The Indigenous Gospel AND the Pilgrim Gospel

I attend the Willow Creek Leadership Summit, via satellite, this afternoon and was largely disappointed. I heard the call over and over for pastors and leaders in the church to work toward making the gospel relevant within the culture in which they find themselves. Of course I do not have any issue there. I agree, we must reach out to those who don’t know Christ in a way that will be meaningful to them. However, many of the presenters are heavily one-sided on this issue (I’ll elaborate in a moment) and often, like John Burke from Gateway Community Church in Austin, TX, take the issue so far that they alter to the gospel so much that I’m left wondering if they’re still presenting a Christian message.

A few years ago John Piper, in his sermon Do Not Be Conformed to This World, referred to Andrew Walls’ book, The Missionary Movement In Christian History, where he discusses Indigenous Principle and the Pilgrim Principle (Mary Knoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2001, pp. 7-9). Here, according to Piper, Walls is arguing that the gospel can and must become indigenous in every (fallen!) culture in the world. It can and must find a home in the culture. It must fit in. But at the same time, and just as powerful, the gospel produces a pilgrim mindset. It loosens people from their culture. It criticizes and corrects culture. It turns people into pilgrims and aliens and exiles in their own culture. When Paul says, “Do not conformed to this world,” and “I became all things to all people,” he is not confused; he is calling for a critical balance of two crucial biblical impulses.

It’s just this critical balance that Burke and others who argue from an emergent perspective are lacking. In fact, his message to us today was completely absent of any notion of the pilgrim gospel. He urged us to remove “barriers to grace,” like objection to the homosexual lifestyle, so that people are not offended and thus turned away from the gospel. So don’t offend, don’t correct, and don’t criticize those around you so that you can build a relationship and, eventually, share the gospel.

But what approach did Jesus use with the woman at the well? Did He “remove barriers of grace,” accommodating the woman’s sinfulness for the purpose of building a relationship with her, or did He address her sin head on by correcting the woman? It

wasn’t a friendship that Jesus was after, He wanted to the woman to gain eternal life. The woman was dying in sin and

Jesus gave her life. Burke’s approach is to ignore what’s killing the woman so that they can be friends. I wonder which approach is more loving?

I do not disagree with those who argue that the church needs to relevant in the lives of people today, but we need balance. We need to be in the culture without conforming to it and we certainly need loving leaders who are willing to, using Burke’s words, “get messy;” not by just reaching out to others with acceptance and love, but by correcting people when they are being openly sinful. It’s not loving to allow people to “come as they are” and remain that way.

I do believe that the work of transforming lives is God’s work and that we are called to love those around us, but that doesn’t mean that we’re called to ignore sin until God does the correcting. Sin isn’t a rash that just simply frustrates lives, it’s a cancer that destroys and kills. Sometimes the loving thing is to correct and criticize rather than to ignore and accommodate for the purpose of relationship building.