The Newness of Our Gospel

Abraham Lincoln, in his annual message to Congress in 1862, said “As our case is new, we must think anew, and act anew.” Those words were said in the midst of a nation struggling with identity. At some level, that is what the nation would eventually look like.

When I think about “church” in our culture, it seems to be that at every turn, churches are “struggling with identity” and trying to determine what it “will eventually look like.” There is no doubt that because our world changes so rapidly, we have to find a new way to make our case to those outsiders we seek to bring inside. We must learn to think differently about how that best happens and our response to that thinking will have to be “new.”

Jesus addressed issues like this when He declared, “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins.” (Mark 3:21-22, NIV) It makes me wonder if Lincoln might have read a little of Mark before writing his speech! “Our case is new, we must think anew, and act anew.”

The challenge of “new” never goes away. Human culture is never very stationary, though often in the subculture of individual congregations, culture gets very stationary. Leonard Sweet, a professor at Drew University, would argue that, in the case of the church educating ministry leaders, we easily get stationary and don’t think “anew.” An op-ed piece in the 27 April 2011 New York Times, written by a religion professor at Columbia University, says “Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market.” In other words – no one is thinking “anew.”

Gabe Lyons, in The Next Christians, boldly suggests that the future of the witness of the church in our world will demand the kind of thinking that focuses on “how things ought to be” and not “how things are.” In other words, if we keep putting the “fermenting gospel of Jesus” into the old forms and models, it inevitably will “burst the old skins and both will be wasted.”

I wish I were smart enough to be able to know exactly what “thinking anew and acting anew” looks like. If I were, I’d be writing these devotionals from a remote island beach setting, living on my book royalties! But I am smart enough to know this: if we keep failing to realize that we live in a very “anew world” and keep failing to realize that the gospel we believe is “ever anew,” then we will never change and transform the world.

May God help us to realize, as even Lincoln did, “Our case is new, we must think anew, and act anew.”