Looking at Christ

A danger was pointed out to me recently that simply being gospel-centred is not enough – for an individual, church or ministry. Let me try to illustrate with a few diagrams. Gospel-centred but gospel-assumed rather than gospel-explicit With gospel-assumed (as we've discussed before ) there is a lot of talk about gospel but we never quite get around to defining and spelling out exactly what we mean by the gospel. So very quickly not only are we not actually preaching the gospel to others (so no-one is being converted or built up), we start to forget it ourselves. The solution:  We go back to the Bible every day to remind ourselves of the good news from all over Scripture. We need to fill in the word with Bible detail. For example in my Bible reading this morning I saw in 1 Chronicles 11 a little vignette of the gospel – one man standing against a whole army of Philistines ‘and the LORD saved’ (v14). And I see a tiny picture of the One Man who stood instead of us and triumphed over a...

There’s a very important article by David Gibson called  ‘Assumed Evangelicalism’ .  It's well worth reading the whole thing but just to whet your appetite I'll summarise...  Gibson starts by retelling the stories of two movements – the Mennonites and the UK Student Christian Movement: The first generation of the Mennonite Brethren movement believed and proclaimed the gospel and thought that there were certain social entailments. The next generation assumed the gospel and advocated the entailments. The third generation denied the gospel and all that were left were the entailments.  In its earliest days the SCM believed and proclaimed the atoning blood of Jesus. The next generation assumed it but did not make it central. The following generations have rejected and denied the apostolic gospel. Gibson defines ‘assumed evangelicalism’ as a church, organisation or movement which:  believes and ...