An Evangelical Social Gospel?. Timothy L. Suttle
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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