At the Road Show

Earlier this summer I attended the Church Basement Road Show, a book promo tour put on by some guys from Emergent Village. The show was creative and engaging, and I embraced many of the general concepts—looking for God in unfamiliar places, creating an environment where Christians feel safe asking tough questions, recognizing that ministering the gospel involves more than reciting four spiritual laws, and emphasizing God’s presence and involvement in the world’s affairs. Overall, however, the supreme emphasis on Christ-like conduct in the here and now overshadowed sacred and central truths of the Christian faith. The following paragraphs explain why this made me uneasy.

Sharing an excerpt from his book Soul Graffiti, Mark Scandrette posed this question: Is loving someone only a means to an end, or is the meaning found in the act itself?

He proceeded to tell of his friendship with The Emperor, a crazy, old transvestite guy who lived in a bus on a hill in San Francisco. Mark and a friend met The Emperor, and at first he hated them. Yet they decided to continue being his friend. Over the course of several months, they would visit his bus frequently, eat food with him, and talk to him. They put up with his goofy antics and nasty habits, such as concocting healing potions from his own bodily fluids. They were careful not to preach to The Emperor or even mention the name of Jesus, because they knew he would immediately have a tantrum and banish them from his domain.

At the end of the story, The Emperor attempts suicide but fails. Mark and his friend show up and take him to the ER. When he wakes up, he is furious. He yells at them, demanding to know why they didn’t let him die. This is the point in the story where you would expect to hear that Mark shares the gospel message with him, The Emperor embraces the truth of Jesus, and all their work in loving him finally pays off. Instead, at the end of the story, Mark and his friend buy The Emperor his favorite food and enjoy it with him while he lies in his hospital bed. In my understanding, Mark intentionally left out any kind of conversion experience, crafting the story to emphasize that loving people indeed is not a means to an end. We don’t do it so that people will convert.

I agree.

However, as I reflected, I felt this tale was quietly communicating something else. With or without the author’s intention, it seems to say that if you do verbally present the gospel message (I Cor. 15:1-8) to a person, that automatically means your relationship was only a tool all along. So I asked myself, if I urge my friend to believe in the risen Jesus, does that rule out the possibility that I actually care about him and will love him even if he doesn’t ever believe? Mark’s story (combined with some of the other material presented at the road show) answers this question with an indirect “yes.”

Again, I agree that the gospel is more than a simple formula. It needs to be lived and communicated daily through our actions. But it is words too; it is a message! As God’s people, our actions should be a testimony to his redeeming work. But that work, the climax of which is Jesus’ death and resurrection, needs to be explained. Christ had a lot to say about how his followers should live, but he also had a lot to say about who he is! (The gospel of John, for example).

It’s cool that people are recognizing how we’ve cheapened salvation with the jargon we use to present gospel truth. Yes, sharing God’s truth with people involves more than reading four laws from a pamphlet. It must be displayed in our conduct. But in rediscovering how to communicate the gospel in word and deed, some people, in practice, erase the message. I agree wholeheartedly with Mark: to overlook people’s physical needs and take interest in them only as a means to an evangelistic end is offensive to the nature of Christianity. However, if we overcorrect and love people without telling them of the saving work of Jesus, then we are nothing but a bunch of people being really nice. We are dissolving into our pluralistic culture.

In the opening pages of Soul Graffiti, Mark writes, "It takes courage and work to investigate the message of Jesus beyond the hype of an overly religious culture…We search for what it means to be human and how to connect with our Creator in the context of our relationships with one another.” I left the road show hoping that Christians across the spectrum will listen to each other and search broadly for God’s truth, giving our humble loyalty always to Christ himself.