Gospel Distortions (Non-Discipleship Gospel)

The Church is failing its responsibility to take the gospel to the ends of the earth in obedience to the Great Commission because of the distortion in the Gospel presentation.

A false or distorted gospel says, “Jesus died for your sins, he rose from the dead, he ascended into heaven, and he will return someday to gather his church. Everyone who has agreed with this set of religious facts is a Christian. By the way, you don’t need to do anything about it; in fact, you can’t do anything about it because it is all by grace.” This is why the late theologian and author Dallas Willard said, “We have not only been saved by grace we have been paralyzed by it.” The church today is truly paralyzed, and it’s largely because of its view—even deification of grace (Many believers reverence Grace more than they do for God), because “grace” allows them to live freely – all that is needed to be reconnected back to God is mutter some words of repentance.

We are saved by grace according to Ephesians 2: 8-9, that is alright, but this should not be a license for us to put our Christian life on auto-drive without our personal effort to be formed into image of Christ or the formation of character. Titus 2: 11 says, “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age.” So, the same that saved also helps us to “live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present age” even to do His will.

The bane of the church today is the lack commitment to making disciples of Christians; we have put a line and wall of demarcation between conversion and discipleship – Making and multiplying disciples is not expected of us, so it has not been done.

You will agree with me that the gospel that is preached today and the Christians we have today in the Church are very different from the Christians of the 1970s – Christians who were the products of the revival 1970s. Femi Adeleye in his book Preachers Of A Different Gospel said, “strange gospel” has created “strange Christians.” Adeleye further lamented that “The gospel that downplays human sinfulness and the eternal benefits of the gospel is not a gospel of Christ” He calls this type of gospel “the gospel of Champagne” and according to him, “Whereas the gospel of the cross calls for repentance and denial of self and other things, the gospel of champagne calls for self-satisfaction in response to stimuli from diverse entertaining attractions” This so because the  primary gospel preached in our churches especially in the first world , by default, is the forgiveness-only gospel, which is almost exclusively focused on sin and atonement.

The “forgiveness-only gospel” is the idea of saying a magic prayer that gets you into Heaven one day. It’s sort of a transaction between you and God, where you get a salvation ticket. Behavior in this “gospel” is unimportant.  And the most common gospel in underdeveloped countries especially Africa is the prosperity gospel (The gospel by which some charismatic preachers defraud and impoverish other believers) which makes discipleship almost impossible to teach as an essential part of the good news. This kind of gospel turns everyone into a consumer of religious goods and services.

Neither version of this distorted gospel includes discipleship as a normative part of what it means to be saved. Both the forgiveness-only gospel and the prosperity gospel make no room for the ways and means that Jesus passed on to his followers. Neither has a serious connection to character transformation, and neither expects everyone who is “saved” to actually follow Jesus. Moreover, these “gospels” don’t set the precedent for making disciples who make disciples. The idea that every believer in Christ is a follower of Christ is not part of its theology, program, or curriculum. In other words, both of these gospels have a fatal flaw—they separate conversion from discipleship and make discipleship optional.

In my many years of teaching and promoting discipleship and study of the works of disciples and disciple makers, I have discovered:

1. We can’t make Christ-like disciples from a non-discipleship gospel.
2. The gospel we preach determines the disciples we make.

So, we are not only paralyzed by grace through distorted gospel presentation, but we also watch as the world is awash with nominal Christians who are being shaped by a gospel that doesn’t reproduce, doesn’t transform, and doesn’t represent the true gospel –products watered down, hype, cheap grace.