Keith’s Blog

Rediscovering the Gospel (Part 2) – An Uncomfortable Truth?

During my student days, I had the privilege of spending almost a year in the wonderful but troubled island of Jamaica. It is a place of almost indescribable natural beauty in which both extremes of poverty and wealth coexist side by side. Jamaicans are great to hang out with so if you ever get the chance… Anyhow, three days per week, I would catch two buses from where I was living (serially, not in parallel) and head off to Webster Memorial Church in the downtown region of Kingston where I was placed as an assistant. Over the years, and recently again, I have reflected often on the words painted large on the outside wall of a school for the blind that I passed each day en route to the church: “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
I very much liked the point they were making to those tempted to gaze at their school with pity or derision.

People often make the assumption that blindness occurs only in others. It is the reason for this rather unusual series of blog entries. I want to have this discussion on what the Gospel really is because my growing concern is that those of us in the church have lost our sight concerning it. I think we have allowed the Gospel to be changed and must recover it again if we are to prove faithful in the task God has given us. The Danish theologian and philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, once noted that “in the matters of faith, every generation must begin again.” He is right, of course, but I think we need to pay particular attention to his words in these present moments of unprecedented spiritual turmoil and decline.

Why is it that the number of those involved in local churches in Ireland today is declining so quickly? For over a decade now, I have read article after article and book after book on this subject and there seems to be widespread agreement around a twofold answer to the question. More times than not, the demise of the Irish church is blamed on changes in the culture around it, and a failure to live out what is preached within it. Our primary missiological difficulty, we are told, is that those around us are caving in to the materialism, secularism and self-interest of modern Irish life whilst those in the church are themselves failing to live up to the message they believe in .

But what if both of the above answers are actually totally wrong?

Firstly, what if the problem with our churches is not ‘them’ at all, but lies solely with ‘us’? What if the changes going on in our culture are not the real reason for the steady decline our churches are experiencing? What if the problem actually lies in what has been going on in the church?

Secondly, what if what the painful slide into church decline evidenced all around is not primarily caused by our failure to practice what we preach but, rather, the opposite? What if, beneath the surface, the reality of our situation is that we are indeed practicing what we preach, we are faithfully embodying what we believe? What if people are leaving the church in droves, today, because the gospel now being proclaimed and incarnated there is nothing but a shadow of the ‘euangelion’ first proclaimed by the Apostles? Could the woeful dichotomy that exists between the ancient teaching of Jesus and the modern reality of our Churches reveal not just a shift from pre-modern to post-modern in our culture, not just a rot in our praxis, as we have always thought, but also, and much more seriously, a terrible rot in the theology that lies at the centre of our proclamation? Could it be that, at the end of several hundred years of assumed faithfulness in kerugma and confidently expressed certainty in orthodoxy, we actually find ourselves in the place of being blind guides in serious need of reformation in our own faith? Personally, I think it must.

Jesus says that “a good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit” (Matthew 7:18) and His prognosis for the latter is somewhat worrying! If these words were true when he first spoke them, are they not just as true today? And could they not just as powerfully be confronting us as they once did the Pharisees? Could it be that it is us who are now the Pharisees, those who love the praise of men more than God, those who substituted relationship with God for knowledge about him, those who are passionate about the keeping of the laws but who fail woefully to offer and proclaim grace?

My answer to most of the above is, sadly, yes! Jesus clearly warned us to watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees. It is my growing conviction that those in the reformed churches, and none more than me, have woefully failed to heed Him. If we would see Ireland respond once more to the gospel of Christ then we must first reclaim that gospel from the many influences that have diluted and altered it. We must preach the good news to ourselves as well as our communities.

So what do you think? In the entries that follow, I would love to invite you to interact with me as I try to explore what it will take for us to be free of this unwelcome yeast and its pollution once more.