I applaud the Evangelism and Church Growth arm of the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s General Assembly Council for taking evangelism and church growth seriously. All Christians should, after all, and particularly those called to lead a declining denomination like ours, which is declining in considerable part due to a failure to take them seriously. I applaud them for seeking to reach out to and inspire those “who have a passion for evangelism, for church growth, and a desire to share the gospel message with all God’s people.” I applaud them for holding a contest for middle-school and high-school students to produce a T-shirt design to help them do that; contests have a way of getting people excited, and unveiling the winner at the Evangelism Breakfast at General Assembly should stir up interest.
Where I have a problem is with the theme of that breakfast: “Reclaiming the Gospel.” There are a lot of things we might say we need to do with the gospel, but reclaiming it? In the first place, we don’t need to re-anything the gospel. It is already “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes,” as Paul teaches us; it doesn’t need anything done to it, and certainly not by us. We just need to stand up with Paul, declare that we aren’t ashamed of it, and preach it.
In the second place, if we did need to re-something the gospel, it wouldn’t be reclaiming it. We never claimed it in the first place—it claimed us, or rather Jesus did, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Theoretically, we as heirs of the Reformation understand that the gospel isn’t about us—it’s something God did for us by his grace, not any of our own doing—and that the power of its proclamation isn’t about us either, it’s about the Spirit of God. To talk of reclaiming the gospel, it seems to me, gets that seriously out of whack, as if we somehow appropriate it and put it to work to accomplish our purposes. No. God appropriates us and puts us to work to accomplish his purposes through us. It’s Christ’s ministry, not ours; it’s the Spirit’s power, not ours; our job is not to reclaim the gospel but rather to submit ourselves to the gospel, to place ourselves at Jesus’ disposal, so that by the leading and power of the Spirit we may be used to carry out his ministry in this world.
I appreciate the heart being shown here for evangelism, but I’m seriously concerned by the fuzzy and human-centered way in which that heart is expressed. This is of a piece, it seems to me, with the very un-Reformed understanding of grace expressed in the Covenant Network’s mission statement, which I think also shows a laudable heart skewed by a serious failure of understanding; it suggests to me that our theological foundations have eroded to a significant extent, such that our guiding assumptions come less from our Reformed heritage than from the world around us. In the end, that’s no way to build up the body of Christ; it’s no way to grow the church.