Jesus' gospel message of the kingdom of God is itself a blue parakeet for many today. In fact, many have tamed Jesus' blue parakeet message of the kingdom and this chapter may well provide a reason why some feel this way. Encountering Jesus' kingdom gospel not only makes us think, but it makes us think we just might have gotten lots of things wrong. It makes us rethink how we are reading the Bible. It makes us think about what the gospel itself is. It also makes us back up to the elements of the Story - creation, cracked Eikons, covenant community, Christ, and consummation - and see which of these elements are the focus of Jesus' own preaching. In this chapter we will examine how Luke tells the Story and we will see that his focus is squarely on two elements, Christ and covenant community. Some are surprised by what they see when they read Luke's Gospel.
I grew up on a gospel that was neat and trim; it was clear and simple. The more I read the Bible the more convinced I became, though, that something was wrong on center court. When some folks read the Bible, they only want to see creation, cracked Eikons, Christ and the consummation (heaven).
The gospel that deconstructs church
Many readers of the Bible read the whole Bible through the lens of the gospel they believe and this is what that gospel looks like:
God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
But you have a sin problem that separates you from God.
The good news is that Jesus came to die for your sins.
If you accept Jesus' death, you can be reconnected to God.
Those who are reconnected to God will live in heaven with God.
Every line of that statement is more or less true. It is the sequencing of those lines, the "story" of that gospel if you will, that concerns me and that turns Jesus' message of the kingdom into a blue parakeet. And it is not only the sequencing, it is the omitting of major themes in the Bible that concerns me. What most shocks the one who reads the Bible as Story, where the focus is overwhelmingly on God forming a covenant community, is that this outline of the gospel above does two things: it eliminates community and it turns the entire gospel into a "me and God" or "God and me" gospel. Who needs a church if this is the gospel? (Answer: no one.) What becomes of the church for this gospel? (Answer: an organization for those who want to do that sort of thing.) While every line in this gospel is more or less true, what concerns many of us today is that this gospel makes the church unimportant.
I believe this gospel can deconstruct, is deconstructing, and will deconstruct the church if we don't change it now. Our churches are filled with Christians who don't give a rip about church life and we have a young generation who, in some cases, care so much about the Church they can't attend a local church because too many local churches are shaped too much by the gospel I outlined above. To be truthful, the gospel above is a distortion of Romans. More and more of us, because we are reading the Bible as Story, are seeing the centrality of the church in God's plan and the gospel being preached too often is out of touch with the Bible's Story.
Yes, Jesus said something like every one of those lines though he never packaged them quite like that. (Nor did Paul in Romans, to be honest.) Is this the gospel? Yes, this gospel is right. The problem is that it isn't right enough. I can give a bundle of problems with this packaging of the gospel, but it all comes down to one big problem: this gospel above isn't the Bible's Story. It is like taking five stars from the sky, knocking them out of their orbits and solar location, and lining them up like ducks in a row and then saying, "Here's our starry sky!" The only way to understand stars is to learn their location and their history and their connections and let each star shine in its place in the sky - and the only way to read the Bible is is from front to back. It doesn't make sense if we don't read the whole thing and to see how each chapter relates to the whole Story. Once we do we come to terms with the gospel that emerges from the Bible's Story.
If reading the Bible as Story teaches us anything, and we need to emphasize this one more time, it teaches us that God's work in this world is to form communities that visibly demonstrate the power of God at work in this world.
The gospel that deconstructs church
Many readers of the Bible read the whole Bible through the lens of the gospel they believe and this is what that gospel looks like:
God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
But you have a sin problem that separates you from God.
The good news is that Jesus came to die for your sins.
If you accept Jesus' death, you can be reconnected to God.
Those who are reconnected to God will live in heaven with God.
Every line of that statement is more or less true. It is the sequencing of those lines, the "story" of that gospel if you will, that concerns me and that turns Jesus' message of the kingdom into a blue parakeet. And it is not only the sequencing, it is the omitting of major themes in the Bible that concerns me. What most shocks the one who reads the Bible as Story, where the focus is overwhelmingly on God forming a covenant community, is that this outline of the gospel above does two things: it eliminates community and it turns the entire gospel into a "me and God" or "God and me" gospel. Who needs a church if this is the gospel? (Answer: no one.) What becomes of the church for this gospel? (Answer: an organization for those who want to do that sort of thing.) While every line in this gospel is more or less true, what concerns many of us today is that this gospel makes the church unimportant.
I believe this gospel can deconstruct, is deconstructing, and will deconstruct the church if we don't change it now. Our churches are filled with Christians who don't give a rip about church life and we have a young generation who, in some cases, care so much about the Church they can't attend a local church because too many local churches are shaped too much by the gospel I outlined above. To be truthful, the gospel above is a distortion of Romans. More and more of us, because we are reading the Bible as Story, are seeing the centrality of the church in God's plan and the gospel being preached too often is out of touch with the Bible's Story.
Yes, Jesus said something like every one of those lines though he never packaged them quite like that. (Nor did Paul in Romans, to be honest.) Is this the gospel? Yes, this gospel is right. The problem is that it isn't right enough. I can give a bundle of problems with this packaging of the gospel, but it all comes down to one big problem: this gospel above isn't the Bible's Story. It is like taking five stars from the sky, knocking them out of their orbits and solar location, and lining them up like ducks in a row and then saying, "Here's our starry sky!" The only way to understand stars is to learn their location and their history and their connections and let each star shine in its place in the sky - and the only way to read the Bible is is from front to back. It doesn't make sense if we don't read the whole thing and to see how each chapter relates to the whole Story. Once we do we come to terms with the gospel that emerges from the Bible's Story.
If reading the Bible as Story teaches us anything, and we need to emphasize this one more time, it teaches us that God's work in this world is to form communities that visibly demonstrate the power of God at work in this world.
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Re: trivialization of church (in the OP)
This marginalization of church in God's divine order (and thus in the life of the believer) is dead straight on, and it gets worse. It is a vicious downward cycle: The church trivialized the gospel as described; the revised gospel trivializes the church; the church now acts out, behaving ever more trivially! (Sadly the high church traditions trivialize the church too, reducing it to an authority structure. Ironic.)
I sum up this truncated gospel as "mere atonement", which predictably earns me withering criticism, and I guess I intend to be provocative. Atonement is priceless beyond measure, but there is more to the cross than atonement, it embodies the victory of God in the earth. The kingdom.
A gospel without a kingdom is not a gospel. It is a shame we leave people groping through christianity to discover the kingdom incidentally on their own. Especially when the kingdom of God is hoti eggus!
Scot, I love this post. Thanks so much for sharing this with us. I particularly liked, "It is like taking five stars from the sky, knocking them out of their orbits and solar location, and lining them up like ducks in a row and then saying, 'Here's our starry sky!'"
In contrast to several of the posters here, I'm not at all sure that an "on the fly" or "thumbnail" gospel is either desirable or helpful. Anything that means anything--"Jesus is Lord & King," "It's the community, stupid" (OK, that's not a great summary), or the four laws--has still got to be unpacked to actually convey a shred of the important meaning it contains.
If we believe we have to have an elevator gospel to be able to share, we're forgetting who plants the seed and who actually gives the increase. Successful evangelism, while it needs evangelists, will always be more about faithfulness than a good success strategy.
As Ben Witherington says in his critique of Bart Ehrman's newest book, before you boil something down, you first must boil it up. That is, before you summarize something to others, you yourself better know the details.
The challenge and trouble of summarizing the biblical story is that something inevitably gets left out or deemphasized. What I hear you saying Scot is what gets left out is community aspect of the gospel-- Christ died for "our" sins (1 Corinthians 15:3) and the Acts community that formed thereafter. What you're not saying is that the gospel simply boils down to the last paragraph of your article.
This article is definitely thought provoking.
Great post! Community is central to our faith and the evangelistic effort. I've learned the importance of community in the past couple years of my life as a missionary. For example, in the past, missionaries could go to churches, share their call and gobs of people would support them and churches were even willing to jump on board. Today, the support raising endeavor works completely differently. You can no longer speak in a church and expect Christians to be excited about your work. You can't go up to a Christian you do not have a relationship with and share your vision for cross-cultural ministry and expect them to be excited. When we shared in congregations we found that maybe (if we were lucky) 1% of the listeners would want to join our ministry as a financial or prayer partner. If we can't convince Christians to be excited about our ministry, to pray for us on a regular basis or to give a tiny fraction of their salary to the work God has for us to do, how do we think we can convince people to drastically change their life and allegiance to our Lord and Savior? I think the days of "sharing the gospel," formulaic representations of what God has done and is doing, and converting people with biblical truths are over if not soon to be. People don't want our formulas and they don't want our systems. People want to see that Jesus has actually changed our lives. Until we begin to truly live in community with each other, we really have nothing to offer the world around us. If our truths are not lived and if our Christian communities do not reflect something different, people will continue to regard us a clanging gongs and clashing symbols. The time for speaking has passed; the time for living is now.
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