To Recover or to Adapt?
Saturday, October 9, 2010 at 2:27PM You may have heard about the Eighth Letter conference that was held in Toronto last week. The question behind the conference: "You’ve got 15 minutes to communicate your most pressing message to the Church. What will you say?"
That's a great question. I didn't attend the conference, but I'm very interested in the different kinds of answers that might have been presented.
For a limited time, you can hear what Tim Challies said for free. Tim writes:
My letter focused in on getting the gospel right...So while I was not booed off the platform and did not have anything thrown at me, my impression was that the message was not particularly popular.
In the comments, Nathan, one of the organizers of the conference, writes this:
From a more personal preference, I expected a bit more. You were talking to seasoned church folk, many Christian leaders and as one commenter assumed I would think, “why did you say something we already know?” Of course, the gospel is important and central, but I think you would also have to give credit to the fact that the very reason why most people were there was because it was their belief in the gospel that brought them there. In a lot of ways, you could have taken your letter verbatim from a gospel tract. At some point there has to be a little bit of credit given to the people in the church can handle some solid food, not just milk.
What's going on here? What's at stake is the issue of whether the church's greatest need is to recover or guard the deposit of the gospel, or whether its primary need is to adapt to new realities. That seems to be the great divide in ministry approaches these days.
I'm reminded of the two types of challenges described in the book Leadership on the Line
- Technical Challenges: “Every day, people have problems for which they do, in fact, have the necessary know-how and procedures. We call these technical problems.”
- Adaptive Challenges: “But there is a whole host of problems that are not amenable to authoritative expertise or standard operating procedures. They cannot be solved by someone who provides answers from on high. We call these adaptive challenges because they require experiments, new discoveries, and adjustments from numerous places in the organization or community. Without learning new ways – changing attitudes, values, and behaviors – people cannot make the adaptive leap necessary to thrive in the new environment.”
I hope I'm not imaging things, but this seems like a good grid to understand the ways people respond when asked what the church needs. I hear a lot of talk in some circles about sticking to our core. I hear a lot of talk in other circles about liminality and experimentation and adaptation. Both approaches were on display last weekend at the conference.
Many today - the young, restless, and reformed crowd - tend to focus on recovering and guarding the gospel. Our most pressing need, they say, is to guard what we already have.
Others - younger evangelicals, emerging, etc. - focus on what has to change and how we need to adapt.
Do we primarily need to guard the good deposit, and center our ministries around it? Or do we need to adapt to new contexts? Or do we need to do both? The way we answer this question will make all the difference in the world in how we approach ministry - or in what we say at a conference.
Reader Comments (5)
Tim would not have picked this topic if he had not felt that "the true gospel" was seriously jeopardized and accordingly the church in danger of losing its very heart and life.I don't think he was wrong in his perception of a rather lukewarm response. Emergents - and I would consider myself one of them - don't just focus on the need to adapt. They see some serious deficiencies in our traditional interpretation of the "dark backdrop" of the Gospel that Tim mentioned. At almost every point, most emergents would seriously disagree: the understanding of God's wrath, the interpretation of the fall, the root problem of sin and its consequences, God's demand for perfection, penal substitution as an act of satisfying God's wrath and justice, faith as a prerequisite to escape the destiny of God's eternal wrath and condemnation etc.Will it be enough common ground that both views agree in the end result of a reconciled humanity through God's redemption and its life-giving consequences as the core of what we have to offer the world, to see each other still as brothers and sisters in the same body of Christ? Or will we end up with mutual "anathemas" and the insistence that the other side is preaching another Gospel that is either cursed or not blessed by God?
Josh:Thanks for challenging the usefulness of my grid. Maybe I am off!Honestly, I don't think there is enough common ground if both views agree on the end result but not on the means and other key elements of the gospel. You've used the language of Galatians which makes the same point. To preach a different gospel is to be cursed. Tough language, which points to the importance of this issue.
What I do find ironic, Darryl, is that the different gospel Paul was combatting (and John in a very similar way with the Gnostic distortions) was a message that essentially took the goodness out of the good news, while the young, restless and reformed camp thinks the gospel ceases to be good news if we don't paint the backdrop of the picture dark enough - hence the focus on the depth of depravity, the fierceness of wrath and judgment, and the unlimited nature of suffering in hell.The other thing that is not ironic but tragic is that the unchurched to a large degree cannot see any goodness in the message at all exactly because of that backdrop. They are thinking: why should I put my trust in a God who is willing, able and determined to inflict unending excruciating pain on human beings, no matter what the offense has been?And one more comment on the seriousness of different interpretations of the atonement, and whether this really constitutes a "different gospel": I may be wrong but I believe with all my heart that checklists of perceived orthodoxy (like: "did you believe in the penal substitution version or not?") do not jive with the actual requirement to be able to see and enter the kingdom of God: becoming like little children!
Josh:I agree with emergents that we haven't always done a good job of describing the cosmic implications of the gospel and how it really is good news. At the same time, the heart of this message is that Christ died as a substitute for our sins. He did so as our victor and example and as our substitute. You simply can't get away from this as the apostolic message.It does take becoming like a child to accept this. Being childlike doesn't mean to lack any theological sophistication - or else emergents are in trouble too! It's more about our dependency and helplessness, which is a pretty good picture of all of us.
Darryl,I have no intention to contradict Paul's definition of the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15. Yes, there would be no good news apart from Christ dying for our sins, being buried and raised to life again. I'm also not against theological sophistication in our attempt to understand what we believe and why we believe it. I'd still insist that salvation itself is not dependent on a particular model of explanation what that phrase "for our sins" means or on preferring one model over another. As you hinted at in your own answer, no singular model alone explains sufficiently on its own what Christ's death and resurrection all entails.What I was arguing against is the tendency to call those heretical who do not entirely agree with our own preferred understanding of how exactly God extends grace and forgiveness through the death of His Son when early summaries of the Christian faith like the Apostles' Creed never bother to emphasize the "how" of salvation beyond the fact that Christ is Son of God, died, was raised, exalted and through the Holy Spirit we believe in forgiveness, eternal life etc.Its the facts themselves that God established which are life-giving and our embrace of these facts, not the degree of sophistication or our depth of understanding.