Guest Blogger: Dave Wright

Dave Wright is Coordinator for Youth Ministry in the Diocese of South Carolina.  He blogs at http://fusionmusing.blogspot.com/

“AN OBSCURED GOSPEL?”

I recently had the privilege of attending Ireland’s largest Christian youth event in Belfast.  Our group was there on a mission to build a partnership with a diocese who had brought a large group to the event.  Our aim during the five days was to get alongside the youth from that diocese and get to know them.   The rest of our time in Ireland would build on those relationships.  I looked forward to seeing how our group would react to a youth event in a different culture.  We tend to think that we do youth ministry the same all over the world, but reality is otherwise.  What I never expected was our group’s reaction to the main stage speakers and general sessions.  Their comments included: “I never thought you could do an altar call without explaining the gospel”;  “Why don’t they mention the Bible much?”; “How can people respond to the gospel when he (the speaker) did not mention the cross”; “We sang 11 songs over and over again before the speaker came on”; “That message this morning smacked of a prosperity gospel”.  Their comments created some very interesting conversations in our group.  To be fair, they glowed about many of the seminars but clearly  picked up on a lack of depth both biblically and theologically in the main sessions.  Every session ended with a call for a response and prayer teams were available but we wondered where the gospel was.

A few years ago I heard a sermon by John Piper in which he commented “If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you do not get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. That is not evangelism, that is deception!”  It seems harsh to apply that quote to our experience in Belfast, but it is not far from the reality that we witnessed.  The gospel was obscured by entertaining speakers who drew more attention to themselves and their audience than to God.  Towards the end of the event, I could not help but wonder as we sang about God’s great mercy and God’s glory how many people in the room clearly understood what they were singing.  Some of the sessions had an obvious evangelistic intent and others were more oriented toward building up the body.  However, hardly any Scripture was mentioned, the cross was virtually ignored, concepts like sin and salvation were not made clear, and yet offers were made to come to Christ, be healed, and receive God’s love.  All this was done in an atmosphere of hype and high emotion.   We had fun, we built relationships, and we prayed hard for God’s spirit to move powerfully despite the lack of substance.  We prayed that those who responded would settle into a good church and begin to grow into a deep knowledge of the God who reveals himself through scripture.

“If you do not listen to theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones!”
— C.S. Lewis