It's About Both

Excerpts from Ed Stetzer post:  Gabe Lyons and the Next Christians

While in Manhattan this week, Gabe Lyons invited me to breakfast and to spend some time getting to know one another. With my six-year-old in tow, we sat down and talked gospel, mission, church and kids. I asked him a few questions and he agreed to come by the blog and interact.

Gabe Lyons is the co-founder of Catalyst, and the co-author of UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity and Why It Matters. He has been featured by CNN, The New York Times, Newsweek, and USA Today on issues revolving around the state of the church and what's next for the younger generation of Christians to follow. His newest book, The Next Christians: The Good News About the End of Christian America, is out tomorrow but I wanted to give you an early look here. This will be an important book in the conversation about the role of the church and Christians in society.

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You describe a missing element of the Christian faith that "the Next Christians" have discovered, what is that?

Instead of discovering something new, they've actually recovered a key understanding of the Gospel that has largely gone missing in many parts of Christian teaching and doctrine in the last century--the idea of "restoration." They believe that part of their responsibility in following Jesus is to lead lives that are prioritized around restoring broken people, systems, schools, neighborhoods, marriages and a variety of other things to reflect God's original intention for his creation. They emphasize seeing the image of God in every person they encounter, even if that person wouldn't acknowledge it. They don't only care about social good, but see that as part of a holistic faith that naturally opens the door to much deeper conversations with their friends about the meaning of life, who we are as human beings and what God's best is for his creations.

One of the things that people get concerned about when you start talking about the metanarrative of creation, fall, redemption, restoration - is that we're going to lose the gospel in some way. Can you unpack the gospel for our readers?

I think we have to be clear when we're talking about the metanarrative to never lose sight of what the real good news is here: that Christ's death on the cross, His payment for our sins, His resurrection - that's the genesis of the Good News. The metanarrative is what helps make that story more coherent, though. When we only talk about the fact that somebody's a sinner, that they're fallen, and we start the story there, and that through Christ they can get redemption -- and then oh, by the way, your role is to get as many people to make that decision so you can all spend the afterlife together -- it's not a very coherent story in a post-Christian setting where you have pretty intellectual people who are pretty thoughtful and well-read, and they're just not buying into something that sounds a bit fantastical. And it's not that none of that is true. It's actually all true. But it becomes way more coherent when you start the story understanding that every human being is made in the image of God and that the fall corrupted that, and that once we're redeemed through Christ we have the opportunity to help people understand that story and understand what restoration looks like in their relationship with God, their Creator, and also in relationship to the world and the work that God wants to do through the Holy Spirit's power to constantly be reconciling all things to Him in this world.

Tell us about the Chuck Colson connection of your idea of restoration.

In 1999, I read Chuck Colson's book How Now Shall We Live, and I came across a sentence that he and Nancy Pearcey had in there that basically said, "Christians are called to redeem entire cultures, not just individuals." I had grown up in a Christian home and a Christian church, and never heard that sentence put together like that -- that Christians actually have a responsibility in the world, that this is part of our calling, it's part of our human job description, so to speak. And that it's a both-and approach. It's not just about conversion, it's not just about good deeds. It's about both, and if we could recover that in our generation, it would be amazing what was possible, if a younger generation understood how those two things should be held in tension, and what that might look like in a world that's changing.

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You mentioned that as people, part of our job is to engage in restoration. When we talk about mission of the church - some are concerned about mission drift - what is the primary mission of the church and what flows out of that?

The mission of the church, I think, is clear that it's to equip the saints. It's to be a place where Christians come together in terms of the meetings and the assembly of the body to be trained up, to be discipled, to be equipped, to know how to go out and do mission all the time. So additionally, the church is the connected body of Christ, working together in unison to reveal to the world who God is through the life that they're embodying. But ultimately I think the great shift is that pastoral leadership is going to have to get really good at knowing how to come alongside the people in their congregation and help them understand how the implications of the gospel play out in their vocation, in their setting - whether they're a professor, a business leader, an entrepreneur. I think that is the next phase, and that's what we're trying to do with Q.

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