the gospel...plus (part one)

The gospel is the only thing that saves and we receive this life-changing truth alone. We don't need the the gospel plus anything else. Beware of falling into the many traps that involve us believing the gospel plus anything else to be saved. In a series of posts I hope to bring some of the common ways we fall into this error.

The gospel plus common interests is a lie that abounds in our fallen church culture. People leave gospel-believing churches for all sorts of reasons, but most of these reasons comes down to not finding common interests (ie: there is no one here my age, there is nothing here for my kids, I don't like the style of music...). Conversely, people stay at churches because they find a social network there. Now, the church is about people, but the common reason we have for committing to a local church is the gospel, not the gospel plus anything else. We believe a 'gospel...plus' theology when we stay at a church because others that share our hobbies keep us there, or we leave a church because there are not enough people who share our hobbies. The gospel is enough to unite us, we do not need the gospel plus anything else. Many people who are highly involved in para-church organizations will often find that it is not the gospel that connects them to those they work with, but the task of the organization.

When people leave a local church in search of people they can spend time with on the weekend they ultimately leave with a powerless gospel that cannot redeem the relationships that don't involve a common goal. If your church is all people who hike together, or read the same books, or work in the same office, or whatever, it is likely that it is not a church, but a social gather of people who like that activity.

Do you have relationships with people in your church with whom you have little in common but the gospel? Develop those relationships, love those people, reconcile any fractured relationships only because you have the gospel in common.

What kind of church should we be?

Often people ask about what kind of church we are, or what kind of church I would like our church to become. We are part of an association of churches by which our name "Fellowship Baptist" comes from, but such associations have less to do with our priorities than they used to. I get questions about how 'charismatic' we are, and some people have attended our church for several weeks in the end to leave because we are not 'charismatic' enough. If you have attended for a long time, in particular, if you were a part of the preaching in Jude, you will know that we don't put much emphasis either way on what we call 'non-essentials'. So what do we put much emphasis on? What kind of church are we? If we don't care about anything, we really aren't a church after all. I agree along with the men in the video I have posted below that we are and need to become a gospel-oriented church. This is the major point of everything the New Testament teaches. This is our work as a church, our focus, and the foundation of our church. Because God's word is absorbed with the gospel, then I want nothing more than for us to do the same. We sing songs about the gospel, take communion regularly (right now twice a month), preach from the Bible, and see the answer to all of our problems in what God has done. I will as your pastor work to make sure nothing else takes over the main emphasis in our congregation.