What’s Bad About Our Good News?

“Gospel” is an ancient and foreign British word that attempts to be the translation of an ancient and foreign Greek word. It has devolved to mean “truth” in secular America and “how to get saved” in religious America. The word it is failing to actually translate from Greek to the language we speak (euaggelion) just meant “good message.”

Eu and Ev were still being debated on their use in English when Shakespeare was writing plays and James 1 of England employed translators to create his Anglican set of Scriptures. Eu was the Greek prefix that the British Eu and Ev were working on. Eugene means good stock, Evander means good man, Evangel means good angel, and angel means messenger. An evangelist is a good messenger, or an ordinary messenger with a good message.

So when we see “gospel” we could be thinking “good news” or “good message.” When Paul wrote that anyone who preached any gospel other than the one he had preached should be cursed, he seemed to be referring to the good news about how to be born of Yahweh (Galatians 1:9).

Some religious people have the idea that he was comparing the gospel of the Kingdom with the gospel of salvation. In fact, there is the gospel of Christ (2 Corinthians 2:12), the gospel of the glory of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4), the gospel of peace (Ephesians 6:15), the gospel of the Kingdom (Matthew 4:23, 9:35, 24:14), and the gospel of the grace of God (Acts 20:24) as a partial list. Paul was not cursing people for preaching those gospels. He preached them.

That was the frame. The picture is: since the 60’s in the United States, every large denomination of the church has declined in membership numbers. Some of them have declined because their idea about what constitutes evangelism was the hope that if someone moved to their area, they would be a member of their denomination and join their congregation. This style of evangelism puts a sign on the main roads coming into town with the address and meeting times of their tribe.

The bigger problem was denominations who persecuted evangelists. One reason the denomination that gives me credentials was begun was to give ordination and tax exemption to evangelists in a particular US denomination because their denomination would not.

I am convinced that the worst problem we have suffered from as US believers trying to bring increase to the Body of Jesus is that our gospel is not good news. It is either pop culture or ponzi schemes or dead religion or witchcraft in many presentations.