The Christian Vision Project has been asking recently, "Is Our Gospel Too Small?" They have several excellent essays posted on their website which you can see here. One that especially grabbed my attention that I would encourage everyone to read is by my friend Tim Keel, called "An Efficient Gospel?" In this article he challenges our reductionistic tendencies and our desire to make our gospel efficient.
One of the features of the modern world was "reductionism": the belief that complex things can always be reduced to simpler or more fundamental things. To reduce something is to take it out of context and to take it apart. Church leaders have become experts at reductionism. Ministries that are successful in one context are reduced to "models" that we try to duplicate in other contexts. Sometimes such reductionism is effective. But when we use reductionism indiscriminately, we end up in a world so simplified it is barely recognizable.
This reductionism directly effects the gospel. Tim discusses his gradual discovery of the deeper meaning of the gospel in this article. What he describes relates directly to something I've been saying for some time. Here's how Tim puts it...
[W]e believe that "the Word became flesh": God revealed himself in a specific time, in a specific place, among a specific people. Jesus joined a story in progress. God entered and engaged. And this is the calling of the church as well—to join in and participate in God's story at work in the world—in our time and in our space(s).
The gospel must become incarnate. It's something that must be lived. We cannot approach God or the gospel a-contextually.
The gospel as we understand it and experience it in our ministry in Hollywood is an embodied reality. I think this fits perfectly with the Adventist anthropology which says that human beings are, by creation, embodied creatures. The incarnation reveals the basic truth that the good news of God needed to be embodied. It was more than an idea. The gospel must be no less embodied today. The way I heard one of my mentors say it once was, "The gospel is not an 'it'." I have since wrote on this blog about this here and here and here.
The second of the linked posts above is "Do evangelistic campaigns work?" It was a controversial post when I wrote it. The basic point I've been trying to make - and Tim's post is right along this line, and I thank him for it - is that we have to question far more than our evangelistic methods in this new world. Indeed, our methods are an outgrowth, many times, of our small, reduced gospel.
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