Can One Church Handle Two Generations?

Here is a link to an article in The Leadership Journal of Christianity Today. Its well worth a read as it discusses the different attitudes and perspectives of a typically 'boomer' Senior Pastor in contrast with that of his typically 'postmodern/millennial' son who is also a Pastor in the church. The back and forth is really good.

It doesn't answer the question though, can one church handle two generations, or more accurately; these two different perspectives on the gospel and ministry?

I'd say the conversation gets a little more intense away from this interview setting.

What do you think?

Peace

Read the article here: Outlooks on Outreach

TKJG Chapter 10: Creating a Gospel Culture

In this chapter McKnight sketches the gospel, the Story of Jesus completing the Story of Israel, I would say the Story of Humanity. He begins with ‘In the beginning God’ and concludes with recreation and humans governing ‘on God’s behalf in the way of Jesus. Forever.’ You’d have to get a copy of the book to read the few pages for yourself. N.T Wright tells the story in a similar manner in his thesis of the big chapters of the bible. Goheen and Bartholomew tell a similar story in The Drama of Scripture. Gabe Lyons covers it a bit in The Next Christians. Sean Gladding has The Story of God, The Story of Us. The St Luke’swebsite has it though I need to update a couple of lines (but am having technical difficulties doing so) having read this book and some others. Each story is nuanced in slightly different ways. They each tell the gospel. McKnight then encourages us to become people of the story, engage in the traditional church calendar as a way of engaging in the gospel story, realise the church is a continuation of the story, counter the stories of our contemporary context such as individualism and consumerism with the gospel story, embrace the story and be saved and transformed by Jesus as we respond to the story with faith, repentance and baptism. Bear witness to the story in serving others, love and compassion.

TKJG Chapter 9: Gospeling Today

The gospel is first of all framed by Israel’s story. Second, the gospel centres on the Lordship of Jesus. Thirdly, the gospel summons people to respond. Fourthly, the gospel saves and redeems. The gospeling of Acts summons listeners to confess Jesus as Messiah and Lord while our gospeling today tends to persuade sinners to admit their sin and find Jesus as Saviour. The later can be done within the former but too often the former is neglected. That’s not gospeling. You can’t avoid judgement in gospeling but gospeling is not simply escapism from hell, this is a distortion.  Though the gospel deals with sin (and this is not intended to downplay sin), sin is not the major problem the gospel is addressing. If the major answer Jesus offers is the kingdom and eternal life, then the major issues at a stake are to do with the search for God’s kingdom on earth and the absence of God’s abundance in the worldliness of this world. Gospeling thus declares that Jesus is the rightful Lord, summons people to turn from their idols and to worship and live under that Lord who saves. When we reduce the gospel to personal salvation we tear the fabric out of the Big Story. Gospeling isn’t about the sinner’s heart it is about the risen Jesus and his story.

TKJG Chapter 8: The Gospel of Peter

Jesus’ resurrection and the profound experience with the Holy Spirit set about a ‘hermeneutical revolution’ for the apostles. They suddenly had new eyes to reread and reinterpret the Old Testament from the perspective of the Story of Jesus. Acts 13:32-33 “We tell you the good news: What God promised our ancestors he has fulfilled for us, their children, by raising up Jesus.” The apostles declare the whole story of Jesus as gospel. Peter reads a Bible (OT) that leads him to see God at work guiding the Story of Israel into the Story of Jesus. True gospeling that conforms to the apostolic gospel leads directly to who Jesus is (as the conclusion of the Israel/humanities story) and summons people to respond in faith, repentance, and baptism.

TKJG Chapter 7: Jesus and the Gospel

Did Jesus preach the gospel? Did Jesus preach himself as the completion of Israel’s story? Jesus declares himself to be at the centre of the kingdom of God, Luke 7:22-23. Jesus was totally into preaching himself as the centre of God’s plan for Israel. Jesus unequivocally and without embarrassment nominated himself as Israel’s president.  Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount understood his teachings to be the consummation and completion and resolution and telos point of the Old Testament Law and the Prophets. Jesus selects 12 disciples and sees the 12 as embodying the fullness of the people of God but himself over the 12. Jesus explained his fate – his death and resurrection – in light of scripture, Daniel 7. Jesus explains himself his story, on the road to Emmaus by beginning with Moses and all the Prophets and explaining all the things the scriptures have said concerning himself, Luke 24:27. Jesus preached himself as the gospel, he was the good news and had good news as the fulfilment of Israel’s story and the inauguration of a whole new chapter of possibility and potential.

TKJG Chapter 6: The Gospel in the Gospels

The early Christians called Matthew, Mark, Luke and John the ‘gospel’ because they are the gospel! The story of Jesus. To call these books the gospel is precisely to express that Jesus himself, the entirety of his acting, teaching, living, rising, and remaining with us is the ‘gospel.’ The four gospels and the gospel are one. The story told in Mark calls hearers to belief in the person who is described in it, Jesus, the Messiah and Son of God, and thus to eternal life; in other words it seeks to be wholly and completely a message of salvation. Luke’s purpose is not merely to narrate the deeds and words of Jesus but to show how these did in fact lead to the experience of salvation and to the formation of the community of the saved. John shows how the principle institutions and feasts of Israel, those annual celebrations that told Israel’s Story and that shaped both memory and identity for every observant Jew, fin their own completion in Jesus. These Gospels do not arrange the story into our way of framing the plan of salvation, and neither do they format the story into our favourite method of persuasion. Instead they declare the Story of Jesus, and that story is the saving, redeeming, liberating story.

TKJG Chapter 5: How Did Salvation Take Over the Gospel?

The creeds articulate what is both implicit and explicit in Paul’s grand statement of the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15. Thus, the gospel is the Story of Jesus as the completion of the Story of Israel as found in the Scriptures, and that gospel story formed and framed the earliest Christians. During the much needed and God ordained Reformation, salvation was clarified in regards to its personal application and necessity. What then happened overtime is that the apostolic gospel was reframed in such as way and so successfully (largely as a result of the powerful evangelistic culture of evangelicalism in American revivalism and then later in America’s culture war between fundamentalists and modernists), that today we are losing contact with the gospel culture.

TKJG Chapter 4: The Apostolic Gospel of Paul

1 Corinthians 15 is the best place to begin mapping an understanding of the gospel. Here Paul comes pretty close to defining the word gospel. The gospel is to announce good news about the key events in the life of Jesus and to shout aloud the Story of Jesus Christ as the saving news of God. The gospel though is intimately tied to Israel’s Story as found in the scriptures of the Old Testament. Salvation – the robust salvation of God – is the intended result of the gospel story about Jesus Christ that completes the story of Israel in the Old Testament.

1 Corinthians 15 (TNIV)

PART A
¹ Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. ² By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. (15:1-2)

PART B
³ For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
⁴ that he was buried,
that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ⁵ and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.(15:3-5)

PART C
²⁰ But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. ²¹ For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a human being. ²² For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. ²³ But in this order: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. ²⁴ Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. ²⁵ For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. ²⁶ The last enemy to be destroyed is death. ²⁷ For he “has put everything under his feet.” Now when it says that “everything” has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. ²⁸ When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all. (15:20-28)

TKJG - Chapter 3: From Story to Salvation

The gospel only makes sense in the context of the full narrative of Christian scripture; if we ignore this larger story the gospel gets distorted. But that full narrative is not the gospel. The gospel is the story of Jesus as the resolution of Israel’s (humanities) story. This story includes how someone is ‘saved’ but any personal plan for or of salvation in itself is not the gospel and becomes a distortion of the gospel.  God’s righteousness and holiness, our sin, Christ’s atoning death, and our response of repentance and faith in Jesus is not the gospel. A salvation plan leads to justification. The gospel though includes salvation but leads to discipleship, justice, goodness and loving kindness.

TKJG – Chapter 2: Gospel Culture or Salvation Culture

Personal faith is both necessary and nonnegotiable; the gospel doesn’t work for spectators you have to participate. Evangelicals though are not really ‘evangelical’ in the sense of the apostolic gospel but instead are soterians. The word gospel is mistakenly equated with the word salvation, but these two words don’t mean the same thing. In thinking salvation as identical to gospel we betray a profound lack of awareness as to what the gospel means and what the gospel might mean for our world today.

TKJG - Chapter 1: The Big Question

In the following series of posts I'll attempt in 100 words or less to summarize each chapter of The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight.

Here we go...

The big question in Christian circles that needs addressing is ‘what is the gospel?’ We need to go back to the bible and ask ourselves this question all over again, as if we were in Galilee listening to Jesus ourselves or as if we were the first listeners of the apostles preaching in some small house church in the middle of the Roman Empire. The word ‘gospel’ has been hijacked by what we believe about ‘personal salvation.’ The result being that the word gospel no longer means in our world what it originally meant to Jesus or the apostles.

The King Jesus Gospel

I've just started reading The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight. The forewords are from N.T. Wright and Dallas Willard.

Here are snippets of what they have to say...

N.T. Wright

God wants every single Christian to grow up in understanding as well as trust, the Christian faith has never been something that one generation can sort out in such as way as to leave their successors with no work to do.

We shouldn't be alarmed if someone sketches a third, fourth, or even fifth dimension that we had overlooked. (This is in regards to our understanding of Christianity and Christian faith).

The movement that has long called itself "evangelical" is in fact better labelled "soterian."

"The gospel" is the story of Jesus of Nazareth told as the climax of the long story of Israel, which in turn is the story of how the one true God is rescuing the world.

For many people, "the gospel" has shrunk right down to a statement about Jesus' death and its meaning, and a prayer with which people accept it. That matters, the way the rotor blades of a helicopter matter. You won't get of the ground without them. But rotor blades alone make a helicopter.

This book could be one of God's ways of reminding the new generation of Christians that it has to grow up to take responsibility for thinking things through afresh, to look back to the large world of the full first-century gospel in order then to look out on the equally large world of twenty-first-century gospel opportunity.

Dallas Willard

Scot McKnight here presents, with great force and clarity, the one gospel of the bible and of Jesus the King and Savior. He works from the basis of profound biblical understanding and of insight into history and into the contemporary misunderstandings that produce gospels that do not normally produce disciples, but only consumers of religious goods and services. In the course of this he deals with the primary barrier to the power of Jesus' gospel today - that is, a view of salvation and of grace that has no connection with discipleship and spiritual transformation. It is a view of grace and salvation that, supposedly, gets one ready to die, but leaves them unprepared to live now in the grace and power of resurrection life.

It would probably be worth your while getting a copy of the book and having a read don't you think?