A Gospel Culture

In The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), Scot McKnight argues that the church has been dominated by the salvation culture in which the gospel is understood only in relation to Jesus’ saving purpose for humanity and its consumer-oriented outcome—going to heaven after death. The church should be very aware of this salvation culture because such a culture tends to reduce God’s salvation in Christ to personal forgiveness. It is what Dallas Willard calls the gospel of sin management [see Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), chapter 2].

The gospel of Jesus Christ is more than the gospel of sin management. The gospel is not just about Jesus as our personal Savior.  But most importantly, Jesus is the Lord of all and the promised Messiah for Israel. When we are called to follow Jesus, not only are we called to believe Him as the Savior, but also to center our lives on the lordship of Jesus. When we know that the gospel of Jesus is the completion of the story of Israel, we don’t privatize our faith as if there were nothing else between me and Jesus.

Scot McKnight writes:

But we would be mistaken to reduce these themes to nothing more than individualism. Peter’s summary in Acts 5:29-32 sees forgiveness for “Israel.” God is at work in his people and therefore in individuals, and we need to see that one of the problems is the people of God who need to become the true people of God. The New Testament expresses this new people of God in the word church (p. 136).

We enter into the story of Jesus by gracious invitation. We are also part of Israel’s story. We are part of something that is bigger than our personal stories. We are part of God’s saving story in which we represent God as kingly priests just as Israel functions as a kingdom of priests in the Old Testament. To know that we belong to this marco-Story helps us place our micro-stories into perspective. In other words, it helps us place the plan of salvation in the story of Jesus, which is the telos of Israel’s story.

Scot McKnight suggests that in order to fight against the salvation culture in the church, we must guard against it by creating a gospel culture. Two of his suggestions are that we need to become people of the story and immerse ourselves even more into the story of Jesus. “To become a gospel culture we’ve got to begin with becoming people of the Book, but not just as a Book but as the story that shapes us…We need to soak ourselves in the Story of Jesus by reading, pondering, digesting, and mulling over in our heads and hearts…” (p. 153).

Evangelism, what is it? To “evangelize” or to “gospel” is to tell the Story of Jesus as a saving story that completes Israel’s Story. What is the best way to evangelize today? (p. 112)

This kind of evangelism does not just lead to decision, but discipleship. But the prerequisite is that we must constantly immerse ourselves into the Story.