up close gospel
So, I was in a discussion with high school students a few weeks ago and I asked this question: “If you were to go to a country and delivered food to starving people, would you say that this action is proclaiming the gospel?” They answered, “No.” In all fairness, I told them I could have worded the question a little better and asked them if this deed is an expression of the gospel, to which they agreed yet still held that this expression is not the complete gospel.
So then I asked them, “If you were to go to a country and proclaim the gospel simply with words, is this the gospel?” They answered… yes.
I hope they didn’t see it, but it felt like my jaw dropped to the ground. These are smart students who really want to make a difference in our world. So, how is it possible that one could hold a double standard for communicating the gospel? How is it possible for one to come to the conclusion that expressing gospel deeds is only part of the gospel, but expressing gospel words is the whole gospel?
I’m still trying to unpack these comments, but I’m believing that these teenage conclusions are hardly their own– they unveil the fruit of the teaching of youth pastors and ministry leaders. Is it possible that youth ministries and western churches have pitted “proclaiming the gospel” against “living the gospel”? Is it possible that we are more interested in “identifying with Christ” through our words and Christian gear, rather than “identifying with Christ” in suffering, serving and simplicity. I think so.
It freaks me out to think that young people are getting the message that actions are a “warm up” to the “true gospel” of verbal proclamation. Maybe others are freaked out my comments and consider this “going soft on the gospel.”
If “going soft on the gospel” means that people like me are afraid to get in people’s faces about the message of Jesus, then I would disagree. Actually, I think proclamation-alone gospel tactics are about as far away from “in your face” as possible. I would even consider it cowardly.
Anyone can hurl words at someone else. It’s no different than hurling food at someone demanding that they eat. “Getting in one’s face,” means so much more. It means allowing people to see the gospel up close by entering into another person’s world… and letting them enter mine. It means expressing the love of Jesus through extending ourselves in conversation (words) and community (life).
But we’re afraid to do that. It seems like the church works hard at staying only as close as necessary to hurl a message at poor sinners, rather than allowing peoples’ space to be entered and the gospel shared with a personal touch and an appropriate word.
The gospel at a distance is no gospel at all. And so, as I reflect on these amazing students, I hope I pass along an “up close gospel.”
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“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ “The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’ – Mt 25.37-40
posted by steve @ 10:22 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Good thoughts - here are some of my reactions. If the gospel is the proclimation that Jesus is Lord, then it isn't confined to either lifestyle of words. It is wholistic. My struggle with students I am working with is that they have caught that we proclaim Jesus is Lord by our lives. But many of them are stuggling with how to articulate it verbally. I was thinking about Christian Smith and some of the research that his organization has done in regards to teens and faith formation. One of the things Smith suggests is that teens have lost religious language. He even suggests that we teach students how to say words that carry symbolic and theological weight in our faith traditions. My fear in our ministry is that we create moralists who live lives that model the character of Jesus, but can't articulate in words why they do it.
Unfortunately Evangelical Christianity in America too commonly suffers from a gap between its rhetoric and any substance. There are words, but they're shells with nothing inside. Now, I'm 24, a missionary kid. I've grown up in the church and I can't stand the "religious language" of Evangelical Christianity. I think we (young Christians) were taught an innocent and unconscious preoccupation with the spoken gospel. (We can't be saved except we confess with our MOUTHS that Jesus Christ is Lord.) We were socialized to talk with our church friends in religious jargon, but we were rarely CHALLENGED to THINK CRITICALLY about Christ, about the church, about our role in the community and in the polis. I'm convinced that in the end religious language can be a cover-up for weak-minded Christians. That's the danger of it. I can do the religious talk... but I'm personally so sick of it, of its enervating effect on the soul and mind. We young Christians are spiritually weak because we don't THINK. The move away from being good speakers may be a refreshing thing. Maybe young people are suffering through the challenges of trying to let Jesus live through them... Maybe that's what a generation needs to be able to aptly convey in words who this Jesus guy is, how He's relevant, and why living the gospel is so very important. Sounds better than just trusting that words are enough.
"Unfortunately Evangelical Christianity in America too commonly suffers from a gap between its rhetoric and any substance."
True - but that is not reason to abandon rhetoric. Rather, it is a reason to redeem it.
I love the the words "wholistic" and "conversation" to describe our lives in proclaiming the gospel because it meshes words with living. That is good.
In my own journey with this I observed something a while ago as I spent some time in the letters written to Timothy and Titus. I observed that the church needs to do. Do what? Do good. Do good to people, do good works, good things, good deeds. It hit me, good works is an expression of our faith. Simple, yet neglected. Too many many sermons on the theology of faith, not enough on the theology of doing good.
Yet we are not justified by living morally, and all it takes is peer pressure and a fad for teens to live morally without the good news. Yet words can be a mask. I struggle with that myself.
The challenge might be to let people see inside us. No fig leaves. True community that makes for awkward conversations, serious pain, blush faces, and danger in relationship. Yet joy and freedom. There is freedom in the gospel isnt there?
Let me offer a Reformed perspective on this issue, especially to address my dear friend Luke's concerns in a constructive way. We Calvinists wear our faith like we wear glasses--it comes from the outside but affects the way we encounter the world at a most fundamental level. Niether a matter of believing propositions or entering a relationship, our only comfort in life and in death is that we are not our own, but belong body and soul, in life and in death, to our faithful savior Jesus Christ who has fully paid for all our sins with his precious blood and watches over us in such a way that not a hair can fall from our heads apart from his gracious will. We're not so much creatures that need to believe something or need to enter a certain type of relationship, we're creatures who are in fundamental need of an identity, of a call that comes from the outside but affects most deeply who we are. In traditional church language, the second hypostasis of the trinity became a single and undivided human being with two natures. Jesus' hypostasis was uniquely God, and we were created to share in the divine life through Jesus' person. In other words, we receive our personhood, our unique hypostasis, from our election in Jesus Christ. So God calls us and makes us what we could never be on our own but what we were always made to be through Jesus. We're chosen, we're accepted, and we most deeply and radically belong to God. As Augustine put it, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, and as the great reformers would add, this nearness comes to us as a word and a call completely from the outside. What's important here is that though the Word is extrinsic to us, it is also what we most deeply need. Our efforts toward self-possession have proved to be the sorry attempts of our bloated pride. And so God meets us, exalted in Jesus Christ as the Crucified One, exalting humanity to the divine life of self-giving love. Jesus judges our pride and sloth and self-possession with God's No, and because of the No to that which destroys us, he says Yes to us. God's Yes is always stronger than God's No. Faith is the action that corresponds to this reality. Remeber, it is extrinsic (we don't do anything) but affects who we are most deeply (it changes our identity). That's why Christians get their names not at birth, but baptism, their nourishment not in the kitchen but on their knees as they recieve the Eucharist, their family not from genetics but in the church, and their love not from natural affections but from God. Our discipleship or sanctification is when God develops us into what God has already declared us to be and what we most radically are. This is the shape that our witness must take in the world. We have not communicated God or reached people unless they are able to affirm that through us they have been loved (however imperfectly through us) by God and shown what it means to belong BODY and SOUL (or physically as well as spiritually), in life and in death, to their faithful savior Jesus Christ. Ultimately, faith is not something that merely happens to us and only affects us; the new world that we see through the glasses of faith is the real world. The name we receive in our baptism is our most basic identity. The nourishment we receive at the Lord's Table is our most basic meal with our true family. The world that Jesus inaugurated and that we celebrate this Eastertide--the world where justice and peace kiss and where Jesus reigns as Lord by being servant--this world is the real world. If we don't live that way, how can we possibly believe it? And if our religious language is a coverup from misunderstanding, then how can we really live in that world? At best, we're blind to it.
Sean
Steve, I thought you made an interesting point in relation to what the High Schoolers told you about proclaiming vs. living the gospel. Have we pitted the two against one another? In a short answer...probably so. In a ministry I was involved in, I was told we were not to do anything in the community without proclaiming (with words) the gospel ("the plan of salvation"). I have heard people scoff at the servant evangelism movement and call it watered down Christianity (the people who scoffed rarely left their pews to get involved in the community).
Did not Jesus Himself meet the needs of the adulterous woman BEFORE He called her out of her sin?
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