Israel’s Total Victory
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The latest installment of an ongoing interview series with contributing
editor Mark Bauerlein. Daniel Pipes joins in to discuss his new book, *Israel
Vi...
6 days ago
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Evangelical Untouchables 1
Michael Spencer has posted the first installment of a series called The Evangelical Untouchables on his blog, Internet Monk. (The series is a gangster theme--Untouchables as in Elliot Ness.) As I mentioned here earlier, I am one of the evangelical pastors he is interviewing for the series. Our first assignment was to describe the Gospel as we would to a group of unchurched 20-somethings. Then, we were to discuss a little bit of what our church was doing to promote the Gospel.
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4 comments:
Congrats! Erin and I were laughing when your picture popped up on iMonk. You have a gift for communicating the gospel in gentleness. I've actually been pondering the same question this past week since St. Patrick's Day. Obviously it isn't the ideal situation to be limited to a two paragraph blurb, but if we truly understand the gospel well enough to share clearly, we should be able to explain the simple gospel in 30 seconds. I think it's a good challenge to keep us sharp.
That was Rob...
Thanks, Rob.
I think two paragraphs was plenty. Paul summarized the Gospel in one sentence: "For I passed on to you as of first importance what I also received--that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve."
The first sentence I wrote was "Jesus Christ died for sins and rose from the dead," and then the rest of the post built around what that meant.
I was surprised both by the other answers and by the reader comments. I left out things like substitutionary atonement, a full definition of sin, resurrection from the dead, faith versus works, the deity of Christ, etc. While I think these things are important, they can muddle our message. The essential part is that Jesus died for sins and rose again and that He wants us to follow Him.
I expected people to rail on me for leaving so much out, but the general response was that the answers were too wordy and churchy.
Sorry I forgot the verse notation in the last comment. That was 1 Cor 15:3–5 NET.
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