will have eternal life in heaven!”

Many on the frontier already knew that they were sinners, and they knew they needed to get right with God. They would indeed go forward and get saved. Good thing, too!

And then the itinerant preacher would pack up and move on to the next town. These preachers didn’t stay and catechize these new converts. They didn’t live among the people and model the Christian life. They did not have the time to talk about the fullness of the gospel and how it impacts every aspect of life. It was, get in – get out. And while there, get as many declarations of faith as you can in that short time.

So, the medium became the message. Since the only thing demonstrated by the preacher is that we must proclaim to people that Jesus died for their sins so that they can go to heaven, that became the sum total of the gospel. Ministry success was measured simply by the number of personal decisions for Christ, not by how many of those converts were actual disciples of Jesus.

As a result, the American church became increasingly shallow, not understanding the implications of the gospel to every aspect of life, including education, arts, government, family, business, media, leisure, etc. We have had generations of Christians believing in a false sacred-secular dualism (which we will explore in a future post), a split vision that separates life into two distinct categories:

• That which has spiritual value (church, prayer, Bible study, evangelism), and
• Everything else, having little or no value.

Evangelism that preaches this simple gospel (“you’re a sinner in need of a savior”) probably doesn’t have traction with a vast number of young people in the 21st Century, who (unlike those people in the 19th and 20th Centuries) are ignorant of the Bible. They are in need of plausibility structures for believing the claims of Jesus through a lot of pre-evangelism which connects Jesus to all aspects of life (a topic we will explore in yet another future post).

Evangelism Beyond Creating More Evangelists

Because of this simple proclamation of the gospel that gets its cues from preachers telling us that the only thing that matters is getting people out of hell and into heaven, God’s mission in the world got reduced to proclaiming this simple evangelistic message. The more efficiently we can get people to believe in Jesus the better.

Traveling crusades continued throughout the 20th century, many churches modeled themselves accordingly by gearing themselves at only targeting new conversions, and parachurch ministries (like campus outreaches) made evangelism their only reason for being.

The Great Commission of Matthew 28 was reinterpreted from the command to “make disciples” to simply “make converts.” Many evangelical ministries shaped themselves around making converts so that they can make more converts.

Paul Marshall wrote,

“Sometimes it seems that our evangelism is calling people to join an army that consists of nothing but recruiting officers – people who call other people to join the army. But people should be recruited into the army that is the church in order to carry out a task beyond mere recruitment.

“Every Christian is called to be an evangelist, to share the gospel. But we are also called to the scriptures to serve a new master, to become part of a new humanity, a new race, a new nation.

A new life expresses itself throughout every part of God’s world. Evangelism brings people into an expectation of the reconciliation of the world to God. It is an invitation to live in a new creation.” (Heaven is Not My Home: Living in the Now of God’s Creation, p. 208-9)

Certainly, the Great Commission to “make disciples” includes making new converts, but it also includes “teaching them to obey everything Jesus has commanded.” With the focus merely on the “simple gospel,” other things, like our embracing a biblical worldview, our yielding to King Jesus as the Lord of all things, or our doing our everyday work as a means of participating in the mission of God to bring flourishing to others, were seen as secondary at best and superfluous at worst.

To Know Our Mission and Message, We Must Know God’s Mission

Jesus was sent to do nothing other than the mission of God in the world. Now we Christians are sent to continue to participate in God’s mission in the world. In his book exploring the mission of God’s people, Christopher Wright makes this observation:

“We have to go one step further back and ask, Whose mission is it anyway? And of course, the answer to that has to be—it is the mission of God. God himself has a mission. God has a purpose and goal for his whole creation…All our mission flows from the prior mission of God.” (The Mission of God’s People, p. 24.)

There needs to be a more comprehensive and multi-faceted definition of the mission of God’s people than merely evangelism, as important as that is.

According to Christopher Wright, the mission of God is this:

“The story of how God in his sovereign love has purposed to bring the sinful world of his fallen creation to the redeemed world of his new creation… It is a vast, comprehensive project of cosmic salvation.” (The Mission of God’s People, p. 46.)

Cosmic salvation, because everything matters! God wants life to be as he always intended it.

Wright goes on to explain:

“The Bible presents itself to us fundamentally as a narrative at one level, but a grand metanarrative at another. It begins with the God of purpose in creation; moves on to the conflict and problem generated by human rebellion against that purpose; spends most of its narrative journey in the story of God’s redemptive purposes being worked out on the stage of human history; finishes beyond the horizon of its own history with the eschatological hope of a new creation. This has often been presented as a four-point narrative: creation, fall, redemption, and future hope.” (The Mission of God, pp. 63-64).

A Two-Part Gospel Story vs the Full Gospel Story

In my book, Reintegrate Your Vocation with God’s Mission, I frame each chapter based on this Four-Part Gospel Story that Christopher Wright described above.

Instead of a simple two-part gospel story (1. Sin, 2. Salvation), the gospel must tell the full story (1. Creation, 2. Fall, 3. Redemption, 4. Consummation).

This isn’t a novel way to see the gospel; I certainly didn’t come up with it. In fact, I’m indebted to CCO (Coalition for Christian Outreach) and our annual Jubilee Conference for helping me understand it. I’m grateful that Byron Borger introduced me to books by Abraham Kuyper, Calvin Seerveld, Albert Wolters, Michael Whitmer, Richard Middleton, Andy Crouch, and Michael Goheen.

My doctoral dissertation explored how this full-formed theology of mission (as defined above) intersects with a deep theology of vocation. I read 143 books and articles for my 215-page dissertation. I say this not to brag (well, maybe a little bit… that was a lot of work!), but to make the point that this is not a minority view of understanding the gospel. Many have been saying that the “simple” evangelistic gospel is inadequate.

Answering the Basic Questions We All Face

J. Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh write,

”What is a faith commitment? It is the way we answer four basic questions facing everyone. (1) Who am I? Or, what is the nature, task, and purpose of human beings? (2) Where am I? Or, what is the nature of the world and universe I live in? (3) What’s wrong? Or, what is the basic problem or obstacle that keeps me from attaining fulfillment? In other words, how do I understand evil? And (4) What is the remedy? Or, how is it possible to overcome this hindrance to my fulfillment? In other words, how do I find salvation?” (The Transforming Vision, p. 35).

Bluntly, the answers to these questions with the simple, two-chapter gospel, can be extremely different from considering them in light of the four-chapter gospel.

Two-Chapter Gospel:

• Who am I? I have been created to be in loving relationship with God and to enjoy fullness of life with Him.
• Where am I? This world is fallen and destined for destruction. I am meant for eternal life with God in Heaven. This is not my home.
• What’s wrong? I have sinned and fall short of God’s perfect standard. I am destined to die and burn for eternity in Hell.
• What is the remedy? Jesus died for me to pay the penalty for my sin. I must receive Jesus Christ as my savior.

Notice that none of this is heresy (though some Christians might have theological quibbles with some of it). Essentially, the two-part gospel of Sin/Salvation is not a false gospel.

But it is a truncated gospel. A better gospel, a gospel that explains all of life, tells the full story.

Four-Chapter Gospel:

• Who am I? I am a member of the human race, a creature among many but made in the image of the triune God and called to represent God, stewarding what God has made through my work.
• Where am I? This is my Father’s world, the creation he deemed “very good,” that he loves and wants to see flourish in every way.
• What’s wrong? All of creation is suffering under curse because we humans rebel against God’s design for our calling to represent God. We are ravaged by our bondage to sin and are now both the perpetrators and the victims of evil rather than good. This is not how it’s supposed to be.
• What is the remedy? God, in his sovereign love, has purposed to redeem sinful humanity and bring the entirety of the fallen creation into the restored world of his new creation. Jesus Christ died and was resurrected to bring God’s kingdom on earth, to initiate the new creation, where every aspect of life is abundant and flourishing again. Jesus will return in the future to consummate God’s cosmic redemption.

Our gospel proclamation must not be too small.

We should be inviting people into this huge four-part story of restoration. We should ask them to yield to King Jesus  so that they can participate in God’s redemption of every aspect of life on earth.

Feature Image by Akshar Dave� on Unsplash