I was moved yesterday by a challenging article written by Christopher Wright that appeared both in Christianity Today and on the site dedicated to the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization that will be taking place in Capetown one year from this month.  Dr. Wright chose as his theme the statement from the original Lausanne Covenant of 1974:  “Evangelization requires the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world”

Though that statement has powerful implications, the phrase that remained undefined in the minds of most who took part in that important congress was “the whole gospel.”  Dr. Wright’s article in part sought to define that phrase.  Among his points is the biblical understanding that Jesus’ atoning death would result not only in providing the means of saving men from sin and death, but would also result in the redemption of the whole cosmos.  On our page labeled “About” you will find that WOC “does not believe that the efforts of the followers of Jesus Christ will somehow make the earth fit for His return. We believe that Jesus will fully redeem, restore, and reunify the sin-damaged earth only at His return. But among our responsibilities in the meantime is the obligation to begin knowing and treating the natural world now in the manner that we expect to know and treat it after the return of Christ.”

Here are some statements from Dr. Wright’s article that articulate further that the “whole gospel” includes the coming restoration of God’s good creation:

The phrase the whole gospel suggests that some versions of the gospel are less than whole—partial, deficient, or (most important) not fully biblical. We must give full weight to all the dimensions of sin and evil that the Bible in both testaments portrays. And we must evangelistically proclaim the glories of God’s redemptive achievement in the Cross and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth—as God’s victory over evil in all its dimensions. There would be no gospel without the Cross. Indeed, all blessings of the gospel, from personal salvation through Christ’s death in our place to the reconciliation of all creation, flow from the Cross. The Cross stands at the heart of the Lausanne Movement; the key scriptural text for Cape Town 2010 is “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:19).

The great Christ-centered, Cross-centered redemptive truths of the New Testament do not nullify, but rather complete, all that the Old Testament reveals about God’s comprehensive commitment to the wholeness of human life, God’s relentless opposition to all that oppresses, spoils, and diminishes human well-being, and God’s ultimate mission of blessing the nations, destroying all forms of evil, and redeeming his whole creation, for his own supreme glory in Christ.

The gospel as a whole, true to the Bible as a whole, shows us God’s heart for his broken, suffering, wicked world. For the last and the least (socially, culturally, and economically) as well as the lost (spiritually)—not that these can be separated, since human beings are whole persons. For those who are dying eternally in their sins, but also for the causes of their preventably premature dying in this world. For those who are without Christ, without God, and without hope in the world, but who also suffer all kinds of other lacks—the landless and homeless, the loveless and limbless, the family-less and state-less. For the creation itself, frustrated in its supreme goal of giving glory to its Creator, and groaning under the onslaught of human greed and violence.

The whole gospel includes . . .

The world story, as God tells it in the Bible, of the world’s origins, history, and ultimate destiny. According to Paul, we are not going to be saved out of the created world, but along with it. But if our Bibles begin at Genesis 3 and end at Revelation 20, we are in danger of missing the point of God’s great story of the redemption of all creation. We will think only of saving fallen sinners from the final judgment—not about living in the present creation as those who, by being in Christ, already bring the transforming values and prophetic truth of the new creation to the here and now.

The world of creation, and our responsibility to the earth God entrusted to us, which God has reconciled to himself through the Cross (Col. 1:20). If the planet was created by Christ, sustained by Christ, and belongs to Christ as his inheritance, the least we can do is to look after it properly. Biblical responsibility for stewardship of the earth should have been an evangelical theme long before the threat of climate change turned it into a matter of self-preservation. [Emphasis mine]

Whether or not we’re convinced that mankind is causing global climate change, we do know that human behavior is causing extensive damage to God’s good earth—and the Church has been culpable in developing the attitude of carelessness toward the creation—a reality we need to repent of before the watching world.  I’m convinced that the evangelism efforts of the Church will continue to be hampered until we adopt the “whole gospel” as it is articulated by Chris Wright.

See you outdoors!

Dean