what's the central message?

My personal friend A.J. Murray posted the following comment:

The thought that keeps leaping to my mind when reading through some of these [posts] (especially relating to comments on Rick Warren's church and his books) are two-fold.

First, having been on mission trips with a sole purpose of reaching out for new believers I recognize two things...I'm not Christ and I do not have His ability/eloquence/insight to share the Gospel as HE does in the Bible, without losing the audience. By this I mean, I have tried what I call the "Campus Crusade" method of a sort of "hit 'em between the eyes with their falleness and need for a savior". For me, it's seldom if ever worked. What I took away from that is, it wasn't the recipient, it was the sender. It wasn't the message, it was the presentation.

What I have found is that in today's cynical, doubting world is that it's important for us to share the Gospel in such a manner as to attract new believers, then lead them to an understanding of their falleness, then (by the means of the Holy Spirit) to a pronouncement of faith.

Thus, while I yearn for the eloquence and straight forwardness of our Lord, or the directness of a Paul, I've found that creating a conversation which gently leads a person to make a decision for faith requires more finesse on my behalf. So, I guess I'm guilty of possibly "dressing up" the message so that the audience is receptive. Once they make a profession of faith, then, I find I have the ability to share and teach of the deeper subjects.

The second thing that strikes me is that each of us has a need for the relationship with Christ. Acknowledgement of our fallen condition is central to our recognition of who we are, but we're also (upon accepting faith) called by Christ, brothers and sisters, adopted by God. So, there is a duality that I believe necessarily exists between the "lite and fluffy" faith of the family, and the hardness of our fallen condition. Some churches err on one side or the other of this equation. To me, as a believer, this duality of being both family and fallen must be taught at the same time, in the same church. Therefore, if a church swings too far one direction or another we ought to be reaching out to improve that pastoral leadership.

Great comments, A.J.! And possibly I should clarify.

I've witnessed many presentations of the Gospel in my time. Most have been perfectly orthodox, and almost all have been gentle, which is fine. But there's another category that I've encountered, typical of the Rick Warren example below, that have been gentle, but not what I'd call orthodox.

For example, I remember going to Promise Keepers some years ago in Colorado Springs, and the first evening they had a call to come forward. As I recall, the guys who came up were led in prayer, but a call to repentance was never made. And afterwards it was announced to them that they were now members of the family of God. (At least this was my impression at the time.)

If you look in the Gospel of Mark, this is how the start of Jesus' ministry is described:

Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:14-15)

Then Jesus went around teaching from village to village. Calling the Twelve to him, he sent them out two by two and gave them authority over evil spirits.

These were his instructions: “Take nothing for the journey except a staff–no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. Wear sandals but not an extra tunic. Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town. And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave, as a testimony against them.”

They went out and preached that people should repent. They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them. (Mar 6:6-13)

"They went out and preached that people should repent."

If you examine both the Old and New Testaments, the message is consistent. Repentance is front and center. And a rejection of the message is characterized as an unwillingness to repent:

Then Jesus began to denounce the cities in which most of his miracles had been performed, because they did not repent. (Matt. 11:20)

There is nothing about relationship with God here. And I'll talk about this in a future post, but if you examine the book of Acts, which describes the spreading of the Gospel by the early church, the love of God is not mentioned once in the entire book! (Greg Koulk, of the apologetics ministry Stand to Reason, has prepared an excellent analysis on this topic called Preaching God's Love in Acts? which I'd highly recommend.)

This is what makes me suspect the church is out of balance in some sectors. I have no reason to doubt that intentions are well meaning. But I think that in a zeal to increase numbers, some have lost sight of the ball.

Like you, I'm all in favor of finding good ways to communicate the message. I would even say that marketing techniques are fine as long as they aren't ones that entail distorting the message.

But the bottom line is, if the people we're communicating with aren't coming to repentance (from an accurate understanding of their sinfulness and God's provision for forgiveness through Christ's sacrifice), then we aren't making disciples. And if we tell them they're saved anyway, we may very well be escorting them to damnation. And obviously, that would be awful.

I don't anticipate I'll have any impact on the heavy hitters in this arena. But I'm hoping these observations will at least help you and I to be more careful and deliberate about how we present the Gospel.