The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited

However, this story is not the same as the gospel. The gospel fits into this story, but it is not the story. Further, the gospel only makes sense in that story. Now a very important claim: without that story there is no gospel. This leads to a second claim: if we ignore that story, the gospel gets distorted, and that is just what has happened in sa

The Christian faith is kaleidoscopic, and most of us are color-blind. It is multidimensional, and most of us manage to hold at most two dimensions in our heads at any one time. It is symphonic, and we can just about whistle one of the tunes.

Evangelicalism is known for at least two words: gospel and (personal) salvation.

The widespread assumption that church bodies can baptize infants and then automatically catechize those babies into the faith when they are preteens or early teens has been challenged by evangelicalism’s stubborn commitment to make a personal decision about Jesus Christ.

I have heard numbers as high as 75 percent of Americans have made some kind of decision to accept Christ, but statistics also show that only about 25 percent of Americans go to church regularly.

At the most conservative of estimates, we lose at least 50 percent of those who make decisions. We cannot help but conclude that making a decision is not the vital element that leads to a life of discipleship. Much higher correlations can be found between routine Sunday school participation, youth group participation, and families that nurture one

What is the gospel?

I believe the word gospel has been hijacked by what we believe about “personal salvation,” and the gospel itself has been reshaped to facilitate making “decisions.” The result of this hijacking is that the word gospel no longer means in our world what it originally meant to either Jesus or the apostles.

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