The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited

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.”

He has said to me time and time again that in his tradition the people have too often been “sacramentalized” but not “evangelized.” That is, they’ve gone through baptism and some even attend church but may not have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ.

However, this story is not the same as the gospel. The gospel fits into this story, but it is not the story. Further, the gospel only makes sense in that story. Now a very important claim: without that story there is no gospel. This leads to a second claim: if we ignore that story, the gospel gets distorted, and that is just what has happened in sa

What is the gospel?

nearly all of my Christian students tell me that the gospel they heard as they grew up primarily had to do with their sin, Jesus’ death, and going to heaven.

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

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

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.

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.