This week I read a blog in the Wall Street Journal with interest. The subject engaged by Gary Hamel in his"Management 2.0" blog was "Organized Religion's Management Problem." I decided to comment, offering that the Church struggles when the message moves from the Gospel (the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ) and the call for belief in this message to anything less. Sadly, the Church often wrestles with the desire to communicate in a relevant and meaningful way to the world and the pressure to water the message down to be relevant and meaningful.
Another reader was kind enough to respond to my post expressing this concern - my words are in quotes; his comment in parentheses: “The Gospel is the central truth of Christianity (I agree), and therefore the world (big jump)”, is the attitude that causes a non-religious spiritual person to reject Christianity. Basically, it is saying we are right and everybody else is wrong. That jump from The Gospel being a personal belief to a worldwide fact is very difficult not to make. How does one believe so strongly yet maintain the reality that it is just a belief and not necessarily The Truth for all. A challenge when Christianity says there is only one way."
The excellence of the Christian message exceeds it's uniqueness in the world. The power resident in the message itself produces fruit (Mark 4.26-29). One favorite illustration comes to mind from a favorite man. This is taken from Arnold Dallimore's SPURGEON: A NEW BIOGRAPHY (BANNER OF TRUTH; 1985; p.94):
Among other activities, he now addressed the largest gathering of his entire career. There had been a mutiny in India against Britain's rule over that land, and a service of national humiliation was planned. It was held in the Crystal Palace and was to be addressed by the one man with voice enough to reach the expected gigantic audience - C.H. Spurgeon. (The crowd was recorded as 23,654 - largest ever indoor congregation in history to that point)
The day before the service, he went to the Palace to weigh up the task he was facing. The building had not been planned with any thought of meetings, and in order to test the acoustics he repeated several times the Scripture, 'Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.' His words were heard by a man who was working somewhere in the building. That man came to him some days later to say the message of that verse had reached his heart, and he had come to know the Lord Jesus Christ.
Christians must remain confident in the power of God resident in His word - no matter how much external pressure exists to make it palateable to a generation.
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