“The gospel is not the problem – we are the problem.”

Hmmm….

 

I read an article the other day where the author – an Evangelical Christian pastor – was describing his interactions with a couple of men, formerly of Evangelical congregations, who had become ‘…repelled by Christianity’. The article then went on to describe his (so far unsuccessful) efforts to get them to come back in to the ‘fold’, as it were. While his essay recognised several good points regarding what needs to change in Evangelical Christianity, one sentence popped out at me as being totally key in the perception of Evangelical Christianity, in addition to all the other things he was saying, and which he had completely failed to notice as such. The sentence was,

“The gospel is not the problem – we are the problem.”

And that, right there, is the very heart of the problem. In my opinion, the ‘gospel’, as the writer sees it, is indeed the problem. It’s both: it’s ‘We’ and it’s ‘The gospel’.

First, I will present the essay as written (with just one emphasis inserted by me), and then I will present my rebuttal on the ‘gospel is not the problem’ idea. There is actually some good stuff here, despite the guy failing to recognise the key issue^[1].

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Two long conversations in two days with two different men, one identical story: Grew up in traditional churches. Highly involved. Now completely repelled by Christianity. Why? Because of the terrible, appalling attitudes held and atrocities done by its leaders.

Heartbreaking.

I said all the obvious things. Apologised. Tried to point them away from religion towards Jesus. Apologised again. Mostly listened. But to be honest I don’t blame them. They were probably safer outside the church. I blame us.

Both men are still open spiritually, cautiously interested in my faith, deeply caring individuals. Both told me ‘I do my best. I’m a good person’. But both of them are also far too hurt to be open to any form of church.

I feel sad. Ashamed – as a Christian and especially as a leader. But I also feel discouraged. Here we are doing our best to reach the one lost sheep, whilst others are repelling the 99. Our back door is bigger and busier by far than our front door.

The Scottish comedian Billy Connolly fondly recalls growing up in the crowded Catholic tenements of Glasgow. Families were enormous and the children would play all day in and out of each other’s homes. At night, he jokes, each dad would make sure that the right number of children was put to bed in each house, without worrying about whose they actually were.

It’s a bit like that in the church. We continually seek to welcome strangers into our home, whilst our own children go missing, and then comfort ourselves that the numbers are roughly the same. We aspire to be good witnesses to the world, whilst neglecting and alienating the members of our own family.

The gospel is not the problem – we are the problem. [Emphasis mine – Ed] This is not a failure of Christian apologetics (both of the men I met are open intellectually); it’s a failure of Christians to apologise (their hurt hearts are firmly and understandably closed).

This is why we *must* do more than just preach the gospel and try to be nice. We must also urgently, practically nurture communities of healing and gospel life. We need systemic change in the institutional church. And of course we must hold leaders to account whilst raising up women and men whose integrity matches their ability. For every pioneer evangelist outside the front door amongst the unchurched, we probably need ten prodigal mothers and fathers on the back porch quietly loving and listening to those who have been (or are about to be) ‘dechurched’. What’s the point of winning new people when we are losing – repelling – the ones we’ve already got?

Religious sentimentality and a fetishistic obsession with the familiar is obscuring the concrete reality of our situation. There is hard graft, dirty and difficult work to be done: first, burying the dead religious rituals despised by Jesus (it won’t be popular), and then actively building the living, loving community he actually came to establish. We must apply ourselves to work and pray with all our strength to renew old churches and to plant new churches. Both together. One without the other will not work. And we must dismantle the toxic distinction between priesthood and laity. Oh and we are also going to have to apologise. A lot.

And then personally we must also be prepared to go on many long journeys with prodigals like the two men I met these past two days. We must listen to them respectfully and befriend them unconditionally. One whiff of bible-bashing and they will run a mile. But give it a few more chats over a few more months and there may well come a night, after a few beers no doubt, when one or other of these men will turn to me and finally say ‘OK, talk to me about the Jesus stuff. How can you really believe all that ****? Tell me more.’

Our back door is bigger than our front door and it has a long and winding driveway.

Kyrie eleison

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So, there we have, along with the beautifully honest points about what corrective changes need to be made in churches, the understandable desire of a pastor to bring back what he sees as his ‘lost sheep’. You can feel the compassion and concern that he has for them, and it is certainly genuine.

Sadly, though, it has to be said: it is obvious that his ultimate objective is to bring them back to believing the same things that he and his congregation do. You can even see the ulterior motives there in his closing sentences, despite using the word ‘unconditional’, and also in his unfortunate and revealing use of the word ‘prodigal’. Heck, he even admits that they are probably safer outside of church! And while he indeed says ” ‘We’ are wrong”, there’s actually much more to it than that.

Recently, I have been working with ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs), helping to bring them back into what could be seen as a ‘normal’ life, free of the habits engendered by a lifetime of being steeped in a toxic religious atmosphere. While the JWs do indeed have a whole pile of, shall we say, ‘problematic’, and indeed harmful, doctrines, I’m afraid Evangelicalism is little different except in specifics. The JWs have many ideas of reality that dictate the way in which they approach life and faith, and in this regard Evangelicalism is of course the same. After all, any person’s faith background, if it is held sincerely^[2], will always dictate – to a greater or lesser extent – the way in which the person lives their lives. And it appears that the key to either voluntary or enforced adherence to one’s faith practices, in many if not most congregations, is that of fear. Fear of others’ opinions, fear of sanctions, fear of leadership, fear of exposure and/or public ridicule or shaming, fear of death, fear of afterlife punishment, and the list goes on. It’s all about fear.

When things like this become apparent to a former adherent to a particular faith tradition, possibly like the two men in the piece above; where they see the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, as it were, it becomes the prime reason why those people would never want to return to that particular ‘flock'^[3]. If the gospel is one of fear – whatever form that fear may take – why would you want to subject yourself to that sort of thing? Especially when the pastor can’t see, and indeed doesn’t know and/or understand, what it was that drives people away in the first place^[4]. And you can’t ‘unsee’ what you’ve seen; indeed, it would be dishonest, and ultimately pointless, to do so.

And there’s more.

Let’s come back to the main assertion:

“The gospel is not the problem – we are the problem.”

You see, I’d actually say that the ‘gospel’, as Evangelical Christianity calls and defines it, is indeed the problem^[5]. Emphatically, it’s not that Evangelicalism itself is evil, and nor are the people in it.^[6]. A lot of good comes from Evangelicalism; I believe that the love that many have for Jesus is genuine and they do lots of good things in society (some of which, yes, has strings attached) and above all their love for Jesus is expressed in some really good, inspired and indeed anointed worship music.

So, why is their ‘gospel’ a ‘Great Evil’, as the title of this piece claims?

The simple answer, which I will of course complicate by explaining and describing it, is that their gospel misrepresents God, presenting Him in the most terrible light possible, so much so that no-one in their right mind would want to associate themselves with such a monster god. And that’s even before you get into how this god has supposedly put – equally horrific – things in place in order to ‘put things right’.

When you really look deeply into Evangelical doctrine – and believe me, I have done just that! – you will find that the summary below is what is held as the true nature of spiritual reality^[7] by Evangelical Christians. I’m sure they would try to qualify, explain away and and ‘Ah, but…’ the whole thing; I’m sure that I, as an Evangelical many years ago, would have done the same thing. But, right at its very heart, this is Evangelicalism^[8]. Here, then, is what you have to believe, at the heart of it, if you’re going to call yourself an Evangelical Christian. Hold tight; here we go!

Evangelicalism’s god is an angry, capricious and bullying god^[9] that acts more like humans than humans do.

He’s easily offended, he holds grudges, and the only thing he accepts to appease him (and as everyone knows, appeasement only works until the bully decides it doesn’t) is to kill his own son to satisfy his ‘holiness’, his ‘justice’ and also his honour.

People are given the ‘choice’ to ‘love’ this god, or burn forever in a furnace – ‘Hell’ – of that god’s own designing and maintaining^[10], while those he’s supposed to have trained to love others either look on in glee – a standard doctrine in 19th century Evangelicalism, which, I am disappointed to be able to say, has persisted to this day in many circles – or are somehow ‘trained’ to forget about their loved ones burning; this being the other doctrine that explains how people can live a blessed life in Heaven while the excluded roast and scream^[11].

And, because ‘narrow is the way’ (Mt 7:13-14), this inescapably means that many more people will go to that furnace than will not, probably including their (Evangelicals’) children, which they still keep popping out despite knowing that most people will end up in the furnace, statistically including their children. It seems they’re prepared to take that risk with the eternal futures of the people they will (hopefully) love more than anyone or anything else in this life.

And, remember, all this happens – Hell and so on – because this god is a god of love, they tell us.

The English word ‘Gospel’ – the translation of the Greek word ‘ευαγγελιον’ (euaggelion) – means ‘Good News’. This is where we get the terms ‘Evangelical’ and ‘evangelist’ from, of course^[12].

The gospel^[13] espoused by Evangelical Christianity, though, can under no circumstances be decribed as ‘good news’. It is in fact far, far worse news than anything in history, putting even the genocide of the Holocaust to shame. It pains me to even have to explain this, but in fact according to the Evangelical gospel, every single one of the Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust went straight to Hell, because they didn’t come to a belief in Jesus before they died. By any definition, except apparently any coming from Evangelicalism, this concept represents such a diabolical evil that the only way to reconcile it with a loving god is…. well, there isn’t one. The only way that an Evangelical Christian, one who really believes that, anyway, can so reconcile it is for them to live with a cognitive dissonance. That a god of love can cause and perpetuate such suffering is only capable of being handled by the human mind by means of having a cognitive dissonance. And that goes with the glibness of their claim that most people, whom their god loves, remember, will burn in Hell for all eternity, and their ability to believe that without going completely insane.

No, this is NOT good news by any standard, and it is the reason why I refer to it as ‘The Great Evil of Evangelicalism’. Because that’s what it is.

Furthermore, the Hell doctrine is an integral part of Evangelicalism; it is fully intertwined with the way the religion works; it is ‘non-resectable’, to use a surgical term – it cannot be removed without doing irreparable damage to the entire structure. If you remove this doctrine, you break the whole thing, and it won’t be Evangelicalism anymore. This is why it’s so deadly. If you’re an honest Evangelical, you have to admit that you believe that this doctrine is true and, indeed, that what it describes will really happen to real people.

One of the reasons why Jesus came was in order to show God as being, well, in a word, ‘Nice’. Someone who loves us just as we are; someone Who has our best interests at heart. Someone Who heals, forgives and restores the broken. He did this in order to set right the image of god that people of His time had; that of being, shall we say, ‘Not nice’!

And yet, over the centuries, successive generations of Christian theologians have twisted that image back to the pre-Jesus concept of a horrible god. Nowhere and no-when has this been more apparent than over the last 150 years or so, since Evangelicalism (and its precursors) began.

This, then, is the evil of Evangelicalism^[14]. Despite the clear example of Jesus, the depiction of God is one of Him being cruel, vengeful, sadistic – and, rather than continue the list, let’s just sum it up with one word: Unapproachable. Who would want the company of a god like that, in the unlikely event that he’d even allow us near him? And so, ordinary, decent people are rightly repelled by that depiction. The very people who need Jesus the most are repelled by Evangelicalism’s depiction of Him, and are thereby denied all the benefits and blessing of direct faith in, and personal knowledge of, Jesus.

Since Evangelicalism is founded on such a diabolically evil dissonance, and one where words and definitions are routinely and irreparably twisted, it would be far better if not only those two brothers being counselled by our pastor friend, but also everyone else with a gentle loving heart, should avoid Evangelicalism entirely.

Such gentle hearts only get corrupted by the constant exposure to the evil that is the Evangelical gospel, which really is the polar opposite of everything that Jesus was, that He showed, and that He taught. I say this from personal experience; that’s what happened to me and it took me fifteen years to detox from it. Try holding the Evangelical gospel up next to the loving teachings of Jesus, and you will see that it only holds water if any of the things He is recorded as saying are twisted out of their real meanings and contexts.

I am so glad that those guys got out, and I sincerely hope that they will eventually recover. I’m not assuming that the points I make in this essay are the reasons why those two guys came out of Evangelicalism – indeed, the reasons are given as being the atrocities committed by leadership. But you can bet that there were other reasons too, and these will have much in common with both what I have written here, and what other ‘exvangelicals’ too have experienced.

So, regarding going ‘back in’ to Evangelicalism, well, you don’t recover from poisoning by drinking more poison. Yes, Jesus is amazing; again, I speak from personal experience. But, in Evangelicalism, even Jesus has been twisted and, in fact, silenced by the Bibliolatry^[15] of Evangelicalism.

You see, if Jesus^[16] tells a believer something that is ‘against’ the ‘clear teaching’ of the Bible – as interpreted by Evangelicalism, of course – then it is Jesus that is wrong, not the Bible. Moreover, Evangelicalism has stained and sullied the Bible over the years, and to such an extent, that now even the purest-hearted believer finds it hard to read it because of all the disgusting twisted interpretations they’ve been fed down the years that keep coming back to mind unbidden.

No, let those escaped men deconstruct in whatever way they need. Leave them alone. Don’t try to recapture them and draw them back into the cage they have escaped from. That would be pure evil – which like all the worst evil, comes from people who think they have the best motives.

Here is an excellent and very much on-point quotation from Rob Bell – a pastor who has of course been rejected by Evangelicalism because of his teachings against belief in Hell:

“Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the Gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly Father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony. Does God become somebody totally different the moment you die?

“That kind of God is simply devastating. Psychologically crushing. We can’t bear it. No one can. And that is the secret deep in the heart of many people, especially Christians: they don’t love God. They can’t, because the God they’ve been presented with and taught about can’t be loved. That God is terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable.

“And so there are conferences about how churches can be more “relevant” and “missional” and “welcoming,” and there are vast resources, many, many books and films, for those who want to “reach out” and “connect” and “build relationships” with people who aren’t part of the church. And that can be helpful. But at the heart of it, we have to ask: Just what kind of God is behind all this?

“Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.”

– Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

And so the two men, in the original essay, came out of Evangelicalism. But, of course, for Evangelicals, that’s no escape! There is no escape from a god who would pursue a person right to the ends of the earth to make sure that they end up in that fiery furnace!^[17] They would say that simply running away or ignoring [their perception of] the truth won’t save you. There is no escape!

But it’s not that. It’s that these people are so honest that they believe that God isn’t like Evangelicalism says he is, so why would they want to be part of a community where that is believed and acted upon? They simply don’t believe that any more, so to them it doesn’t matter that this ‘truth’ might pursue them, for it is no longer relevant. So why would they ever want to return to something that they have essentially grown out of? Their path of spiritual growth has led them away from Evangelicalism, and to go back would be to nullify that growth. They have grown past that, in the same way that a butterfly has grown past being a caterpillar, and what butterfly ever benefitted from taking flying lessons from caterpillars?

And so, it’s not just that “…others are repelling the 99” as the author says; it is also, most emphatically, their gospel itself.

I am aware that many of my readers believe fully in the atoning death of Jesus, and in the deflection of God’s wrath away from us and onto Jesus. Of Jesus being the sacrificial Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world. I’m not trying to take that away from those people; far from it. Take a look at this article for more on what Jesus did on the Cross and why it all applies no matter what the precise details are of your belief system. Remember also that there are almost as many ways of looking at the Cross as there are denominations. Be encouraged; be secure: Jesus is still Lord, and Jesus still died for our sins, no matter how that actually works in practice.

The actual Gospel is sooooo much better than Evangelicalism gives credit for. However it works, Jesus has obtained forgiveness of sin and victory over death! This is not heresy; this is the glorious truth of it all!

So what is the Gospel, then? Many people outside of Christianity say, ‘If God is so good and so powerful, why can’t He just forgive people anyway?’

And, that, I believe, that is the Good News – the Gospel – that those ‘outside’ so intuitively realise: that God does indeed forgive, and has indeed forgiven, everything that everyone has ever done wrong, every ‘sin’ both actual and only perceived. This is indeed the case; because for Him they were never a problem. “As far as the East is from the West, so far does He remove our transgressions [sins] from us” (Psalm 103:12-14). There are so many ramifications that lead on from that one basic truth, but that in essence is what we’re looking at.

I might go into more detail on this later in the series, but, for now, I think I’ve blathered on enough!

Grace and Peace to you all

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