Video from Core Christianity
How Important Is Fellowship Outside of the Church?
How to Engage the Culture Without Losing the Gospel
"Q1. WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES FACING THE CHURCH TODAY?
The greatest challenge always facing the church is whether it will preach the gospel. Not whether the world will let us preach it–although religious liberty is always a question, and there’s a lot of hostility out there in post-Christian as well as Islamic societies–but whether we think the gospel is still the power of God unto salvation. I’m not talking merely about what the liberals do to the gospel: essentially reinventing it as the affirmation of basically decent people. It happens in evangelical circles–including churches linked to the Reformation. We get bored. And let’s face it, a lot of preaching and teaching today is boring and that’s a shame. But then we begin to take it for granted. It becomes an “of course”–the ABC’s of the faith that we needed to become Christians, but now we need to focus on life. As if the gospel got us started and now it’s all about us again (see Galatians 3:3). So we subordinate the gospel to supposedly more relevant and interesting agendas.
Or, in the name of “translation”and “mission”(or just by not thinking about it), we slowly assimilate the gospel to cultural habits of thought. It’s the frog in the kettle. For example, in a highly therapeutic society, we say the words “sin”and “salvation,”but we mean (or people hear us saying) “dysfunction”and “recovery.” It’s very hard in this culture to get people to take seriously the fact that a God outside of us is going to judge us one day and there is no hope unless we are dressed in the “wedding garment”of Christ’s righteousness.
People think religion is about inner empowerment for their own life projects. This is all law, not gospel; it’s not even God’s law, but what I call “Easy Listening Law.” What they need is God’s law–his interpretation of the situation and of us–to tell us the truth. Many people today have a supporting role for God maybe in their life movie, but they get mad if we tell them, “Well, actually, you die in this scene and God raises you up in Christ as a new character in his greatest story ever told. But those who are saved by it know how powerful it is to do that very thing to us: to insert us into Christ in whom we find our election, redemption, justification, adoption, sanctification, and glorification. Since the gospel creates the church, to whatever extent it is faithfully preached the kingdom of Christ expands and deepens. And people discover that this death of the “curved-in”self (to quote Augustine) really is their life..." from the article: How to Engage the Culture Without Losing the Gospel
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