Is the Christian Gospel Any Good For the World?

Christians talk a lot about this thing called the Gospel, and that it is ‘good news’.  However, just how good is it when it is often encountered as a demoralizing message of shame and guilt over things people have done wrong, and that behind all this is a God who will punish you if you don’t conform (but hey – accept Jesus and you’ll be saved).  The church as the corporate purveyor of this so-called good news hasn’t had a good run of it lately either.  Public perception of the church (warranted or not) is coloured by many things that detract from the ‘good news’ such as the impact of colonialism, residential schools, anti LGBTQ stances, and in some contexts, Christian nationalism and its related issue-politics. 

This is not His ‘good news’. It makes me sad and frustrated at how far the expression of this Gospel has strayed from its original story. 

It’s only in the last decade I have come to extricate myself from a narrow and truncated version of God’s Grand Story for the world that was so often put forward by some within evangelicalism. Yes, I am deconstructing – and in reality we all should be.  Not to destroy and abandon, but to renew, rebuild and restore.  Our faith is not static.  How can it be if it is focused on the Creator of the Universe????  Can you remain in your knowing, thinking you’ve ‘got it’?

What happened to love?  What happened to inclusion?  What happened to embracing the outcast?  What happened to radical hospitality? What happened to resisting and even challenging the straitjacket that is religion?  What happened to living as a representative of Jesus Christ, who displayed all these things I just mentioned? 

What happened is that instead of living out His ways in the workplace, the neighbourhood, and wherever we go in our lives - and thereby attracting people to that way and truth about real, abundant life -  contemporary Christianity chose to slice and dice the Bible as though it was merely a divine last word theology-text, draw the lines of who can qualify as a Christian, develop the words and the rules of entry into God’s Kingdom and in effect, take on the role of humanity’s judge.

A tragic case of missing the point.

The Gospel is indeed Good News for the world in that ALL THINGS will be restored to God’s original intentions though Christ.  As we live according to His ways, that process of restoration is being enacted in real-time. God’s good news is that in Christ there is a path to abundant living with nature, with each other and with our Creator.

The earth desperately needs good news.  My personal sense is that everyone in this world has a primal sense that things could and should be better.  Don’t we all long for more peace, more love, more abundance and joy?  The Good News is that Christ is the Way to that kind of life.

Let’s show up and show that Way.

Changing How the World Works

I am growing weary of mission rhetoric. My thinking on what defines and comprises “mission” is definitely morphing. I grew up in an evangelical environment that was very much about ‘telling’ the story to the ‘regions beyond’. Perhaps like many of you. It wasn't world-changing.  Mostly about changing eternal addresses.

Along the lifetime of my ministry I have encountered my own and the broader church’s narrowness of engagement with broader culture, defined largely by those encounters that would lead to conversions or church attendance. Church mission-rhetoric may be to “love the world as Jesus loves”, or to be "focused on the lost”, but when push comes to shove, the metrics behind whether to keep a program or engagement going is what ultimately reveals the narrow definition of your ‘mission’.

I am a lowly voice among many writers and thinkers who are trying to yell at the church and show a “new, but not new” understanding of the Missio Dei, which embraces all things in this world as the arena for the restorative force of Gods’ Kingdom. After all, it is ‘all things’ that Christ intends to reconcile to Himself (Colossians 1:20).

How engaged are we with ‘all things’ as defining the mission of God?

The power of God to restore the world is in the loving acts of engagement with the world as it is, in order to see it become what He intends for it. We have a grand and just cause that moves far beyond ‘crossing the line’ to Jesus’ side and enjoying spiritual renewal, to a lifestyle that lives out the ways of the Kingdom of God in front of our society. It’s in that living that the power of the Gospel is experienced by the world. That power is not located exclusively through inner renewal or spiritual insight (which much of the church’s energy is dedicated to provide), but it is in the encounter between the Christ in us and the people and systems of this world.

This is how the early church transformed the world. It was not through evangelistic forays into people groups, but via societal engagements that clearly showed and offered a way of being that stood in an appealing contrast to the surrounding society [1]. Christians lived then, as we do now, within an understanding they were part of a new society, an alternate Kingdom. We live by the rules and ways of that Kingdom, which when expressed in word and deed, cannot help but interact with social, economic and political systems. (How can you read your Gospels and not see this embedded in the words and ways of Jesus?). We are to be part of a social revolution that is the direct (and inevitable) result of a Kingdom way of being. The eventual institutionalization of the early movement of the emerging church (the fate of all movements if they don’t die off completely), has had the effect of walling off this new societal revolution and instead has created some doors for entry, but which now require certain types of keys to gain entry.

We, the community of Christ on this earth will always be in tension over the radical movement outward into the world and the urge to consolidate our efforts into the institutional structures and thinking of the church. Believe me, after all I have said when I say this: May the tension never leave us. It’s the intention of the gift-mix Jesus gave to the leadership functions of the church. The apostles, prophets and evangelists are given to call us out of our consolidating tendencies so that we remain focused on living out this new society called the Kingdom in front of (and sometimes as an affront to) the world. Life calls to life. The shepherds and teachers ground us and keep reminding us that Jesus is the author and finisher of our faith. But rue the days, as we are in now, when we as the Christ-community settle and merely ‘send off’ the apostles, prophets and evangelists to do their work elsewhere (e.g. to “missions”, or para-church organizations, or local social agencies, or to ‘be a light’ in their jobs), while shepherds and teachers keep the non-profit wheels running and people in the pews to pay for the programs & staff that justifies our corporate existence.

This dichotomy, left unchallenged when all 5 gifts are not informing mission, reinforces to the watching world that the gathered church is NOT a new society living according to new ways of being, but has taken its place alongside other religions of choice, establishing organizational structures for maintaining loyalty and meaning for insiders.

The world is transformed by those who show up.










 Harv Matchullis


[1] For an historical look at the sociological reasons for the church’s significant advance to become 50% of the known world by AD 300, read Rodney Starks’ “The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries”