Tuesday, January 08, 2008

SINNER!

There has been quite a dust-up in the youth ministry world as the organization Young Life has fired a number of staffers due to a change in policy regarding the way the gospel is to be presented. Several bloggers have picked up on the controversy: Mark van Steenwyk, Tony Jones, and Rick Lawrence.

Apparently the problem is that Young Life has required that the gospel presentation must begin with people gaining recognition of their sinful state before they hear about the mercy, grace and love of God. This perspective has gained popularity thanks to Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron's Way of the Master training.

This infuriates me. How dare we say that there is only one approach to the gospel when the Bible itself contains a wide variety of approaches? How arrogant to say that this way is somehow "Jesus' Way" and that any other method is "man-centered". In fact, several prominent theologians have described ways of sharing God's message of hope based on the deep longings that are common to all humanity, perhaps rooted in our very creation in the image of God.

N.T. Wright begins his book Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense with four "echoes of the voice of God" in today's world: a longing for justice, a quest for spirituality, hunger for relationships, and a delight in beauty. He then describes through the rest of the book how the true and living God made manifest in Jesus Christ speaks into and fulfills those longings. He doesn't ignore sin and repentance, he just doesn't start there.

LeRon Shults approaches things in a similar vein by talking about three universal desires: to love and be loved, to know and be known, and to belong and to be longed for. When we talk about what it means when we say "Jesus Saves", it includes saving us from the destructive and selfish ways we have sought to fulfill those desires and saving us into a new way of living and being.

It seems to me that when we attempt to share the good news of Jesus, we would do well to listen to the other person first. If the gospel is actually GOOD news, then it ought to resonate powerfully with the longings, experiences, and hopes of humanity. Finding those places within conversations and relationships seems to be a far better way than to slap on a "one-size-fits-all" minimization of the gospel.

2 Comments:

At 2:25 PM, Blogger pastorboy said...

Of course you know where I come from on this.

Your comments are all very true 'love and be loved, known and be known' etc. , however, the heart is deceitfully wicked. From that perspective, man, in His natural state, cannot recognize or know that he needs for Christ until he or she recognizes their need.

You don't need to use the way of the master script, just make sure to use the law as it was meant to be to expose us for falling short. Martin Luther and Charles Wesley were famous for examining themselves in this way, even after they were saved!

I use the law in evangelism, but no two witnessing encounters have ever been the same for me. Guided by the Holy Spirit, I am able to share my faith with anyone who God brings me into contact with.

You really should research the method a little deeper, because I have tried each and every method I have come across, and this is by far the most effective in truthfully exposing man's condition and making them hungry for the Good News.

 
At 9:02 AM, Blogger Corey said...

Tony Jones quoting John Calvin:

There have been some comments calling for me to retract the “wallow” comment. I will, in part. Though the non-negotiables document makes it clear that Jesus Christ “is to be proclaimed in every message” and that kids are not meant to wallow in sin, the hyper-Reformed sequence of 1) awareness of sinfulness, 2) repentance and belief, is even out of step with John Calvin. Calvin’s doctrine of “evangelical repentance” is explicated by him thusly:

Although we have already in some measure shown how faith possesses Christ, and gives us the enjoyment of his benefits, the subject would still be obscure were we not to add an exposition of the effects resulting from it. The sum of the Gospel is, not without good reason, made to consist in repentance and forgiveness of sins; and, therefore, where these two heads are omitted, any discussion concerning faith will be meager and defective, and indeed almost useless. Now, since Christ confers upon us, and we obtain by faith, both free reconciliation and newness of life, reason and order require that I should here begin to treat of both. The shortest transition, however, will be from faith to repentance; for repentance being properly understood it will better appear how a man is justified freely by faith alone, and yet that holiness of life, real holiness, as it is called, is inseparable from the free imputation of righteousness. That repentance not only always follows faith, but is produced by it, ought to be without controversy. For since pardon and forgiveness are offered by the preaching of the Gospel, in order that the sinner, delivered from the tyranny of Satan, the yoke of sin, and the miserable bondage of iniquity, may pass into the kingdom of God, it is certain that no man can embrace the grace of the Gospel without retaking himself from the errors of his former life into the right path, and making it his whole study to practice repentance. Those who think that repentance precedes faith instead of flowing from, or being produced by it, as the fruit by the tree, have never understood its nature, and are moved to adopt that view on very insufficient grounds.

John Calvin, Institutes on Christian Religion, Book III, Chapter 3, Section 1 (emphasis mine).

 

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