What Is The Gospel?
While attending a recent conference I frequently heard various speakers express their concern for Emergent Church leaders who seemed to have denied the gospel. They quoted various authors to give evidence to their accusations.
The gospel was defined as the life, death and resurrection of Jesus that brought brings grace to all who believe and receive him. Those who deny this story were labeled as ‘heretics’ - however congenial their personalities.
Simultaneously, these same speakers spoke against various practices within the church - most often labeling homosexuality as sin and denying a leadership role to anyone wrestling with this ’sin’. Meanwhile, they same individuals confessed the ’sins’ they struggle with - anger, profanity, jealousy, etc. These were, of course, ’acceptable sins’. No one ventured to add sins of lust (either heterosexual or otherwise).
The problem with all this, in my opinion, is that when we receive the gospel of Christ it informs us that all have sinned, all are sinners, and all sins have been forgiven. There is, as one seminar speaker mentioned, ‘bad guys and Jesus, not bad guys, good guys and Jesus’. Receiving Jesus doesn’t make us perfect in actuality, but in accounting. If this is true then those who ‘really’ understand the gospel would receive into fellowship (and even leadership positions) all who receive Jesus - regardless of what they continue to wrestle with. If we confess our sins and repent, we are forgiven our sins - but we are not made immune to falling back into those sins again. Yet, if we do fall, we continue to have an ‘advocate with the Father’. That is the gospel.
So, if we say we believe the gospel and that belief in the gospel defines whether or not we are a Christian, then we living out the gospel will be seen as a forgiving, embracing & loving spirit - a clearly very attractive fellowship, even for leaders. Instead, we find churches and denominations labeling one another as Christian or less-than-Christian based on what is believed without taking into consideration the evidence of believe found in how that belief is applied.
For example, the Christian church has repeatedly and unwittingly empowered the media to be a much more important voice for ‘orthodoxy’ in the world than is the church. This happens every time a church leader is ‘discovered’ to be ‘in sin’ and is publically exposed by the media and the church pulls the man from prominence to protect the institution of church. This behavior suggests that leaders are immune from sin. They are leaders because they are ‘perfect’. Each time we act to protect the image of a perfect church we embolden the media to attack the church.
If we really believed the gospel, when a leader (or any one else for that matter) falls into sin that becomes public knowledge, we should reiterate the gospel message that begins with ‘all have sinned’ and that ‘all are sinners’. If the media observed the gospel in practice - calling sin sin, yet embracing, encouraging, reconciling, rebuilding, and retreading fallen leaders - secular society would more often than not take note of the church rather than to join the crowd labeling the church as hypocritical. Every fallen leader, my understanding of the gospel tells me, should be treated as was Peter when he denied Christ in public, when the Prostitute sinned, etc.
The message intrisic to the gospel is forgiveness, not judgment. Not being afraid to label something sin, yet being able to acknowledge before the world that all of us wrestle with sin inclinations isn’t a contradiction. So much healthier it would be for a leader to be free to say to the world - ‘I wrestle with homosexual temptations and I need your prayers to help me continue to lead as God has called me, yet not to fall into my sin. And, if I fall, I need you to help restore me so that I can continue to fulfil my God given calling.’ It is in open confession of our sinful inclinations as leaders that we, paradoxically, find less occasion to enter into sin. When we are fearful to acknowledge our particular sinful inclinations, our ’secret’ takes on a life of its own. I would much rathr be a pastor of a 1000 member church who knew my struggles and had eyes watching me at all times, praying knowingly for me, and encouraging me to continue using the gifts God gives to me, than to be the pastor of 1000 member church struggling alone with my sin apart from a church family.
The truth? Every pastor wrestles with something. If we break the moral law in any point, we break it all. The gospel doesn’t say that Jesus died only for the really bad siners - prostitutes, tax-collectors, homosexuals, murders and the like. It tells us that Jesus died for all - that no sin (gluttony, heterosexual or homosexual lust, lying, jealousy, etc) stands without a need of the Savior. So, let us all start telling the truth - we are all sinners. We have no right, if we understand the cross, to select certain sins as ‘worse’ sins as if our sins didn’t require a savior’s death on the cross.
