An Efficient Gospel?

Last fall Andy Crouch invited me to write an article for Christianity Today's Christian Vision Project. The question he invited me to consider was really rather limited in its scope: "Is our gospel too small?" See what I mean.

Anyway, I appreciated the opportunity Andy gave me and took this assignment as a challenge. I submitted my piece in November and while the finished article has been edited to half its original length, I am pleased with how it turned out.

It recently ran in the winter issue of Leadership Journal, one of the magazines in the Christianity Today International family of publications. The magazine came out around one month ago but they have just now made my article available online. Marshall Shelley, editor of Leadership Journal, has decided to make this question, "Is our gospel too small?" the focal point of the Christian Vision Project for 2008. My article is the lead offering. They retitled my piece, "An Efficient Gospel?"

An excerpt:

Asking "Is our gospel too small?" implies that something is off kilter—that somehow we have gone off course in the way we answer "the gospel question." But it may not be just our gospel that is too small. It may be that we have been living in a world that was too small—the small, reduced world of modernity.

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.

So in a modern world, we tend to reduce the complexity and diversity of the Scriptures to simple systems, even when our systems flatten the diversity and integrity of the biblical witness. We reduce our sermons to consumer messages that reduce God to a resource that helps the individual secure a reduced version of the "abundant life" Jesus promised (John 10:10).

You can read it here.