I have heard numbers as high as 75 percent of Americans have made some kind of decision to accept Christ, but statistics also show that only about 25 percent of Americans go to church regularly.

IT WAS 1971. I was a seventeen-year-old high school senior fresh into a brand new experience of faith. I was also full of zeal for evangelism but clueless about how to evangelize other than just telling my friends about what I was so passionate about — God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, and the rapture.

telos

We can’t keep trying to improve the mechanics of the system because they’re not the problem. The problem is that the system is doing what it should do because it is energized by a badly shaped gospel.

Evangelicalism is known for at least two words: gospel and (personal) salvation.

The widespread assumption that church bodies can baptize infants and then automatically catechize those babies into the faith when they are preteens or early teens has been challenged by evangelicalism’s stubborn commitment to make a personal decision about Jesus Christ.

I heard John Stott say that some people had been talking about “the irreducible minimum gospel.” He dismissed such an idea. “Who wants an irreducible minimum gospel?” he asked. “I want the full, biblical gospel.”

What has happened is that we have created a “salvation culture” and mistakenly assumed it is a “gospel culture.”

“For most American Christians, the gospel is about getting my sins forgiven so I can go to heaven when I die.”