I’m peering out the window from the back of a bus as we wind our way along the Sea of Galilee. With every turn, every new vista, my mind and heart keep drifting to the same question: I wonder if Jesus walked there… spoke there… healed there… slept there. The memory of Jesus is soaked into the land itself. And our denomination was immersing us in this place to inform our spiritual growth and leadership for the rest of our lives. In the very back row sits a group of young clergy, on their way to ordination. They all attended the same seminary, and throughout the pilgrimage they’ve mostly kept to themselves. But as I eavesdrop on their conversation, I begin to hear a familiar thread: frustration, disillusionment, critique. The usual list of everything wrong with the church. Eventually, I find an opening. I ask what they think about the Fresh Expressions movement. I can still hear the response. “Personally, I don’t want anything to do with that movement. It’s really just a new version of evangelism.” I pause. I’m not sure I heard them right. “So… as pastors preparing to be ordained in the church… you don’t think evangelism is important?” Their answers unsettled me. As someone who is apostolically wired, whose life and ministry has been shaped by evangelism, who now teaches it in seminaries, I wanted to understand. What exactly had gone so wrong that evangelism itself had become suspect? As we kept talking, I began to hear the deeper story. And they weren’t wrong about everything. They had seen harmful forms of evangelism, manipulative, transactional, even exploitative. The bait-and-switch tactics. The pressure-driven conversions. The reduction of salvation to a formula, a script, a prayer said on cue. In many ways, my life’s work has been about healing those very distortions. And I found myself agreeing with them more than they probably expected. I don’t want that kind of evangelism either. Fresh Expressions, at its best, is a rejection of those practices. It creates space for authentic relationships, for shared life, for belonging before believing. It resists coercion and honors the dignity of every person’s spiritual journey. But as the conversation went deeper, something else emerged. The real issue wasn’t just how we share faith. It was whether there is anything unique to share at all. Theologically, they had embraced a kind of soft universalism. All religions lead to God. All paths are ultimately the same. Evangelism, then, becomes not just harmful, but unnecessary. An outdated concept from a less enlightened age. And here’s where I want to be careful. I, too, believe God is active beyond the boundaries of the church. The Holy Spirit goes before us. I have met people in other religious traditions who seem closer to the way of Jesus than many who claim his name but do not live his life. Furthermore, I believe Jesus has descended into the depths of hell to liberate the captives. I don’t see the gospel as a post-mortem escape plan from a bad eternal outcome. I’ve experienced a living hell in this life, got the t-shirt, and was rescued by Jesus from it. And in the communities I help cultivate, we are not trying to “convert” people in the aggressive, reductionistic ways many of us were taught. We are not walking people down the Romans Road or pressuring them into a scripted prayer. Our communities are intentionally spaces for interreligious dialogue, where mutual respect, curiosity, and shared life open the door for deeper spiritual discovery. In Fresh Expressions, we don’t practice “bounded-set” evangelism, where you have to know the secret code to enter the gated community. We are co-creating circles. Spaces of belonging. Environments where people from all kinds of backgrounds, religious, spiritual, skeptical, can explore life, meaning, and faith together. But those circles are not empty. They have a center. And for us, that center is Jesus. Not an idea. Not a symbol. Not merely a moral teacher. The living Christ. His glorious, death-conquering, fully-alive and present-with-us-now, risen self. In a “centered-set” kind of evangelism, people move at the pace of grace. Some are leaning in. Some are circling at a distance. Some are even moving away. But the center remains constant, and over time, lives begin to orient around him.
We practice justice and compassion, yes. But not just in the name of Jesus. In the way of Jesus. In the truth of Jesus. In the life of Jesus. So I tried to explain all of this from the back of that bus on a Holy Land tour. And it just didn’t land. For this group, Jesus seemed to be something else entirely. A concept. A historical figure. A crucified peasant with radical ideas. A social justice warrior. But not a living presence. Not someone who heals. Not someone who speaks. Not someone who invites us into union with God and one another. I didn’t have language for it at the time. Looking back now, I realize what I was encountering was not the absence of faith, or even the rejection of Christianity, but one of the most subtle and compelling distortions of our time: Jesus-less Progressive Christianity. Thin Religion: Christianity Without Christ Sociologically, what I encountered on that bus is not random. It is part of a much larger cultural pattern and is best understood as a form of moralized spirituality shaped by late modernity. It retains the ethical vision of Christianity, justice, inclusion, compassion, but detaches those ethics from a living, authoritative Christ. In this way, it functions as a kind of thin religion, where belief is flexible, identity is self-constructed, and spirituality is measured more by one’s social commitments than by one’s relationship to God. The result is a faith that looks Christian on the surface, but whose center of gravity has quietly shifted. This distortion does not emerge in a vacuum. It is, in many cases, a reaction to harm. Over the past several decades, millions of people, especially younger generations, have experienced Christianity not as good news, but as exclusion, control, hypocrisy, or even trauma. One in three Americans now report some form of religious harm or wounding. When people deconstruct, they rarely discard everything. They tend to retain what felt true and life-giving, while rejecting what felt oppressive. But in the process, something unintended often happens: Jesus is not always rejected outright, but he is reduced, reframed, or relocated. He becomes a symbol of love rather than the Lord of life. At the same time, this distortion is shaped by what we call in sociology: expressive individualism. In our cultural moment, the highest authority is no longer tradition, Scripture, or the church, it is the self. Each person becomes the curator of their own beliefs, assembling meaning from a range of sources. This leads to what scholars describe as bricolage religion, a do-it-yourself spirituality where elements of Christianity are combined with insights from psychology, social theory, and other religious traditions. Within this framework, Jesus is often appreciated, even admired, but no longer occupies a unique or normative role. He is one voice among many, not the center that orders all things.
A Flattened Gospel: Therapy, Activism, and the Loss of Transcendence Closely related is the rise of therapeutic culture, where the primary goal of life is emotional well-being and self-actualization. In this environment, religion is expected to heal, affirm, and support. God becomes less a holy presence who calls, confronts, and transforms, and more a source of comfort and validation. Sin is redefined primarily in social terms, harm, injustice, oppression, rather than as a rupture in our relationship with God. While this has helped recover important dimensions of justice and compassion, it can also lead to a flattening of the gospel, where salvation is reduced to personal and social wellness rather than participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. There is also an important political dimension. Over the last half-century, Christianity in America has become deeply entangled with partisan identity, particularly on the conservative side. For many, rejecting harmful forms of Christianity has meant distancing themselves not just from certain doctrines or practices, but from anything that feels “religious” at all. In progressive spaces, faith is often translated into the language of activism. The church is replaced by movements. Discipleship is reframed as advocacy. And while these movements can do profound good, they can also unintentionally absorb Christianity into ideology, rather than allowing the gospel to stand over and transform every ideology. The Kingdom Without the King To be clear, this distortion is compelling because it gets something right. It rightly insists that faith must be expressed in love, that justice matters, that the church has often failed to embody the teachings of Jesus. It refuses to separate spirituality from real-world suffering. In many ways, it is a necessary corrective to other distortions that have overemphasized belief at the expense of love. But when orthopraxy (right action) becomes disconnected from orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopathy (right suffering/love), something essential is lost. The energy for justice remains, but the source of that energy begins to fade. At its core, then, Jesus-less Progressive Christianity is a faith that keeps the teachings of Jesus while loosening its attachment to the person of Jesus. It seeks the kingdom, but without a clear sense of the King. And over time, that subtle shift matters. Because in historic Christianity, love, justice, and transformation are not abstract ideals we strive toward on our own. They are the fruit of a living relationship with the risen Christ, who is not only an example to follow, but a presence to encounter, a voice to obey, and a life in which we participate. Justice Without Jesus Progressive distortion can be understood by these three key traits: 1. Christ-Decentered Activism 2. Selective Scripture 3. Therapeutic Spirituality Thus, this distortion is the mirror image of the conservative distortions.
In both cases, something essential is lost. One clings to truth without love. The other practices love without clinging to the one who is truth incarnate. Lord and Living Center To bring this full circle, what’s ultimately at stake here is not a minor theological disagreement, it is the center of the faith itself. The historic Christian claim is not merely that Jesus taught love, or embodied justice, or inspired a movement. It is that Jesus is Lord… alive, present, and reigning. When that confession is softened, sidelined, or symbolized, the entire structure of Christian faith begins to collapse. Not all at once, not dramatically, but gradually, like a building whose foundation has been quietly removed. You can keep the language, the ethics, even the community for a while. But over time, without a living center, the energy fades. The mission fragments. And the church becomes just one more well-meaning social institution among many. This is why evangelism still matters deeply. Not as coercion. Not as manipulation. Not as a sales pitch for heaven. But as witness to a living reality. If future pastors and leaders no longer see evangelism as a central task of the church, then the continued decline of mainline denominations is not mysterious… it is inevitable. Because a church that has nothing unique to share will eventually have no compelling reason to exist. Evangelism, rightly understood, is not about growing an institution. It is about participating in God’s ongoing mission to reconcile all things, to invite people into a living relationship with Christ and into a community shaped by his love. In recent lectures on evangelism and eschatology, I’ve tried to name this more clearly. The telos (end, purpose, goal) of evangelism is not escape from the world, but the renewal of the world. The kingdom of God is not a distant future we wait for, it is a reality breaking in here and now. That means evangelism necessarily includes environmental justice, because creation itself is groaning for restoration. It includes anti-racism, because the dividing walls of hostility have been torn down in Christ. It includes making amends for harm done and removing barriers that have excluded the full participation of our LGBTQ+ siblings, so that all can offer their gifts in the body of Christ. It includes acts of compassion, solidarity, and repair, because the reign of God always moves toward healing what is broken. But these are not ends in themselves. They are signs, foretastes, witnesses to something deeper: the presence of the risen Jesus, making all things new. So the invitation is not to abandon justice, but to re-anchor it. What if the very instincts that draw us toward justice and love are not replacements for Jesus, but evidence that he is already at work, calling us closer? What if true liberation is not found in moving beyond him, but in moving toward him? What if the center still holds? What if the Jesus who taught, healed, and threw dinner parties across the Galilee really is still alive? What if activism, justice, and prophetic denunciation is important because it yokes us in with what Jesus is already doing in the world? Conversation Starter: |
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