Episode Details

As foreshadowed in last week’s edition, I want to come back to a question that has been niggling away at me over the past few months, and that a number of you have asked about. 

The question goes like this: 

* let us agree that there is only one gospel (not many gospels); 

* and let us also agree that each person we tell the gospel to will have different questions, and come to the gospel with different cultural presuppositions; any particular conversation or presentation might start at a different ‘entry point’, touch on different presenting issues or questions, and utilise different language or metaphors along the way; 

* how, then, can each gospel conversation or presentation be the same and yet different? How can the gospel be one thing, and yet many things?

This is a very important question, because it affects not only how we preach the gospel (in evangelistic talks or courses) but how we train everyday Christians to understand the gospel and chat about it with their friends. (I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, as we revise and rewrite the Two ways to live training material.)

It’s too big a question, in fact, to answer completely and satisfactorily in this little newsletter. But I do have an insight to offer that I hope might move the discussion forward. 

Let us imagine that our gospel conversation (or sermon) starts by talking about something good in the world that our friends want more of (like beauty or love or justice) or something bad in the world that our friends want less of (like suffering or injustice or the fact that I’m lonely and my job stinks and I feel desperate). 

One increasingly common approach to evangelism suggests that we should frame our presentation of the gospel around these common culturally-framed desires or frustrations in our hearers, by:

* affirming what we can affirm that is good about these desires;

* challenging the dysfunctional way that we (and our culture) understand them and seek to meet them; showing that our way of pursuing these things doesn’t work;

* and then offering the gospel news that there is an answer or fulfilment of these desires, and it is found in what God has done through Jesus.

This is sometimes called the Resonance-Dissonance-Gospel approach. 

There’s much to like about it—particularly in how it listens carefully to each person (or culture) and seeks to have a gracious, salty conversation that bounces off the questions and issues of everyday life (in a Colossians 4 kind of way). 

But there’s a significant weakness here as well—or at least there often is, depending on how the conversation unfolds. 

In Two ways to live terms, the problem happens when we glide too quickly from the second half of Point 2 to the second half of Point 5.

Let me explain what I mean. 

For non-2wtl aficionados, Point 2 says: 

We all reject God as our ruler by running our own lives our own way. 

But by rebelling against God’s way, we damage ourselves, each other and the world. 

Coming as it does after Point 1 (God as creator and ruler), Point 2 presents a picture of a good world gone wrong because of our rebellion against the Creator. And so there is plenty of scope to open a conversation of the Resonance-Dissonance variety. God has made a good world—and so beauty and justice and meaning and freedom and a satisfying job are indeed good things that we want and experience. But our ability to experience them is drastically compromised because of our disconnection with the Creator and his ways. So far so good. 

But what frequently happens next is that Point 2 is not fully enough explored, and then Points 3-4 are skimmed over too quickly—if I can put it that way—in order to get to the happy ending of Point 5. 

Point 5 says: 

God raised Jesus to life again as the ruler and judge of the world. 

Jesus ha