I’ve been trying to emphasize the Gospel as the foundational content of the Christian life for many years. While I’ve worked at fresh articulations of the Gospel, there are a lot of familiar articulations of the Gospel that show up in my preaching and teaching with high school students and the adults in chapel and in my classes.

For example, these are four different Gospel articulations that I’ve used repeatedly in speaking and teaching. They are not definitions or creeds. They articulations that summarize and balance the content of the Gospel as I understand it. It’s language I want my hearers to hear frequently. Sometimes in phrases. Sometimes in whole sermons or lessons.

Announcement: The Gospel is the glad announcement that God himself, through Jesus, has done everything necessary to rescue his broken world and save its broken people from judgment and ruin. All persons are invited to believe this glad announcement, to be forgiven and to become a disciple of Jesus who is King and Lord. Read more

The apparent crisis in giving the Gospel its right and Biblically healthy place in evangelical Christian faith exists on several levels.

First, there is the level of scriptural definition. While I can answer the question “What is the Gospel?” it is the Biblical material that should form my definition. Before I give some simple Gospel articulations, what are the Biblical sources of Gospel definition?

Does the Bible give a definition of the Gospel? Or is the Gospel a theme that connects alll of scripture, yielding definitional material and language, but also context, meaning and significance for many other things? Read more

In a recent sermon, I said that I was deeply concerned about the understanding of the Gospel that I hear among adult Christians and especially preachers. I was not just making noise. With every passing year, I’m amazed that the level of Gospel understanding seems to be lower and lower among Christian adults. This isn’t just a failure to hear the Gospel in the terms and definitions I prefer. No, it is an ever lowering articulation of the Gospel, a replacement of the Gospel with other concerns and, perhaps most distressing of all, a replacement and confusion of the Gospel-centered mission itself.

I expect that this emphasis on my part will not endear me to some people, mostly on grounds that I am failing to see the significance of things like moral issues, behavior change and political causes. I’ve come to the point that I realize a discussion of the Gospel is going to have a predictable shape:

1) We all know the Gospel. It’s basic.
2) Once you’ve preached or taught the Gospel, then you need to deal with other things.
3) If you are constantly trying to bring the Gospel to the forefront as the main concern, you’re missing the importance of things like behavior change and obedience. Read more

1. Why did you start using the term “post-evangelical?” Aren’t you aware of how that term is perceived in the discernment blogosphere?

This will seem hard to believe, but I simply wanted a way to say I was moving past evangelicalism to something else, but that something else wasn’t what would cause me to say “non-evangelical,” at least using the generally accepted understanding of evangelicals. I wasn’t in any way trying to identify with post-modernism or the emerging church. The Ancient-Future Evangelicalism of Robert Webber really described me, but that label was unclear to me at the time and I still see it as being more ambitious than I ever want to be with “post-evangelical.”

The discernment blogosphere use of the term is synonymous with “apostate liberal in sheep’s clothing.” I notice a graphic at teampyro that says something about tours of the post-evangelical wilderness. Well, my post-evangelicalism is a way of navigating through the evangelical wilderness with the resources of the broader, deeper, more ancient church. I think the discernment blogosphere is talking about Mclaren, Bell, etc. Read more

Chaplain Mike Mercer is one of the long-time faithful friends of this web site. Many of you will recognize him as a frequent commenter. Mike has gone the extra mile to befriend me and that has been a true gift.

I wanted to do this interview because Mike is now involved in pastoral care of the dying and their families as a full-time ministry. This is an area where evangelical ministers and younger pastors need encouragement and help. Because pastoral care is so closely bound up with the integrity of the Gospel as a Word from God for the dying, I think this is a very worthy subject.

This is a long interview. One of IM’s longest. I have decided to keep it intact as one interview, though if discussion is sufficient we may venture to a second post for more focused discussion.

One request: When you share how pastoral care is done in your tradition, please do so from what you know, not from what “the instructions” say should be done. And be constructive and helpful.

Tell us a little about yourself, your journey as a Christian and your current ministry. Read more

C.S. Lewis said that the person who tries to be unique never is, and the person who sets out to be original seldom is.

I would suggest that the IM blog and IM radio podcast audience are made up of people who may, at least at some point, have felt they were “the only ones,” or one of a few.

Slowly, as books and blogs and stories and coffee shop conversations proliferated, their view changed.

Now, they/we know. There are thousands of us at a thousand different places in the evangelical wilderness. Our experiences in evangelicalism weren’t exactly what we originally thought. Given a place to stop, listen and talk, it turns out there are many of us, not just a few. No one seems to have a map, everyone seems to have a story. Very few of us want to go back to whatever evangelicalism was when we were happily going along with the show. Read more

I am continuing to repost my 2005 series on “The Christian and Mental Illness.” This post, “Is Mental Illness Demonic?” has been edited considerably from the original. This post will deal with some controversial ideas. I am not pretending to have the last word on any Biblical text or any person’s mental illness. My primary point is that we do not have to abandon a compassionate response to mental illness in order to uphold the authority of the Bible.

Is it the Christian view of mental illness to categorize mental illness as the activity of demons and/or the result of sin?

This question really goes past a discussion of mental illness into questions of Biblical interpretation that have increasingly troubled Christians in the past century. The seeds for this controversy were sown as Protestant Christians expounded the doctrine of Sola Scriptura in their confessions. In order to keep Biblically authority sufficiently high to battle liberalism, words and concepts were applied to the Bible that have become more and more troublesome when the Bible interacts with secular ways of seeing the world. These claims for the sufficiency and inerrancy of the Bible inevitably come into conflict with the vocabulary and truth claims of science and medicine. Read more

Today’s Gospel reading was Mark 13:1-8. There’s a chapter with “Can o’ Worms” written all over it.

When I deal with this chapter, I try to show that the parts of the chapter that are easily understood plainly give us instructions on what we are to be doing and not doing. Hope this message is helpful for you. I didn’t read all of the chapter but that would be helpful for you as you listen.

Preaching for Grown-ups is my lectionary preaching at a small Presbyterian Church where I am privileged to supply. It’s the one time during the week I’m not preaching to mostly or exclusively teenagers, hence the name.

Listen to: “Mark 13: What to do While the World Falls Apart.”

This week: Lessons from Chess. Get Over it. Gospel Cowards

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Gambit: The NYT Chess Blog
Gospel Cowards
Get Over It

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I asked for permission to reprint an entire editorial column from the always provocative and frequently dead-on-target Patrol Magazine. It’s entitled “Get Over It.” It’s the latest installment in The Coming Evangelical Collapse, as far as I’m concerned. There aren’t enough ways to say “Yes” and “Amen” to this editorial. I’ll have more to say about this on the podcast.

Patrol Magazine is consistently on top of the current evangelical evolution. David Sessions and the Patrol staff have been doing outstanding journalism for two years now. It’s a young evangelical Rolling Stone, the magazine Relevant would like to be. There’s more to say, but this is a true note amidst the confusion that surrounds us. Expect this editorial to get the “people who criticize the beautiful bride of Christ are pathetic” treatment, but don’t be deterred. Evangelicals have their strong suits, strong churches and worthy messengers, but overall, this is what mainstream evangelicalism is cooking. Add Patrol to your feed and stop in frequently.

(Reprinted with permission from Patrol Magazine)

HOWEVER LONG it may take to relinquish its hold on American culture, evangelicalism in the United States—still probably best defined by the British historian David Bebbington as a movement whose members adhere to conversionism, Biblicism, activism and crucicentrism—faces near-certain extinction. It has been blinded by its symbiotic relationship with the Enlightenment, and has perpetually failed to see beyond its hopelessly Western perceptions. Confined to the paramaters of liberal rationalism, it has mounted no challenge to the present political order and offered no intellectually acceptable explanation for how one is to live and think in the postmodern world. As this magazine has chronicled, its brightest children are throwing up their hands in record numbers, defecting heavy-heartedly to less temporal churches, or to no church at all. Read more

Matt Chandler spoke at my alma mater this week (yes SBTS alumni, class of ‘84 and more). You can watch the message here, but one of the Thinklings excerpted part of Chandler’s message and the words were very familiar.

Chandler’s quoting Eugene Peterson, he who created the much vilified paraphrase “The Message” and who most recently endorsed The Shack with a glowing comparison to Pilgrim’s Progress. Suffice it to say you won’t read a lot of Peterson quotes at 9 Marks or hear his name dropped at Together for the Gospel. Classic mainline liberal, fiery prophet of learning from Dickinson and poets no one can pronounce, renegade translator of the original languages into even more original language, a curmudgeon who lives in Montana and doesn’t answer the phone, unapologetic advocate of “spiritual direction” and “contemplation,” and without question the most passionate advocate of the role of the classic Protestant pastor and the most fearsome critic of whatever it is that passes for a pastor today.

Chandler was reading from page 5 of the most underlined book in my library, Peterson’s nuclear attack on the contemporary re-invention of the pastor, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity. If you think you are a pastor or might want to be, this book cannot be avoided. Read more

A church-planting friend just wrote me about a conference he’s attended in one of our state Baptist conventions. Plant those churches, boys, was the rallying cry, but stay out of those pubs.

Take the Gospel into the world, but stay out of anyplace that serves beer. That’s someone’s version of how the Gospel applies to church planting. Go to jungles, mountains, into the tribes of cannibals or the roughest ghetto, but stay out of O’Charley’s.

Here’s my current theory: it’s not that we are simply ignorant of the Gospel. We can stop announcing that the church needs to hear the Gospel for the first time. It’s more than that. I think most people in most evangelical churches have heard it more than adequately. (Though I am not disagreeing with myself or anyone else that many in evangelicalism’s darker corners haven’t heard the Gospel with accuracy, understanding or personal application.) They may not have your footnotes on justification memorized and they may not be wrath-anxious enough for some of you, but a lot of Christians understand the Gospel.

The problem isn’t simple ignorance. It’s primarily cowardice.

Here’s the Gospel. Here’s life. Let’s apply the Gospel to life, to sin, to church, to ideas, to boundaries, to traditions, to power, to the accepted way of looking at everything. Read more

I’ve served at two churches with exceptional pipe organs and organists. Some of my best memories of worship are about the postlude.

The last amen had sounded, the congregation was leaving the worship space and the organist, with the help of Bach, was taking the roof off the building.

I absolutely soaked it in. Could not get enough. If you have this sort of postlude possibility, I am officially envious.

Those postludes sent us out with JOY. Wonderful waves of the majesty of God, going out the doors, out the windows, right through us into that broken world that Jesus loves so much. Read more

From the inimitable, irreplaceable, absolutely necessary Naked Pastor, David Hayward:

This is the second in a series I did in November of 2005 on Christians and Mental Illness. Looking back at the comments that this post prompted, it’s apparent that many Christians are deeply suspicious of any model of dealing with problems of mental and emotional health other than using the Bible. This is a more mediating view for those who believe we can benefit from some of the scientific approaches used in contemporary psychiatric treatments. There remain large issues between secular psychology/psychiatry and religion. This is one layperson’s view. I am not a trained therapist of any kind. Talk to your doctor and your pastor if you have questions for yourself.

Because the Bible is authoritative in Christianity, it is often difficult to come to terms with forms of knowledge that ignore the Bible, and especially difficult to deal with systems of knowledge that threaten to transcend or neutralize the Bible. In America, this tension did not fully dawn until the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the early twentieth century. While Darwin continues to get most of the attention, it is more likely Freud who has created the most perplexing tensions for Christian believers.

Psychology does not appear to be an immediate frontal assault on the Christian view of truth. Many Christians, especially in more moderate communions, have been open to psychology as a way of compassionately understanding human beings. More recently, however, psychology has met with sterner opposition from many evangelicals, who have become aware that the discipline was atheistic, even religiously hostile, from the outset, and that its ways of explaining, understanding and helping human beings have potentially dire consequences for the Christian view of truth. Read more