The Gospel Commission

Michael Horton’s new book The Gospel Commission: Recovering God’s Strategy for Making Disciples (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011) is a very thorough exposition of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20). If you want to know about the Great Commission in depth and what it practically means to the church, this is a must read. In one of the chapters, Horton deals with contextualization: “the attempt to situate particular beliefs and practices in their cultural environment.” (p. 115) In other words, in order to make the gospel relevant, we must understand our cultural contexts.  At one extreme, we totally ignore the context that we are in. Preaching the Word is what we care. We are passionate about the Word; however, we are not sensitive to the world. At the other extreme, we are so in tune with the world. As a result, we fail to offer an alternative. The prophetic nature of the Word is mute in the world.

An Excerpt:

Many evangelical seminaries today offer a panoply of elective courses on contextualized ministry (e.g., urban, youth, sports, sub-urban, emergent, African-American, Latino, men’s and women’s ministry). Obviously, something has to give—the seminary curriculum can only handle so many credit hours. Increasingly, at least from my conversations with friends, it seems that it is the core courses in biblical languages, systematic and historical theology, church history, and more traditional pastoral theology that are being pared down to make room. As a result, many American pastors, missionaries, and evangelists today may know more about their target market than they do about the “one Lord, one faith, and one baptism” that they share with the prophets and the apostles, the church fathers and reformers, or their brothers and sisters in China, Malawi, and Russia.

In the 1920s Princeton New Testament professor J. Gresham Machen was already issuing the complaint that the obsession with “applied Christianity” was so pervasive that soon there would be little Christianity left to apply. Are we seeing the effects even in evangelical and Reformed circles of a pragmatic interest in the methods of ministry that downplays interest in the actual message? Do our pastors coming out of three or four years of seminary education really know the Bible as pastor-scholars ready to proclaim, to teach, and to lead the sheep into the rich pastures of redemption? Or are they becoming specialists in pop culture and demographic marketing? Turning aspiring pastors into connoisseurs of their own consumer profile builds churches with a cultural hegemony (sameness) in spite of sometimes wild diversity in Christian doctrine, worship, and life. By contrast, the gospel creates spiritual unity rather than cultural uniformity. (p. 116)

What a critique!