The WRONG Gospel and the WRONG Mission

Like it or not we have been deeply shaped by our cultural context and our cultural context is deeply shaped by consumerism and that consumerism has shaped even our approach to church and the gospel.

We confused goals and outcomes. 

We heard Jesus’ heart that “the world may believe” through our consumerist lens and assumed he had given us a product to sell. We interpreted his great commission at the end of Matthew, to “go and make disciples of all nations,”^[1] in the same way.

This led to our understanding of mission as primarily the communication of ideas, as Donald McGavran put it: “an enterprise devoted to proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ, and to persuading men and women to become his disciples and responsible members of his church.”^[2]

One of the things that stands out in McGavran’s definition is that the mission of the church is to persuade people. This brings into focus an underlying assumption that faith is an idea to be transmitted.

This way of thinking resulted in the formulation of the gospel into a neatly packaged set of ideas that were labelled ‘Four Spiritual Laws’^[3] or “Steps to Peace.”^[4]

The person who first popularised the four ideas as the gospel was a businessman who was skilled at marketing and had a heart for evangelism. Bill Bright struggled academically and eventually gave up his theological studies,^[5] however his deep commitment to telling people about Jesus and his business skill led to the establishment of Campus Crusade for Christ and the formulation of the Four Spiritual Laws ^[6] which Bright named as:

1. God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life
2. We are sinful and separated from God. Therefore we cannot know and experience God’s love and plan for our lives.
3. Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for our sin. Through Him alone we can know God personally and experience God’s love and plan.
4. We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord; then we can know and experience God’s love and plan for our lives.

The world’s most famous evangelist, Billy Graham, adapted Bill’s four spiritual laws to become  what he called the “Steps to Peace”^[7], which are still broadly promoted as the basis of all evangelistic work done by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.^[8]

The beauty of four ideas like this is that they could be memorised (with associated bible veses) and also written up as small pamphlets (called tracts).

These four ideas became the framework for every evangelistic message, and many churches ensured that those four concepts were embedded in every Sunday Service.  The only problem is that those four ideas are not the gospel, at least according to the bible.

The Gospel in the Bible.

Each time “the gospel” is communicated in the New Testament it is slightly different, but at no point does it even resemble what Bright and Graham formulated.

The fundamental difference between the “gospel” that most of us grew up with and the gospel of the bible is that the gospel of the bible is not about ideas. In fact the word “gospel” literally means ‘good news,’ and that’s what the early church understood it to be. Rather than being theological ideas, the gospel was a recounting of historical events.

This is seen most clearly as Paul recounts the gospel he ‘received’ and which New Testament Professor at Göttingen University, Gerd Lüdemann (who also happens to be an atheist) dates to within 2 or 3 years after Jesus’ crucifixion.^[9]

As you read Paul’s account of the gospel it becomes very clear that there is a huge chasm between this and the four ideas promoted by Bright and Graham:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.^[10]

Every aspect of the gospel that Paul communicates is an event that happened in history. For Paul, the gospel is an historical reality that continues to shape a community of people, who he points out “are still living” and can be spoken to directly.

By focussing on four theological ideas, Bill Bright and Billy Graham watered down the gospel and made it more abstract than it actually is. 

As the gospel becomes a set of ideas, it automatically finds itself in a contest. Christianity becomes just another worldview in competition with all the others and as such Christians find themselves in a zero-sum game where what they understand Christianity to be must defeat every other way of seeing the world. 

As we start to understand the gospel as “news” of historical events, we can start to relax a little bit about theological ideas. 

By immediately praying “may they also be in us,” after praying that we would be one, Jesus is clear that mission isn’t about getting right ideas but is an outworking of his life in us.

Several commentators have suggested that what he is doing is praying that the disciples will realise the truth of what he told them just a couple of chapters earlier:

Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing^[11]

If it is true that it is not within the normal human capacity to sustain a community of people from wildly different backgrounds then the only possible way that Jesus’ vision would be possible would be for us to remain in him. 

There is always a danger in writing a book like this that the author can become idealistic, giving advice that is impossible to follow in the real world, and the idea of being in fellowship with people who have a diametrically different worldview to you seems to fit that category. 

Our world is increasingly polarised. It is normal to see those who don’t see the world in the same way you do as the enemy. In recent history arguments over same-sex marriage and then vaccine and mask mandates during COVID became bitter battles. 

As I write our country is preparing for yet another divisive political fight over whether it is right to change our constitution to give Aboriginal people an organised ‘Voice to Parliament. As you read this, you probably know what the outcome of the referendum was, but as I sit here, on the day that the Prime Minister announced the date for the vote, the only sure thing is that our Nation is once again heading for division. 

The sad thing for me personally is that in each of these debates, Christians have been some of the most vitriolic voices. Rather than agents of God’s love, Christians are often so busy fighting for right ideas that they become sources of deep pain for those who oppose them.

This is the unavoidable consequence of believing that Christianity is a set of ideas to be defended rather than a relationship to be lived. I don’t buy the line that is often trotted out to questions about this approach, that confronting people with “the truth” is what is the most loving thing that could be done for them. If people are being traumatised by your actions, then the chances are your actions are not an expression of God’s love.

It feels a bit like the way to win any argument is to prove you are a bigger victim than the next person. The moral high ground is found in the place of greatest perceived persecution.

From that framework Alex Awad is on about as high a moral high ground as it is possible to be. I have only heard speak once, but what he said remains with me to this day.

Alex is a Palestinian Christian. He co-founded the Bethlehem Bible College (yes, in THAT Bethlehem) and lived in Israel from 1946 to 2015.

At the end of World War Two his community and family were forcibly removed from their homes to make way for the new state of Israel. When he appeared on the Theology in the Raw podcast^[12], Alex points out that the same event is commemorated from two very different perspectives:

We commemorate (with an Arabic word that means catastrophe or disaster) what happened in 1948 when we lost about 2/3 of our country to Israel in the first Arab-Israeli war. Nearly 800,000 Palestinians became refugees. Every Palestinian person is taught about the disaster. For the Israelis, this same event is their Independence Day.

Many Western Christians are not even aware that there are Palestinian Christians. They perceive the conflict between Israel and Palestine to be a conflict between Jews and Muslims, but it is not that simple.

As a Christian, Alex knows that he somehow needs to find a way to have fellowship with Messianic Jews. He needs to find a way to love the people that caused so much damage to his friends and family.

Alex had to discover the truth of Jesus’ prayer and had to let go of any notion that the gospel was a set of ideas to be put upon another person. He describes how it works in practise:

We discovered that the secret to fellowship is to focus on Jesus as our main common denominator because if we focus on Jesus, we can continue to have fellowship. If we focus on theology and politics, then it is very hard for us to keep a harmony in the body of Christ.

When Jesus prays “may they also be in us.” This is what he means. To the degree that Alex is able to keep his focus on Jesus, he is able to love people who have caused both he and his extended family great pain. Alex is not talking about a superficial agreement where difficult questions are ignored. He elaborates on the complex reality: 

However, by saying this, I’m not recommending that we compromise what we believe or they compromise what they believe. However, we look at each other face to face and say I don’t agree with you, but I still love you in the love of Christ. I still love you even though I don’t agree with you. 

You believe that (military victories for Israel in 1948 and 1967) are miracles of God on behalf of Israel. You believe that God engineered all of that on behalf of Israel. We don’t believe that. We believe these are genocides where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were killed and became refugees. We don’t look at these as you look at them. However, we can disagree and continue to have fellowship. Don’t demand from us to take your perspective, and we don’t demand from you to take our perspective.

In a very tangible way, Alex describes how being “in Jesus” allows us to be one without having to fully agree, even on fundamental things. In his faithfulness to Jesus’ call to be one, he not only models a way forward for believers in the middle East, but also for us who consider that Jesus couldn’t possibly want us to have fellowship with people who are fundamentally different to us.

Alex is describing exactly the kind of miracle that Jesus was praying for and stands out in stark relief against the steady stream of violence and death that has characterised life in the Middle East since 1948.

There are no shortcuts to this kind of fellowship, and it is clear that this is the kind of fellowship that Jesus sees as fundamental to the nature of His church. 

We should have twigged to the kind of church Jesus was wanting to build when we noticed who he chose for his 12 disciples. Among them were both Simon the Zealot and Matthew the Tax collector. Zealots were holy freedom fighters who sought to rid their homeland of Roman Occupation. Tax Collectors were Roman collaborators who made a personal fortune by helping the Romans oppress the Jewish people. It would not be normal for these two people to be in the same room, let alone working together as the foundation of the early church.

Jesus very clearly wanted to model that the church he was founding was to be one, but not the same. The only way this would be remotely possible is if his followers found their life in him and not from their own plans or strategies.

You simply cannot love people who think stealing your country is the will of God unless you are first loving and focussing on Jesus. You won’t regret it, but you can’t half-do it either.

From the very beginning Jesus’ strategy to change the world was through a community unlike anything the world had ever seen before. A few chapters earlier, Jesus had issued what he called a ‘New Commandment’ that sounds an awful lot like his John 17 prayer:

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”^[13]

Maybe we haven’t been having much impact on the world because we have been trying get people to believe a set of ideas and thinking the job of the church is to persuade people rather than live a life shaped by Jesus’ love.

Jesus didn’t select academics as his disciples. He selected fishermen. He wasn’t trying to establish a new set of ideas, but rather establish a community who would be so transformed by their relationship with him, they would need to explain the truth of who He is.

This is what the Apostle Peter assumed when he instructed the church to 

But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect,^[14]

The shape of Jesus’ John 17 prayer is embedded in Peter’s assumption about how evangelism actually works:

1 Peter 3:15	John 17:21
But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord.	May they also be in us
Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect	so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

In a 2022 report on the changing faith landscape in Australia, McCrindle’s research indicated that the top three things that people outside the church appreciated about the church were the supportive community (29%), the social connections (21%), and the events and programs that support the local community (21%)^[15]. As it turns out, Jesus’ vision for the church’s relationships to be the thing that speaks most loudly is backed up by current data.

In the same way we have had the wrong idea about the gospel, we have also had a wrong idea about the mission of the church. Our mission is not the propagation of ideas or the persuasion of people, Our mission is to live as people who love because He first loved us.

David Bosch wrote a book that surveyed the churches understanding of it’s mission throughout it’s history and the conclusion he came to was a definition of mission that is radically different than Donald McGavran’s. He writes:

(Mission is) the good news of God’s love, incarnated in the witness of a community, for the sake of the world.^[16]

Or to put it another way:

… I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me …^[17]

Jesus understood that it was only “in” relationship with him that his followers would have anything to give to the world. He knew that it would be impossible for his followers to be “one” unless they truly were in relationship with God, but if those two things were true then the world would be transformed.

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^[1] Matthew 28:19

^[2] Donald A. McGavran. Understanding Church Growth (Kindle Locations 417-418). Kindle Edition.

^[3] https://www.crosswalk.com/faith/spiritual-life/what-are-bill-brights-four-spiritual-laws.html (Accessed August 30 2023)

^[4] https://stepstopeace.org (Accessed August 30 2023)

^[5] Turner, John G. (2008). Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ : the renewal of evangelicalism in postwar America.pages 23–39.

^[6] https://www.crosswalk.com/faith/spiritual-life/what-are-bill-brights-four-spiritual-laws.html (Accessed August 30 2023)

^[7] https://stepstopeace.org (Accessed August 30 2023)

^[8] Billy Graham changed Bright’s wording slightly : 

1.               God’s purpose: Peace and Life

2.               The problem: Our separation from God

3.               God’s Bridge: The cross

4.               Our response: Receive Christ.

^[9] Gerd Lüdemann The Resurrection of Jesus, trans. by Bowden (Fortress, 1994), pp 171-72.

^[10] 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 NIV

^[11] John 15:4-5 (NIV)

^[12] Published 21st November 2022

[13] John 13:34-35

^[14]  1 Peter 3:15 NIV

^[15] McCrindle Research Pty Ltd, The changing faith landscape of Australia report, page 44

^[16] David Bosch Transforming Mission (Twentieth Anniversary edition) Orbis Books (2011) page 532

^[17] John 17:20-21 NIV