It was the preaching that left me jarred, though.
There are lots of Baptists and evangelicals in east Tennessee. Because of that, I've grown accustomed to attending religious events and listening to the standard evangelical appeal to respond to the Gospel.
Specifically, if you want to respond to Jesus, you're expected to pray for forgiveness, invite Jesus into your heart as your Lord and Savior, and prepare for a life with him in heaven.
There seems to be a nearly-obligatory question: "If you died tonight, do you know beyond a shadow of a doubt whether you'd go to heaven?"
And that question nearly always -- no, if I'm honest, it always! -- jars me.
Especially when it comes from evangelical and Baptist friends who take the Bible so seriously.
Because no where -- not even once! -- does the Bible expect that we say a prayer to invite Jesus into our heart.
Biblically, the respond to the Gospel is repentance. Not a set of things you're supposed to do in order to make your life better.
The difference here is between announcing Good News and offering good advice.
The Gospel is the declaration that Jesus is Lord, that the Kingdom of God has entered the world in Jesus. That's why Jesus himself preached the Kingdom, even long before his crucifixion. The Gospel isn't just about Jesus' death. It's about the Life of God extended to all creation in Jesus Christ. For example, there's this from just after Jesus' baptism:
After John was put in 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 the good news!" (Mark 1.14-15).What is the Gospel according to Jesus? It is the declaration that "the kingdom of God has come near". Similarly, when Jesus sends out his disciples in Luke 10 they proclaim the same message:
"When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is offered to you. Heal the sick who are there and tell them, 'The kingdom of God has come near to you'. But when you enter a town and are not welcomed, go into its streets and say, 'Even the dust of your town we wipe from our feet as a warning to you. Yet be sure of this: The kingdom of God has come near'."As I sat there Saturday night, listening to some "electric" preaching, I heard again how pastorally dangerous this kind of preaching and its invitation can be to Christians, especially teens.
What is that proper response to the preaching of Good News?
Good News, by its very nature, is the announcement of something: That God has acted in Jesus Christ to reconcile the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5).
Good Advice, on the other hand, tells something about Jesus, then asks you to do the right thing. Accept Jesus into your heart, pray a prayer.
Good News is the invitation to join in on God's reconciliation. Good Advice is the emotional appeal to "get right" with God.
There's as much difference between Good News and Good Advice as there is the difference between grace and works.
Because Good News doesn't ask for faith. The preacher on Saturday night had to appeal to the crowds to respond to Jesus as Lord with cognitive assent. "Believe in Jesus", he said.
Jesus, on the other hand, has a very particular response in mind: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near" (Matthew 4.17).
The role of this repentance is highlighted from the very beginning -- in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. For example, from Mark 1:
The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:Right from the very beginning, the proclamation about Jesus begins with "preaching a baptism of repentance". To be sure, faith is a prerequisite for all this. Obviously, you'd have to believe John's message before undergoing his baptism of repentance. But that's the banal part of evangelistic preaching. Such a faith doesn't, in itself, constitute a full and proper response to the gospel. Rather, the response we see is a repentance for the forgiveness of sins. This is how the heart is properly prepared for responding to the kingdom coming.
"I will send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way" --
"a voice of one calling in the wilderness,
'Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.'"
And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.
This makes sense if the heart of the New Testament's proclamation of Jesus is that Jesus is Lord. Jesus is King. Kings don't demand faith or belief. You don't believe in kings.
No, you obey them! You give a king allegiance. So when the Kingdom comes in Jesus, the proper response isn't prayer. The proper response is behavioral. The Gospel is nothing less than a reconfiguration of our loyalty. A new (apocalyptic!) way has been revealed in Jesus, so we're called, wooed, loved, into this new Story, and that invitation is nothing less than the drastic and dramatic break with the world. Because in Jesus we find our lives radically readjusted.
That's why the ministry of John was so important to Jesus' own message.
So why, I have to ask, have we reduced the New Testament's emphasis on genuine repentance to that of a prayer for salvation?
One very important reason is right there in my question: We've reduced the Gospel to salvation.
Thus, the crux of Christian life becomes cognitive assent (i.e., faith) rather than readjusting our lives in the face of the gospel -- that Jesus is Lord and the rule/kingdom of God has broken upon us. As I described above, it's so much easier to believe that Jesus is King than to obey him as King. The point being, for great swaths of Christianity the message and ministry of John the Baptist has no place. We don't tell people that, to accept the Gospel, they need to prepare themselves. All you need to do is believe in Jesus and say the Sinner's Prayer. Compare that with John's baptism of repentance and his message (John 3.10-14):
"What should we do then?" the crowd asked.When people ask, "What must I do to be saved?", we generally respond like the preacher responded to the kids this last Saturday. We don't respond as John and Jesus responded.
John answered, "Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same."
Even tax collectors came to be baptized. "Teacher," they asked, "what should we do?"
"Don't collect any more than you are required to," he told them.
Then some soldiers asked him, "And what should we do?"
He replied, "Don't extort money and don't accuse people falsely -- be content with your pay."
Can you imagine saying something like, "If you have two shirts, give one away"? We'd rather see the action of praying for ourselves as the response we need to make. Not the response of giving away excess. But, here's the thing: If I take Jesus seriously, the announcement of the Good News isn't just about me. It's not about "saving my soul". The announcement of the Gospel doesn't call for faith. It calls for reorientation. An about-face. It calls for repentance. And repentance is more than feeling sorry for my sin. Repentance is readjusting your life to the in-breaking Rule of God.
Here's the other reason I don't think we Christians talk much about repentance to youth rallys: It simply doesn't sell well. Let's be honest, repentance -- as John and Jesus preach repentance -- is a rather morbid concept. And that's understandable.
Kendra's response to the preaching last weekend was rather predictable. She didn't hear Good News at all. She heard fear -- a toxic, guilt-driven message of shame, self-loathing and judgment from an all-Just-God. When some of us hear "Repent!", we hear "You're going to hell, ya damned sinner!" But that's not the Good News of Jesus, either.
Because this News is good. Not good in a moral sense. But good in a genuine joyful sense. That God has not abandoned us. No, Good News is simply this: "God is with us".
This is why I think if you're going to preach repentance, you always have to preach that preparation and allegiance go hand-in-hand. It's not about getting down on yourself. It's about clearing out the rubbish and clutter of our lives. Sort of like spring cleaning. (Literally, at times, a spring cleaning. To the point of going through your stuff and giving it away.) More, repentance is about loyalty and allegiance. It's about hearing the declaration of the Gospel and switching sides. It has less to do with guilt than about joining up with a new team.
Last night, a pastor-friend of mine asked what we can do to counter the kind of preaching we heard on Sunday.
My response is: Put more emphasis -- not less -- on Baptism.
The proper response, the biblical response, of repentance isn't going down for an altar call.
That's the problem with altar calls. They're not biblical.
The proper response to biblical preaching has nothing to do with individually praying a prayer to accept Jesus into your heart. The proper response -- according to the pattern set up in Acts -- is that repentance leads to Baptism.
The trouble here is that most of us are accustomed to hearing worship as something that's distinct from evangelism.
I blame tents.
The tent was a seemingly brilliant innovation in evangelism. In the tent you could leave out all of the weird things. All of those practices like baptism, communion, reciting the creeds, the images like crosses, and other distinctly Christian activities that had the potential of "weirding out" the non-believer could be left in the church. Thus the "worldly person" could be reached without the hindrance of a distinctively Christian culture. Those who are unfamiliar with tent revivals may remember the advent of the crusade. Crusades were essentially the same thing as the tent revivals except they were moved to stadiums, had much better tech savvy media, and larger turnouts.
That's precisely the inherited tradition of last Saturday's event. It was held in a convention center in another town.
I know that the goal was -- and still is -- to move them from the tent/crusade into the church. But, let's be honest, that hasn't happened.
Instead, we've moved those stadiums into the church.
To be sure, those tents and crusades have done and do great things. However, what is left over is a church who despite their genuine desire to experience Christ as their personal Lord and Savior generally participate in worship that is mostly anthropocentric and only marginally Christocentric. We preached hard the message of salvation and argue that the method doesn't matter.
I'm saying method does matter. That the preaching of last Saturday needs more distinctly Christian imagery -- particularly Baptism -- to keep it from devolving into an emotional response, typically out of fear, that leaves the individual isolated and alone. Rather than an invitation into the great thing that God is doing -- the reconciliation of himself to the world -- in Jesus Christ, preaching like last Saturday keeps us isolated in the rampant and voracious individualism of our culture.
When asked on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2), Peter responds:
When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, "Brothers, what shall we do?" Peter replied, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit."That's what we needed to hear last Saturday.
And lest you think I'm putting too much an emphasis on Baptism instead of the "Sinner's Prayer", there's this from Acts 8:
The eunuch asked Philip, "Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?" Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus. As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, "Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?" And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him.Or, from the conversion of Saul/Paul in Acts 9:
Then Ananias went to the house and entered it. Placing his hands on Saul, he said, "Brother Saul, the Lord -- Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here -- has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit." Immediately, something like scales fell from Saul's eyes, and he could see again. He got up and was baptized.Or, from the conversion of Cornelius in Acts 10:
While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on Gentiles. For they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God. Then Peter said, "Surely no one can stand in the way of their being baptized with water. They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have." So he ordered that they be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.Or, from the conversion of Lydia in Acts 16:
One of those listening was a woman from the city of Thyatira named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. She was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul's message. When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home.See, if you're going to respond in repentance to the Good News, there's no better place to begin than in Baptism. Repentance doesn't equate to "asking Jesus into your heart as Lord and Savior". Repentance is reorienting in your life. And no where is that reorientation more explicit than in Baptism.
That's the problem with evangelistic preaching and altar calls. They aren't sacramental enough.
The biblical pattern seems quite clear to me: "Repent. Believe the preaching of the Good News. Confess Jesus as Lord. And be baptized".
Baptism is the event that signals repentance, not praying a "Sinner's Prayer".
So what's a pastor to say in response to preaching like last Saturday? Repent and be baptized.