Back in March I sat down for an interview with Brian Larson and Brian Lowery, editors of PreachingToday.com, to talk about how and why the popular understanding of the gospel is shifting. The interview kicks off a year of articles for PT.com asking the question, is our gospel too small?

If you find the topic interesting you’ll want to pick up the fall issue of Leadership journal due out in October. We’ve just completed a nationwide survey of pastors to determine how their understanding of the gospel and mission has shifted over the last 10 years. The findings are illuminating.

Here’s part of my interview with PreachingToday. You can read the whole interview here.

Preaching Today: A number of Christian authors, pastors, and theologians are raising critical questions about our understanding of the nature of the gospel. What do you think has stirred such passion?

Skye Jethani: A lot of passion has been fueled by the angst produced from conversations about how to reach younger, postmodern generations. Two schools of thought emerged from the beginning. One group opted for the conservative approach: we just need to be more relevant, repackaging the same gospel message in a manner or style that’s going to be appealing to the next generation. Another group insisted the church needed to go deeper than repackaging the content. They felt we needed to rethink the content. A lot of today’s conversations about the gospel were born out of the early tension between the two schools of thought.

Our gospel arsenal is a lot bigger than it used to be. We can choose to preach the Good News from a number of different angles, according to the audience we’ve been given.

These two groups were not unlike the two groups that formed during the modernist/fundamentalist split that happened a hundred years ago. Think about the massive cultural changes that were going on: Darwinism, Marxism, textual criticism of the Bible, psychology. Many Christians looked at that tangled mess and concluded they needed to adjust the gospel. In doing so they ended up forming mainline, liberal theology. The fundamentalists among them said, “I don’t care what’s happening to the culture. The gospel’s the gospel, and we’re not changing it!”

It’s quite similar today. One side prides themselves on not changing the gospel but only the style in which it is preached. In their eyes, anyone who adjusts their perspective on the gospel represents a new liberalism. The other side responds with a certain degree of disdain over what they feel is stodgy fundamentalism blind to its own modernist bias. 

Another factor that explains why we’re currently engaged in gospel-oriented conversations is the revival of interest in spiritual formation. Decades ago, Richard Foster and others at Renovaré were not asking, “How do we reach younger generations?” They were asking questions like: “Why aren’t we seeing Christians living in Christ-like ways?” “Why is the church so culturally captivated?” “If we’ve been preaching the gospel all these years, why aren’t we seeing much change in people?” Their conclusion was that we had been preaching a limited gospel—one that didn’t bring about radical transformation. Foster and others were questioning whether or not we were preaching a gospel of transformation for the here and now and not just for life after death.

Who are the particular individuals or movements that continue to ask hard questions about the gospel, pushing the issue forward from the past into the present?

Dallas Willard has certainly played a pivotal role. In the opening chapters of The Divine Conspiracy, Willard challenges what he feels is a false view of the gospel. In his own upbringing in ministry years ago, he was taught that the gospel was all about finding an answer to this question: What do you think is going to happen to you when you die? The gospel was mostly an assurance of salvation after death. You pray the prayer, and when you die, you’re with Christ. There was little about the present life that was inherent to the gospel—issues of discipleship, sanctification, or transformation. Willard challenges us with the idea of “the eternal kind of life now.” That’s a totally different way of thinking about things, and it has huge implications. If we’re to live in the kingdom of God now, that has major implications for the Christian life and mission now, rather than just later. Think about how radical it is now to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Willard has also played a pivotal role in putting “the kingdom of God” back into people’s vocabulary. He’s pushed his readers to figure out what Jesus meant when he said, “Behold! The kingdom of God is at hand.” In his opinion we’ve neglected a theology of the kingdom of God. Brian McLaren has picked up on this level of thinking in many of his books, like The Secret Message of Jesus. McLaren has tended to take a more politically active direction than Willard, but kingdom theology is a big piece of the puzzle. These convictions concerning the gospel show up in the work of another key figure, Tony Jones. The Emergent folks have continued to champion a gospel that includes issues of social justice. They seek ways to manifest the kingdom of God here and now through the love and good deeds of the church.

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