Читать книгу An Evangelical Social Gospel? - Timothy L. Suttle - Страница 9

One of my favorite childhood memories has to be sitting in front of my parents’ console stereo listening to records. Forget about iPods and mp3’s piped through terrible sounding headphones. This was a real stereo hi-fi, big enough to lie down and take a nap on. It was long and loud with a smooth, elastic, analog tone. I would sit beside it listening over and over to vinyl LP records (or 8-track tapes), by REO Speedwagon, Journey, Kansas, and believe it or not, John Denver. I’d go to the closet and pull out one of my parent’s tennis rackets and hold it like a Gibson Gold Top guitar, and check myself out in the reflection from the picture window in our living room. Striking my most rebellious rock star pose, I’d windmill like Pete Townshend and sing my heart out, butchering the words to Take It on the Run, Baby, and Carry on My Wayward Son. I would lie in front of that giant stereo and stare at the album jackets for hours. I loved looking at the live shots of the bands. I loved pictures of musicians in the studio with their long hair and funky clothes. I wanted to be in those pictures. I wanted to be in the band.

So I started to play, guitar, piano, harmonica, or anything else I could get my hands on. I found that I actually had some natural ability for it. After graduating from college with no prospects, and no marketable skills, I did the most sensible thing I could think of at the time. I started a band. By 1998, my band Satellite Soul hand landed a record contract and was travelling and playing full time. We inked the deal and walked into Ardent Studios in Memphis completely wet behind the ears, ready to take our shot at the big-time. Before we knew it our first record was released, our first music video was shot, and the first single was breaking into the top five on the charts. We had no idea what was going on. This wasn’t really supposed to happen was it? We were just an indie band playing bars and churches around the Midwest. When it finally sunk in that for some reason God was giving us a platform, we made each other a simple promise: we would make this about something bigger than ourselves and our careers. We wanted it to be about the gospel.

I remember one night later on that same year we were opening for the Newsboys at Universal Studios in Orlando Florida. I was looking out across this sea of people, there had to be eight to ten thousand of them, milling around and talking—just waiting for the show to begin. All of the sudden, the lights went dim and the crowd began to yell that high-pitched sound of pure anticipation. I’ll never forget that moment, pregnant with expectation and possibility. We walked on stage to take our places in the dark while the introductions finished. The lights kicked on, the sound came up, I strummed down my Rickenbacker six-string electric, blew into my harmonica, the band kicked in, and we were off to the races. It was magic. Out of everything I’ve ever done in my musical career, there will be no better musical moment. There’s nothing like that first downbeat—the drums, the bass, the guitars all in perfect sync—propelled by the power of a massive sound system and thousands of screaming fans. I was in heaven.

Over the next decade, Satellite Soul played nearly a thousand shows all over the country. We gave our life to the road and to this band which we genuinely thought of as a ministry. Night after night I would tell about Jesus, and how he died to set us free. I would share the good news with people, but over time something strange began to happen. I started to feel like no matter what I said, how we played, or how big the crowd was, our ministry seemed to make little impact on the world. As I developed relationships with other musicians I learned that I was not alone. Most of us struggled with this inescapable sense that the gospel should have more impact on the people we shared it with. The more we played the more we started to feel like nothing we were saying or doing was making any difference at all. Time after time we’d crank up the amps and sing the same songs, tell the same stories, and try desperately to make a connection with people, and make a difference in the world, but I could never escape the nagging feeling I wasn’t making any difference at all.

After Satellite Soul stopped touring full time I went on staff with a church in the Kansas City area to help plant a new church in another part of the city. I dove headfirst into that ministry just like I had with Satellite Soul. My wife and I started a family and leveraged everything we had to try and build a church that would make a difference in the world. After several years of ministry the church seemed like a success from the outside. Yet, when we were honest with each other—from the senior staff down to the marginally involved attendee—all of us were wondering if all of our work was making a difference.

Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever wondered why the gospel we have given our lives to doesn’t have more impact on the world? For the past twenty years of my ministry, I’ve seen people who work hard and live with integrity and purpose. They give their hearts to Christ and raise their families in the church. They volunteer at church and support the ministry financially. They try to invest in friendships in the hope that they might get to share with them the joy they find in a relationship with Christ. They hold nothing back from God or from the church community. They do everything that is ever asked of them, and yet they constantly wonder if anything they are doing is making any difference. Have you ever been frustrated with the fact that you are a part of a church and you give and give and give to that ministry, but it doesn’t seem to have much impact on the world? Why is this happening? Why don’t we see the good news going forth in power and changing our entire community?

I lived my life in this tension for many years. I’ve wrestled with the ubiquitous, nagging feeling that with all of the time, money, passion, and creativity we put into communicating the good news to people, we should be seeing the world changing all around us. Our churches, towns, and cities should be catching fire with the life-altering vision of the kingdom of God. But it isn’t happening. Why isn’t it happening?

What follows here is my possibly lame, certainly limited, yet nevertheless honest and passionate attempt to help the church be more faithful and effective. I don’t want people to feel frustrated anymore, as though the sacrifices they are making for their church and for the gospel are not making any difference. I don’t want to be frustrated anymore either. I think the good news can change the world just as it did two-thousand years ago. I want us to reconsider the way we talk about the gospel—the good news of God’s redemption through Jesus Christ—and begin to conceive and communicate it in a more robust and powerful way.

Of Shotguns and Car Maintenance

The Darwin Awards are these hilariously wrong, real-life stories of how people have accidentally caused their own demise; natural selection in real time. I heard a story which should be a nominee, except I don’t think the guy died. Admittedly, there are moments for all of us when we are about to try something risky, and we say to ourselves, “I hope this works.” This had surely been one of those times, I guess . . . I don’t really know, but the story goes like this. A Kitsap County Washington man had been working on his old Lincoln Continental for weeks outside his home. He had apparently been attempting to remove the right rear wheel from the car, but one of the lug nuts was stubbornly stuck in place. It seems the 66-year-old man had tried everything he could think of to loosen that lug nut when, after reaching the pinnacle of frustration, he went inside, got his 12 gauge shot gun, loaded it with buck-shot, and shot the wheel. The Sherriff’s report says he fired the shotgun from about an arm’s length and was immediately peppered from his chest to his feet with shot and other sorts of debris. “Nobody else was there and he wasn’t intoxicated,” the Sherriff said.1 One can always know they’ve made a huge mistake when those who are trying to explain the incident feel compelled to clarify that the person has not, in fact, been drunk out of their tree. It’s a sure sign you have derailed. “He’s bound and determined to get that lug nut off,” said the Sherriff. You think, really?

Ever used the wrong tool for the job? Just a guess, but I’m thinking rule number one in the art and science of fixing automobiles is that a shotgun is never really helpful. I remember doing the dishes when I was a kid, struggling to get spaghetti sauce off our dinner plates. My mom noticed my frustration and showed me that if I’ll use the hottest water my hands can stand, the sauce will come right off. I was so amazed when it worked that I almost enjoyed doing dishes for a few days. Hot water, who knew?

The right tool for the job can be the difference between great success and miserable failure. As a Christian and a pastor, I often think of this maxim as I consider what in the world it is I’m trying to do. I was handed a set of tools when I was very young. Beliefs, doctrines, strategies, and especially stories, which were meant to help me understand the Christian faith, were instilled in me from a very young age. It is the same for most of us who grew up in the evangelical Christian community. These tools were meant to make me a faithful Christian and an effective witness for the gospel. They were supposed to work, and I suppose they did to some extent. But you can clean your dishes with cold water, too. It just takes considerably more time and energy. I think perhaps they worked because God works with whatever broken thing God can, not because they were terribly effective or faithful tools. When faced with a particularly sticky lug nut, one might be tempted to reach for the shotgun (which I think we can all agree is a big mistake). It’s just a lot more effective if you use the right tool for the job.

I have come to believe American Evangelical Christianity as a whole has been using the wrong tool for the job when it comes to the way we view the Christian gospel, and the way we share that message with the world. The reason can be a little complicated, but it’s really, really important to understand. It’s complicated because it’s theological in nature. The word theology is just a ten-cent word which is really two words in one: theo, meaning “God,” and ology, meaning “talk.” Theology is “God-talk.” The way we talk about God has become problematic, especially when it comes to the way we talk about the gospel itself. The words we use work powerfully to shape our understanding of the gospel, and thus they shape who we are becoming as the people of God.

Over the past few centuries, the way we tell the story of God has changed. It has become overly individualized, reduced to a way of managing the guilt we feel as the result of our sinfulness. This gospel has little or no moral or ethical implications. It makes few demands on our lives right here and now. I find this strange given the emphasis Jesus places on obedience. The gospel which most of us who grew up in the evangelical church were taught—the one we know how to tell—is only part of the story. It’s just about how to deal with sin and “go to heaven” when we die. But this is not the major theme of the teachings of Jesus. This “gospel of sin management,”2 as Dallas Willard calls it, does not do justice to the good news we find in the Scriptures, and thus it doesn’t have the desired effect on us, on our communities, and on our world.

Most of us who grew up among evangelicals were taught a gospel which went something like this: Everyone is a sinner, and the punishment for sin is death. Jesus took our punishment on the cross and if we believe in him, receive him as Savior, and invite him into our hearts, we will receive eternal life and go to heaven when we die. That’s what we were taught, and for the most part, it is the story we tell. But if we consider it carefully, we will realize that version of the gospel is only about the individual and God. It’s about you and Jesus and what you believe about who he is. It is all about each individual winning heaven and immortality through faith in Christ. At its heart, this version of the gospel is about us getting something we want or need, i.e., forgiveness and eternal life. It is ultimately selfish and individualistic. It requires very little from us apart from mental assent to certain truth claims about Jesus. It is all about the individual and God, and carries with it few social implications, if any. And in a nation of selfish people who have individualism forced upon them from the day they are born, our faith has become too individualistic as well. The gospel we tell is too individualistic, and has become indistinguishable from the narrative of the culture at large. It should be no wonder it doesn’t call people to change.

What if the reason the gospel has become ineffective is that it has been co-opted by individualism? What if our gospel is more about individualized religion than authentic good news? What if the gospel has become so dominated by individualism, that in a country full of individualists, the gospel doesn’t stand out as anything different, doesn’t ask us to live differently? Maybe this is why we give our lives to try and share the good news with people and are continually frustrated and disappointed with the results. We’re not telling the whole story! The truth is hard to hear, but I believe this is true: the version of the gospel most American evangelical Christians tell bears little resemblance to the gospel Jesus preached, nor does it echo the kind of life-altering pursuit of the kingdom which we see at work in the lives of the great saints of the New Testament.

I wish I could say I’ve never been frustrated enough to take a shot at this sticky lug nut. I cannot. I’ve fired in frustration countless times and I typically end up injuring myself in the process. I’ve handed out my condemnations, and I usually regret it. I’ve slandered, complained and threatened to leave. But I haven’t left because I think deep down I realize this is who I am; these are my people. For better or for worse, I am in and of the tradition of American Evangelicalism. So I don’t write this critique as an outsider, but as one who has great love for the evangelical church. However, I am resolved to confront my tradition, even to poke it with a stick because, well, it is my tradition. I’m not going anywhere and the truth is we need to rethink a few things. This book is the best way I know to show my love. Wounds of a friend and all . . .

A Break in the Clouds

Here’s the problem as clearly as I can state it. For the past few centuries, individualistic conceptions of the gospel have championed some truly good things: the emphasis that every human person can have a personal relationship with God through faith in Christ; the essential nature of personal faith; the priesthood of the believer; the missionary spirit; the consistent appeal to the authority of scripture; the resistance of the absolute power of a corrupt church; and many others. But, the resulting forms and modes of what it means to follow Christ have been overly-geared toward individual salvation and self-enhancement. As a result, the individualistic nature of the gospel has become distorted and overplayed. Individualism has usurped the essential communal and corporate nature of the Christian faith, and the social claims which Jesus makes on the life of his followers have been drowned out and ignored. When this happened the gospel lost its power.

When astronauts take a trip to space, they have to carry their own oxygen. They can’t just open up the windows of their spacecraft and get a breath of fresh space air. Space is a vacuum. The air would instantly be sucked out of their lungs, which I’m guessing is not a very good way to go. The lack of oxygen in space means rocket fuel will not burn either. Rocket fuel in and of itself is worthless in space. Without oxygen it cannot burn, it cannot oxidize, and thus cannot propel the spacecraft. If you want your rocket fuel to burn in space, you have to carry your own oxygen with you. Only then can you fire your rockets and get where you are meant to go.

The gospel is like this. It has a personal dimension—just between you and God—and this is a critical piece. It also has a corporate dimension—between you and all of humanity, even the created order—and this is a critical piece as well. You have to have the personal and corporate dimensions working in tandem for the fire to burn and get you where you are meant to go. As oxygen is to rocket fuel in space, so the corporate dimension is to the personal dimension in the Christian gospel. In American Evangelicalism, we have the personal covered, but we are lacking in the corporate understanding of the good news. The nexus of the personal and corporate is where all the power is.

The tradition which protected and emphasized the corporate nature of the gospel has often been called the Social Gospel movement. It has been attacked and maligned by evangelicals for a century, sometimes rightfully so, for shunning any mention of personal faith and a relationship with God. But we need to put that behind us. It is time to realize the gospel is personal for sure, but it is also corporate. Today, individualistic ideas of what it means to follow Jesus hang like a cloud over the message of Christ we find in the Scriptures. Jesus, following in the footsteps of the prophets who came before him, was very serious about the corporate nature of the gospel. Yet, perhaps in our day and our time there is a moment—a break in the clouds—a chance for us to hear the true gospel which binds us together as the people of God and sends us out in the mission of God. Shouldn’t the gospel be good news for the cultures and institutions of all societies, as well as the individual persons? To rediscover the corporate aspect of the gospel will require a clear theological exploration of the gospel in ways that favor the solidarity of all humankind over the primacy of the individual. Maybe if we began to preach the gospel this way, we would discover this is how God has planned it from the very beginning.

As I said, I am writing as an evangelical Christian. If that is not your cup of tea, it is entirely possible this makes absolutely no sense to you so far. Yet I hope the issues I address here will challenge all of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus. The church is on the verge of irrelevancy in our culture, but our problem is not a lack of cultural relevancy as many assume. A few candles, some incense, and a good rock band won’t help us here. The problem runs much deeper than that. The problem is the gospel message has been overshadowed and corrupted by the rival god of individualism.

We might pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven,” but do we really expect it to happen? Do we really mean it? It’s time for us to face up to the fact that the limiting reagent in this chemical reaction is not God, it is us. We are the problem. The church is all rocket fuel and no oxygen, and so the way we bear witness to the gospel has become problematic. We are ignoring its communal nature and in so doing we are robbing it of its power.

1. Associated Press, “Revenge of the Lug Nut.”

2. Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, 35.