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Why It's Not Evangelism Until We Speak

But Jesus’ life and teachings were also compelling to me—the stuff that’s in the red letters of our Bibles. My unbelieving friends may have slighted Christianity, but they could respect Jesus. He taught about how we’re supposed to live: loving our neighbors, forgiving others, living lives of simplicity and generosity, crossing cultures, empowering others, seeking justice, praying for miracles, connecting with God in our everyday lives. Jesus masterfully painted a captivating vision of what it meant to be a citizen of the kingdom of God.

Yet in the gospel I knew, none of that seemed to matter. Even if you hated your neighbor, acted on your racist prejudices, spent all of your wealth snapping up extra homes and stock portfolios caring nothing for your neighbor, but you prayed a prayer when you were 8 years old, then you’d be with Jesus for all time? 

That didn’t feel like good news. It felt like we were setting people up, in the name of Jesus, to live self-centered lives. Shouldn’t the gospel not only tell us how to die, but also how to live? Shouldn’t we have a story that is relevant to those who still breathe, and not just to those who gave up their last?

I know we teach more than that from our pulpits. We do talk about how to live out our faith in practical, relevant ways. But when we start talking about the gospel itself—the core articulation of our faith—it can make the more relevant stuff feel irrelevant. Or at least like extra credit.

It didn’t feel like a story I wanted to live and die for, much less tell.

Red-Letter Gospel

In my early 30s, I found myself nestled in the foothills of Sierra Madre, a Los Angeles suburb. Around 30 pastors and leaders had gathered for a doctoral class at a Passionist retreat center under Dallas Willard’s tutelage.

Early in the course, he asked us a question: “What is the gospel Jesus taught?”

All the hands went up in the air. And someone gave a respectable answer: “That Jesus died to pay the penalty of our sins, so that when we die, we get to go to heaven.” All of us looked around in approval.

But Dallas bent down into the microphone and said, “No.”

My mind raced: Was he a Christian?

Then he asked us to open our Bibles to Mark 1:14-15:

“After John was put into prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe this good news.’”

I had read these verses many times, but they finally clicked for me. In this passage, the word for gospel is repeated twice: “good news.” And for Jesus, this was the core message: The kingdom of God has come near. God is in charge and making wrong things right—now, and in the glorious future. It was a powerful way to put together the already and not-yet-ness of the kingdom of God, and all the stuff in the red letters started to make sense. Jesus’ proclamation, therefore, could pull together the strands of my theology and weave it into one coherent gospel.

There is an eternal future that exists for all of us, and through the cross, we are forgiven. And at the same time, God is serving the hors d’oeuvres of that future banquet in our present day. His kingdom has come, and we’re all invited to be a part of it.

This felt like good news, and I was ready to tell it.

The Big Story

But as a college minister, I couldn’t go on campus and start saying, “The kingdom has come near.” They’d envision me yelling on a megaphone, wearing sandwich boards depicting people falling into the flames of hell. It just wouldn’t make sense.

So we came up with a way to share the gospel, through the lens of the entire biblical story. We called it the Big Story. [If interested, you can read more in depth about the Big Story in True Story: A Christianity Worth Believing In (InterVarsity Press, 2008).] It would walk through four “circles”—Created for Good, Damaged by Evil, Restored for Better and Sent Together to Heal—to help people understand why the world was created, how it was damaged, how it is being restored and our response to it all.

The first time I taught this at an evangelism conference for college students, the response was amazing. The seminar was full of students from Occidental College, one of the most politically correct campuses in our country. The residence hall leaders there are trained in a list of words they can and cannot use, like “first-year” instead of “freshman,” to be inclusive. It’s not an easy place to proclaim the gospel.

But when students heard about the Big Story, they went out immediately and started sharing their faith. One student went to a fast food restaurant that evening and started telling this story with a stranger. (I’ve known two people who have since gotten tattoos of the Big Story.)

It finally felt like good news.

And they, as the marketers predicted, started to share with others.