I mentioned in my last post about a new blog series titled, “A Gospel Stripped of Power” where I’ll be examining the emptiness behind the gospel we find ourselves presented with today. This is actually written by my friend Michael Beardslee and if you would like his contact information let me know and I’ll get it to you. If you have any questions about what any of this ‘means’, let me know that too. I’m free to answer questions.
God has a way of reminding us that he is really God.
I’m usually not reminded by the sweaty evangelist on the
morning radio anymore. I’ve become bored with him. What haunts me is a whisper.
It’s those times where the presence of God is so profoundly felt that it spurs
me to change. The Word of God brings forth the winds of change. It moves and
empowers; Elijah heard a quiet whisper, and returned to the city. I feel as
though I have stumbled upon a change within the church. And like Israel, this
change rides the wings of our folly.
I began to catch wind of this when I was involved with a
simple outreach to high-school kids. Week after week I became more aware of a
thorn in my side. We taught and taught, and after two years with mainly the
same kids and various reinterpretations of the youth program itself my itch got
worse. We were still left with a group where the passionate people that desired
to worship and discover God were the minority. Our changes had failed. In the
rest of the church, I saw many faces that were bored with God and uninspired to
worship him. Communion had become a mandatory act, merely a filler of time. I
knew something was about because of the few who seemed to radiate with
gratitude. Was I judgmental? Perhaps. But it was too obvious to ignore, the
thorn never left. Sometime later I talked with a close friend of mine. She had
lost her faith.
A dear friend had died of cancer, which shook my friend to
the core. As most of us would, she fell back on her doctrine supporting her
faith, and fell straight through. Her doctrine failed to console her, but it
was worse than that. It painted an ugly
picture for her, one that disgusted her, to the point that she renounced her
claim of being Christian. This doctrine of hers was not something strange or
abnormal. On the contrary, it reminds me of the words of that early morning
evangelist. Something was very wrong within the walls of the American Church.
Boredom, complacency, friends renouncing faith. At school I
began to ask the “why” question. We entertained many hypotheses, such as
teaching the disciplines. Then it hit me; the answer was desperately simple. We
have a poor idea of what the gospel is truly about.
Let me explain
Man doesn’t live life in his head; I was first awakened to
the truth of the gospel in my heart, and then in my head. But the truth of the
matter is this: the way that we understand the gospel as Christians builds the
framework on how we understand the Christian life and relate to God. If this
was the case, the answer was simple. The church, at least the churches that I
had grown up knowing had a poor understanding of the gospel of Christ, and this
poor understanding is passed onto others.
I propose that much of what the American church understands
as the gospel is not gospel in full. It is instead a watered down version,
stripped of its power in our attempt to pigeonhole it into a singular,
systematic process. Best shown in two different categories, Richard Foster
calls it the gospel of the right and the gospel of the left.[1]
But I will restrict my argument to focus on the “gospel of the right”.
It is difficult for me to point the finger and say, “That is
wrong.” The difficulty lies in that this gospel stripped of power denotes that
it once did, indeed, have power. Karl Barth tells us that a gospel of salvation
that has lost its power can have all of the trappings of a true gospel, it can
be shrouded in biblical truth and pietistic zeal and still be a “dull
impartation which says everything and nothing…”[2]
Having once known power, or understood the gospel in one sense, the watery
gospel cannot be critiqued on a purely doctrinal level as it still retains
doctrinal truth. But we can begin to discover what happened.
What strips the Gospel of its power is what is called
reductionism, and in a majority of churches, the gospel of Christ has been
reduced.
