The Gospel Changes Something

What if the gospel wasn't about changing minds?

Dear Church,

Did you know?

As I'm writing this, we're coming up on the end of the year. My husband and I have weathered the various Christmas gatherings, family time across the state, obligatory winter illness, and are finally in that sweet in-between moment of stillness. Post-holidays, post-family-obligations, pre-work obligations in a new year.

Which has, of course, left me with plenty of time to reflect.

I can really only speak from the perspective of the American church, but have you noticed how cerebral the Evangelical, primarily White Church has become in the last couple of decades? I could get into the history of the tendency for the majority to swing back and forth from one extreme to the other, but let's not derail too far off the tracks here.

"So if the gospel isn't about changing minds, then what am I even doing when I share the gospel with people who aren't followers of Christ?"

Great question, my Dear Reader. First of all, let's talk about the term "sharing the gospel." It's odd, isn't it? When we describe talking about complicated subjects, or talking with our close friends about a potential new relationship, we don't often use the term "sharing" in those contexts. Baked into the Western Christian language of "sharing" the gospel is an interesting theological understanding: that we're not the ones doing anything. We're (supposedly) sharing about who our God is and who Jesus is and who we are in relation to Him.

On the flip side, it also leaves the problem of the disengaged Christian who thinks they've "done their job" because they "presented" the "gospel" as it was taught to them in Sunday school: God created, we messed it up, God came down embodied to save the world, died for our sins, and was resurrected. (Did I do alright?)

After spending the last almost 4 years in Genesis and the majority of this last year studying Matthew with a dear friend of mine, I've noticed something...Jesus preached a gospel. So did the disciples. Before he was crucified or resurrected or anyone really understood the gravity of the situation. (I would argue that to some degree, we still haven't fully grasped it, but you know what I mean.)

"So...if Jesus was preaching a gospel before he had completed 'the gospel narrative,' then what on earth good news was he spreading then?"

And...break!

AI-generated image of a Bible being part of a growing plant's root system and soil

Now, the funny thing about this post is that I wrote everything above this section about a year ago.

And then I just left it here. To simmer, to stew, and for me to chew on the idea for a whole 'nother year. In fact, I think it's actually been closer to 1.5 years since I last touched this draft.

In that time, I've done a few things...I've still been reading the Bible pretty consistently with a friend of mine on Thursday mornings who's asking really good, thoughtful questions. I also got to meet with different pairings of LDS missionaries in my city over the course of around 6 months.

For those of you who don't know, LDS missionary pairs rotate every 6 weeks.

I was sitting in one of my favorite coffeeshops in Buda (there aren't all that many to choose from), catching up with an old friend of mine, and mentioning God every so often. I'd actually seen the missionaries out of the corner of my eye and had wanted to go talk to them, but my friend and I were having a pretty deep conversation, so I wasn't just gonna abandon him mid-conversation.

However, I didn't have to--they wound up walking over to us, and I was thrilled. Thus began a 6-ish month saga of me meeting with different missionary pairs in Buda, then getting connected to the LDS ward that was closer to my house, and continuing to meet up with a couple more pairs of missionaries.

There was a whole lot of interesting, clarifying conversation that happened when I met up with them, but I want to focus on one thing in particular: the response of my Christian friends when I was telling them who I was meeting up with.

Friends closer to my age (mid 20s to mid 30s) tended to be curious and intrigued by the fact that I was having ongoing, multiple conversations with people from another faith and typically asked me why I was meeting with them or said how very cool it was of me to share the Truth with them and how they could never do something like that. Friends and connections of mine who are a little bit older, more like Gen X and above, tended to be more gung-ho about, "Yeah! Set 'em straight!" without a ton of rooted knowledge about what exactly it was I was setting them straight from, or why it's a little more complicated than a simple "gospel presentation."

[Also, a brief note on the LDS church and missionaries...

I know the LDS church wants to say that they are simply another Christian church - the one, true church left on earth post-martyring of all the apostles - but they don't hold to a trinitarian view of YHWH, they don't actually believe that Jesus was and IS YHWH...some other stuff...and because of all of this, they don't believe that Jesus' actions or Word and sending of His Spirit to indwell in, give power to, and edify every believer was truly effectual.

Instead, they believe that God's authority was lost on earth, reclaimed/re-founded by the first modern day prophet Joesph Smith, passed down directly from the apostles>Joseph Smith>Every LDS President since then, and that since only the LDS church's modern-day "Prophet" can access the fullness of authority, the majority of us humans left on earth still need the words of the LDS President in addition to the past revelation of the Old and New Testament and the Book of Mormon to seek God's will, Truth, and power. (That's also where The Pearl of Great Price, Doctrine and Covenants, and every general conference sermon is added into the ongoing, modern revelation that those of us without any "keys" - access to authority from God - need, according to their theology.) There's a lot more to be said here, of course, but that's the skinny of it to give you a big picture idea.]

My meetings with the LDS missionaries were interesting because I did in fact learn a lot more about their actual theology, which was also helped by the fact that I have some knowledge of their church and background because I happened to go to high school with a lot of LDS folks.

A lot of my conversations tended to center around who God is and what he did to make himself--and his power and authority--fully accessible to us through Jesus, rather than Jesus' death and resurrection simply serving as a sacrificial lamb of sorts that made it possible for us to continue to add onto the "requirements of salvation" to be made acceptable to God by how well we live our lives on earth.

As you can imagine, these conversations didn't exactly end up with anyone converting to another understanding of faith and who God is. (I know, shocking.) Even though I did a really good job of "presenting the gospel" and asking them culturally and theologically relevant open-ended questions. And vice versa.

The gospel isn't about saying the right thing in order to win a soul to conversion into Christianity.

It's about connecting the Truth of who God is, as presented through the Old and New Testaments, particularly in the person of Jesus to our lived, human experience. We have access to the Kingdom now, as it is in heaven, on earth to do justice, love mercy, and continue to walk humbly with our God because Jesus took on the necessary punishment so that we could receive the reward both now and not yet in having full access to the authority and power of God through the power of the Holy Spirit as we await his return.

The gospel is complicated.

The gospel is more than a presentation.

When I met with the missionaries, the greatest joy I felt was when two of them commented on different occasions about how they need to read and study their Bible more. Not the Book of Mormon, not the King Follet discourse: the Word of God that we have left through generations of accumulated texts, poems, stories, and accounts to reveal who he is to his people. Not because I felt like I had "won" in getting them to the Bible, but because I trust that the Word of God is True. And effectual. And that if anyone interacts with it on their own, much less through the embodiment of believers, God can choose to move and act through His Word with anyone because the Word (in Jesus' resurrected, embodied being as well as the text which we have in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword.

The gospel is the Kingdom, accessible - and effectual - for everyone.

As I referred to in the title of this post, the gospel changes something - but it's not about changing minds. It's not about presenting it so clearly and without any doubt that logically, the recipient has no logical choice other than to "choose God."

The gospel changes the lives of those who receive the Spirit. Which is not up to us, the ones "sharing" the gospel; that's between every individual and Jesus, directly.

What does that leave for me to do, then?

Do justice,

Love hesed,

Walk humbly with your God.

Care for the marginalized.

Resist the devil and the systems of injustice and oppression across the globe.

Trust in the Lord.

Remain rooted in the faith he has sparked in you, and trust the community he's invited you into to help sharpen each other.

Stop being so concerned with convincing people into salvation.

Instead, let's focus more on living and acting out of the communal, justice-oriented faith we've been invited into for the good of the people around us - period.