Scot McKnight and iMonk on the Individualized Gospel

I saw this the other day on Scot McKnight's blog. Really good stuff on how the individualized gospel is killing us. Michael Spencer (iMonk) summarized it today and gives his own thoughts. I reprint his post here in its totality. Read this. Seriously.

From Scot Mcknight’s Kingdom Gospel series at Jesus Creed. I did a bit of creative editing.

I wonder what John would think of the gospel I sketched at the beginning of this chapter:

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
But you have a sin problem that separates you from God.
The good news is that Jesus came to die for your sins.
If you accept Jesus’ death, you can be reconnected to God.
Those who are reconnected to God will live in heaven with God.

Every line of that statement is more or less true. It is the sequencing of those lines, the “story” of that gospel if you will, that concerns me and that turns Jesus’ message of the kingdom into a blue parakeet. And it is not only the sequencing, it is the omitting of major themes in the Bible that concerns me. What most shocks the one who reads the Bible as Story, where the focus is overwhelmingly on God forming a covenant community, is that this outline of the gospel above does two things: it eliminates community and it turns the entire gospel into a “me and God” or “God and me” gospel. Who needs a church if this is the gospel? (Answer: no one.) What becomes of the church for this gospel? (Answer: an organization for those who want to do that sort of thing.) While every line in this gospel is more or less true, what concerns many of us today is that this gospel makes the church unimportant.

I believe this gospel can deconstruct, is deconstructing, and will deconstruct the church if we don’t change it now. Our churches are filled with Christians who don’t give a rip about church life and we have a young generation who, in some cases, care so much about the Church they can’t attend a local church because too many local churches are shaped too much by the gospel I outlined above.

Scot Mcknight has increasingly become a lightning rod in evangelicalism as he does his work as a New Testament scholar teaching the church to understand and apply the Bible. The “lightning” is the reaction of many conservatives to Mcknight’s views on Biblical interpretation, women in ministry and the Gospel of the Kingdom.

In the past few days, Mcknight has been asking some pointed questions and making powerfully honest applications regarding the “gospel” that has developed in recent evangelicalism. That Gospel, which he summarizes in the quote above, is the familiar Four Spiritual Laws/Billy Graham/Evangelism training version of bringing a person to have a relationship with God through affirming certain beliefs in a prayer or other. He points out that this “Gospel” is so individualistic that it not only makes the purpose of the church largely irrelevant, it also creates believers who have little or no concept of the entire Biblical story’s focus on the “people of God.”

It is a “gospel” that deconstructs the church and, in my opinion, largely deconstructs discipleship down to the components of individualism as interpreted through society, personality and personal experience.

It is a “gospel” that needs a minimum of “spiritual formation” or “Jesus shaped community” because its primary pattern is that God wants YOU to be YOU and YOU are the primary interpreter of Jesus for YOU.

At some time we are going to have to get around to talking about this, and Mcknight has opened the door.

Since I do a lot of evangelistic work and evangelistic counseling with new believers, I can give you a report from the lab.

Here’s what happens: right at the moment the student “gets it,” the whole movie needs to stop, and right there the student needs to look at me and say….

“OK. If that’s it, I want you to honestly know something. I can say I believe this because I do. I can pray the prayer. I can get baptized. I can call myself a Christian. But this little moment we are having here…this moment where I cross the line? It’s not going to change my life. It’s not going to change me. It’s going to take more than saying yes to a set of belief statements. I need some help. A lot of help from God and people. I’m only barely getting started and I know I can’t make it on my own.”

But I won’t hear that. What I’ll hear and what most of us will say is something along the line of how the “gospel” above is life-changing, and now that person has a life-changing relationship with God.

They should now, we’ll say, read their Bible on their own every day, pray on their own every day, witness on their own, find a good church on their own, and go there at least an hour a week.

And give their money.

And listen to Christian music. And buy Christian products.

And live up to the following 48 page, small print list of behavior rules, most of which wouldn’t make sense to the aliens ruling this galaxy, much less a new Christian.

Left with the “gospel” Scot has outlined, that new believer stands a better than average chance of getting nowhere permanent in a church. They will become convinced that their own views on things like sexuality and money are totally normal and can’t be changed. They will see their faith as highly individual, personal and private.

If they make it into some form of Christian community, it will likely be one that affirms them in this individual path by teaching them that Jesus is a life coach who wants them to experience lots of personal fulfillment and have a great dating experience.

Whatever steps they take in the Christian life will come down to “I got so much out of that.” The primary flaw with Christianity will be that it’s boring. The great quest will be relevance and good feelings. The church will either facilitate the authority and fulfillment of the individual and his/her version of the “gospel” or it will become optional.

Over time, expect most churches to fail the test. Chances are that this new Christian will be a church drop-out pursuing their own “walk with the Lord” outside of church before too long.

Welcome to the evangelical wilderness. Anyone else recognize that individualized gospel Scot is describing and what it has done to you, your church community and your family?

Anyone else sick of it?

Thank you, Scot. I love you for writing this because it inspires me to see how it has all worked its way into the heart and soul of lifelong evangelicals like me.

We need to talk about this some more. (Clue: Churches that surrender to this are destroying themselves. Your own message will deconstruct the purpose for which you exist. HA!)

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ME:  These guys are stumbling onto something here. I have been writing about this for a while now. We have salvation without discipleship or community and we call it good. Bonhoeffer calls it cheap grace. There must be a way that we can talk about grace and faith without adding works while still being faithful to the very words of Jesus when He gave the Gospel of the Kingdom. It seems that some people are wrestling with that and I am glad. We will all be much better off for it.

UPDATE:  My friend Joe Kennedy says the same thing in this post right here. Interesting thoughts. What do you think?

Comments

[Joe Kennedy]

I re:posted something I wrote about the Gospel Inoculation from 2005 tonight. Glad it seems to fit into this theme.

[Bob Cleveland]

Alan,

Good/bad reaction going on here, so far. And I think the bottom line's apt to be a highlighting of the shortcomings of the "typical baptist church", of which Internet Monk said we're evangelical, but that's ALL we are.

The Bible is SO clear that we're a body, and EVERYONE has a task in it, that I have to think that part of the Bible just isn't being heard from the pulpits. And perhaps that's because there's been SUCH a strong emphasis on conclusions FROM scripture (drinking and gambling are bad, eternal security, the Trinity, etc etc) that the scriptures themselves are relatively unknown to most folks in the pew.

Maybe it's a simple as we're out "soulwinning" when we ought to be making disciples of the folks who are already here. Maybe too many churches are only worried about getting the folks in.

As CB says, "nickels and noses".

[Doug]

Spot on! I have been preaching and teaching this for years, but I sense an even greater urgency as we see so many of our traditional churches dying. Preaching the "kingdom" instead of the "gospel" is more of a mindset than a "doctrine". The trend in our SBC churches will reverse when we see this, and our pastors are trained in this kind of a setting. It will also change when we honestly and humbly quit trying to "save the church" and instead start "building the kingdom" as Jesus commanded us.