David Fitch: Can the Gospel Be Too Big?

David Fitch is one of the speakers at October's Ancient-Evangelical Future Conference (you really should come hear him). David leads a double life: He is both a professor of theology who is a church planter. He is a church planter who is a professor of theology. But despite the double life, he's no Jekyll and Hyde. David brings a consistent vision to both pastoral and professorial roles.

David contributed the most recent essay to Christianity Today's Christian Vision Project series, which CT made available on its website yesterday. Here's how he begins his article:

Missional Misstep
Emphasizing the big gospel can make it hard to communicate any gospel.

Can the gospel be too big? For some of us in the missional church movement, this question borders on heresy. We regularly caution that the gospel is not only about what Jesus can do for me. It is primarily about the transformation of our very way of life into God's mission for the world. We resist any temptation to turn the gospel into anything that might be too "user friendly." The mission of God (missio Dei), so we proclaim, must be all-encompassing, and we must become participants in it.

Yet for all the good in this approach, there may be another heresy beneath the surface.For in protecting the bigness of the gospel, we risk making the Christian life inaccessible to those outside of it. As a result, amid the current swell of appreciation for missio Dei theology in American churches, and the outcries against a gospel that has become too small, I find myself concerned about the ways we may unintentionally be making the gospel too big.

Read the rest of David's article here.