Jesus didn’t send his disciples into cities, and say “When you go, be nice, trendy, hard-working, law-abiding citizens, start successful businesses, be super culturally relevant, and pray… And wait… Wait for that moment. That moment someone asks you why you’re such a great person and why you’re so successful. Then, and only then, preach the gospel to them.” Actually he told them to preach the gospel, heal the sick, cleanse lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Matthew 10:8 It’s dumb for us to do everything that helps us spread the gospel, but never actually preach the gospel. That’s just dumb. I understand that there are many “covert ministries”, and spheres where much wisdom is required, and I’m thankful for Christians who God has positioned to bring influence in the various mountains of culture. And I understand that in most cases, it would not be a good idea to jump up onto the table and start proclaiming a blistering bible message. However, I’m afraid that we’ve become kind of like hunters sitting in our hunting blinds, and we’re so preoccupied with the process of sitting in waiting and perfecting our animal calls, that we never take the shot. We just watch the game stroll by and we pat each other on the back, and pride ourselves in how close they got to us without getting spooked.
In China today, there are 27,000 people coming to Jesus every day.
One of the underground church networks I have read about has started more than 60 bible schools throughout China
(as of 2011).
They have sent out more missionaries than all the other church networks combined.
They raise $200,000 every year for missions, and that is money exclusively raised through their thousands of churches,
mostly located in the Anhiu province, where the majority of the churches consist of poor farmers.
Several of the networks of churches in China are well over or close to ten million people.
China has the largest church in the history of the world.
The more you read about the church in China, the more you realize that this wasn’t the result of Christians just passively living Godly lives, going to work, and hoping that the world would see their lives, and somehow get saved.
The Chinese martyrs who ended up being the seeds that produced the revival we see today, were bold in their preaching of the gospel, and they paid with their lives.
You don’t get twenty seven thousand people coming to Jesus every day by not preaching the gospel.
What happened? What happened to the most simple form of preaching the gospel?
I want to share several things I believe have contributed to this negative phenomena.
Souls vs. spheres.
My amazing mentor Michael Brodeur, who teaches a class called The Theology of Transformation once said so eloquently:
The reaching of souls depends on the reaching of spheres. And vice versa. In saying that it only makes sense to save souls instead of saving spheres, we essentially divided the gospel. We created a false dichotomy.”
The problem is that we are all pendulum riders.
In various points of history, people would get a revelation about the fact that God is not merely interested in saving souls,
but that He’s also interested in things like ending slavery, stopping mass genocide, and transforming societies.
Some would call that the rise of the “social gospel.”
General William and Catherine Booth were exceptional examples of this.
Famous as the founders of the largest non-profit organization in the world, The Salvation Army,
they had an unquenchable passion for saving souls.
However, unknown to many, they were also trailblazers in things like rescuing young girls from sex slavery,
reforming life-threatening work conditions in factories, and bravely standing up to the injustices of their time.
Fast forward to today.
Now it would not be uncommon to meet people who would say that their drilling of wells in Africa is in itself preaching the gospel.
I’m sorry.
Drilling wells in Africa is not preaching the gospel.
Preaching the gospel is actually opening your mouth and preaching the gospel.
Drilling wells is awesome, but let’s be honest. It’s not preaching the gospel.
In a similar way, when it comes to the 7 Mountains teaching, I believe we’ve allowed the pendulum to swing past God’s sweet spot for saving the planet.
I love this teaching, and I believe it has been very helpful for the body. Thank you, Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright!
God cares about politics, economy, societal transformation and reform, clean water, safety, infrastructure etc.
And it’s important for people (most of us) that feel called to various arenas outside of full time ministry to believe that they’re bringing the Kingdom to those spheres, and not feel guilty of not doing any ministry per se.
It’s been an important revolutionary teaching that I love, and teach.
However, the 7 Mountains teaching was never intended to cause people to just sit back and relax, when it comes to preaching the gospel.
As if somehow, God’s Kingdom would somehow sovereignly invade those mountains, just because we got a revelation that He wants to.
It’s not a sovereign job.
God has delighted Himself in allowing us to be involved in the transformation.
I’m afraid that sometimes, the more we lean into the idea of being successful and prosperous in our respective sphere,
and bringing reforms to all the different mountains of society,
we get so deep in the weeds, that we start to drift away from preaching the simple gospel message.
The Supernatural revolution
When I did three years of BSSM, I learned to heal the sick, to prophesy, etc.
To some degree, when we’re trained to encourage people, prophesy over people, and heal people,
that creates an environment that’s dominated by positivity.
(This is my personal experience, and it’s a fine line, so please hear my heart)
After a while, being in that kind of environment,
preaching the gospel starts to feel very uncomfortable and even a bit unnatural.
I found that I was was a lot more comfortable with getting people healed, or giving them a prophetic word,
than preaching the gospel and leading them to Jesus.
Unless you believe in Universalism, there’s an uncomfortable side to the REAL gospel message.
It’s not just ALL GOOD.
There’s a conflict.
A big glaring problem.
A gap.
There’s sin.
There’s hell.
And it can feel like it doesn’t line up with our value system of releasing edification, exhortation, and encouragement.
1 Corinthians 14:3
The reason being that you can’t really preach the gospel, and not ever mention the problem of sin.
A movie with no conflict.
Being one of the most widely known screenwriter lecturers,
Robert McKee teaches that in order for a story to work, and be meaningful, you essentially need these four things:
- A lead character.
- Ambition. If the character doesn’t want anything, then the audience gets bored.
- Conflict. Every story needs hard times. If there aren’t hard times then your audience won’t be engaged. It won’t make sense.
- Resolution. It has to come to an ending.
Sometimes the way we share our faith is like trying to get someone to like a movie that doesn’t have any conflict.
No danger.
No enemy.
It’s just all good.
Positive and encouraging. Just like Christian radio.
“You’re awesome! And that’s all that matters!”
General William Booth prophesied with eerie accuracy about some of what we see today.
The chief danger of the twentieth century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and Heaven without Hell.”
The gospel and the church are not the same.
Don’t let things you dislike about your church overshadow the gospel, and cause you to be ashamed of the gospel.
The gospel and the church are not the same thing.
Church is easy… until people get involved.
There will always be problems in the church, because the church is people.
But there is power in the gospel.
Some of us, being frustrated with the church, have equated the church to the gospel.
“Well, I’m not sure I can bring my friend to our church, because…”
I believe it’s a tragic mistake when we allow the problems in the church to serve as justification for us not to preach the gospel.
We start to feel like we can’t preach the gospel to people, until we fix the church up.
The church will never be perfect.
But Jesus is perfect, and there’s power in the gospel.
People need the gospel in their lives, even if your church is messed up!
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation…” Romans 1:16
It doesn’t have to be fancy
The message of the gospel doesn’t have to be fancy, and ultra culturally relevant, and super hipster,
and perfectly spoken in the latest cultural dialect.
People are smart.
And if they don’t understand something there’s nothing wrong with explaining.
If they don’t know what the phrase “born again” means, NO PROBLEM!
When Jesus used that term, nobody knew what He was talking about.
How dare He use a Christianese word no one even understood.
Jesus said a lot of things that didn’t make sense in his time and culture.
In our desire to reach people where they’re at, in a language they understand,
we have to be careful that we don’t sacrifice the potency of the gospel on the altar of cultural relevance.
The gospel brings division.
It challenges people to make a choice.
That’s the way it’s intended to be.
However, if you drench all of that with sincere love, healing, miracles, words of knowledge, prophecy,
and all the other manifestations of truly preaching the gospel of the Kingdom (not merely the gospel of salvation),
then it’s more than just palatable.
It’s glorious!
You don’t have to be an apologetics ninja
New believers sharing the gospel are living proof that the power is in the gospel, not in our methodology or sophistication.
The most effective evangelists are people who were just born again.
The irony is that they are the least trained.
They haven’t been trained to prophesy, get words of knowledge, heal the sick.
They haven’t learned apologetics, and how to intelligently defend their faith.
But nevertheless, they are astonishingly potent agents of the Kingdom.
When was the last time you shared the simple, pure gospel with someone?
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