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Your Inquiry Journey - -
PROLOGUE
PRELUDE: The Parable of the Ice Cream Shop
ONE ~ Why Reassess?
TWO ~ What Do We Mean By “This Gospel”?
THREE ~ The Gospel and Mission Today
FOUR ~ The State of Our (dis) Union
FIVE ~ Mapping the 25 Distinct Expressions of Christianity by Orientation
SIX ~ Interview: What Is “This Gospel”?
SEVEN ~ Jesus’ Gospel Before Our Systems and Doctrinal Statements
EIGHT ~ Paul’s Gospel Is Not a Different Gospel
NINE ~ One Gospel, Three Dimensions, Many Expressions
TEN ~ One Shared Seven-Word “Lowest Common Denominator” Gospel
ELEVEN ~ How This Minimalist Gospel Compares to Jesus’ Own Summaries
TWELVE ~ Testing the Minimalist Gospel Against Paul’s Own Summaries
THIRTEEN ~ How Mission Agencies Implicitly Choose a Gospel Orientation
FOURTEEN ~ A Teaching Framework Pastors Can Use
FIFTEEN ~ A Unifying Re-View
- BONUS: The Parable of the Ice Cream Shop: Explanation, Illustration, Sermons, Facilitating Discussion, Mapping Traditions
- BONUS ~ Suggestions on Pursuing Unity
- BONUS ~ The Parable of God’s Global Choir
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BONUS> One True Church - Different Expressions Of The Spirit
MORE> Express The Unity of The Church: Not Conformity but...
PLUS> Concepts & Practices of CItywide Expressions of Church Unity
BONUS Content >>>SCROLL for RELATED COMMENTARY by GUEST-POSTERS + FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS
"Gospel"
AS EVERYBODY KNOWS BY NOW, gospel means "good news." Ironically, it is some of the gospel's most ardent fans who try to turn it into bad news. For instance:
"It all boils down to the Golden Rule. Just love thy neighbor, and that's all you have to worry about." What makes this bad news is that loving our neighbor is exactly what none of us is very good at. Most of the time, we have a hard time loving even our family and friends very effectively.
"Jesus was a great teacher and the best example we have of how we ought to live." As a teacher, Jesus is at least matched by, for instance, Siddhartha Gautama. As an example, we can only look at Jesus and despair.
"The resurrection is a poetic way of saying that the spirit of Jesus lives on as a constant inspiration to us all." If all the resurrection means is that Jesus' spirit lives on like Abraham Lincoln's or Adolf Hitler's but that otherwise he is just as dead as anybody else who cashed in two thousand years ago, then, as Saint Paul puts it, "our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain" (I Corinthians 15:14). If the enemies of Jesus succeeded for all practical purposes in killing him permanently around A.D. 30, then like Socrates, Thomas More, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so on, he is simply another saintly victim of the wickedness and folly of humankind, and the cross is a symbol of ultimate defeat.
What is both good and new about the good news is the wild claim that Jesus did not simply tell us that God loves us even in our wickedness and folly and wants us to love each other the same way and to love God too, but that if we will allow it to happen, God will actually bring about this unprecedented transformation of our hearts himself.
What is both good and new about the good news is the mad insistence that Jesus lives on among us not just as another haunting memory but as the outlandish, holy, and invisible power of God working not just through the sacraments, but in countless hidden ways to make even slobs like us loving and whole beyond anything we could conceivably pull off by ourselves.
Thus the gospel is not only good and new but, if you take it seriously, a holy terror. Jesus never claimed that the process of being changed from a slob into a human being was going to be a Sunday school picnic. On the contrary. Childbirth may occasionally be painless, but rebirth, never. Part of what it means to be a slob is to hang on for dear life to our slobbery.
-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words
THERE ARE BAPTISTS, Methodists, Episcopalians. There are Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists. There are Disciples of Christ. There are Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses. There are Moravians. There are Quakers. And that's only for starters. New denominations spring up. Old denominations split up and form new branches. The question is not, Are you a Baptist? but, What kind of a Baptist? It is not, Are you a member of the Presbyterian church? but Which Presbyterian church? A town with a population of less than five hundred may have churches of three or four denominations and none of them more than a quarter full on a good Sunday.
There are some genuine differences between them, of course. The methods of church government differ. They tend to worship in different forms all the way from chanting, incense, and saints' days to a service that is virtually indistinguishable from a New England town meeting with musical interludes. Some read the Bible more literally than others. If you examine the fine print, you may even come across some relatively minor theological differences among them, some stressing one aspect of the faith, some stressing others. But if you were to ask the average member of any congregation to explain those differences, you would be apt to be met with a long, unpregnant silence. By and large they all believe pretty much the same things and are confused about the same things and keep their fingers crossed during the same parts of the Nicene Creed.
However, it is not so much differences like these that keep the denominations apart as it is something more nearly approaching team spirit. Somebody from a long line of Congregationalists would no more consider crossing over to the Methodists than a Red Sox fan would consider rooting for the Mets. And even bricks and mortar have a lot to do with it. Your mother was married in this church building and so were you, and so was your oldest son. Your grandparents are buried in the cemetery just beyond the Sunday school wing. What on earth would ever persuade you to leave all that and join forces with the Lutherans in their building down the street? So what if neither of you can pay the minister more than a pittance and both of you have as hard a time getting more than thirty to fill the sanctuary built for two hundred as you do raising money to cover the annual heating bill?
All the duplication of effort and waste of human resources. All the confusion about what the church is, both within the ranks and without. All the counterproductive competition. All the unnecessarily empty pews and unnecessary expense. Then add to that picture the Roman Catholic Church, still more divided from the Protestant denominations than they are from each other, and by the time you're through, you don't know whether to burst into laughter or into tears.
When Jesus took the bread and said, "This is my body which is broken for you" (1 Corinthians 11:24), it's hard to believe that even in his wildest dreams he foresaw the tragic and ludicrous brokenness of the church as his body. There's no reason why everyone should be Christian in the same way and every reason to leave room for differences, but if all the competing factions of Christendom were to give as much of themselves to the high calling and holy hope that unite them as they do now to the relative inconsequentialities that divide them, the church would look more like the Kingdom of God for a change and less like an ungodly mess.
-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words by info@frederickbuechner.org