Recently, I heard a pastor describe the relationship between his method of ministry and the message of the gospel by comparing it to guacamole and its container. According to the analogy, guacamole is like the gospel. It is a delicious “superfood,” good for health. However, according to this pastor, when the guacamole is not in the right container, it turns brown and spoils, becoming ineffective. From here, the pastor draws the parallel between guacamole and the gospel, stating that they intend to keep the guacamole of the gospel the same but to change the container. Thus, the church employs theatrics, dance teams, dramatic backdrops and set designs, and lots of pop music as a better, more effective container for the gospel message. The pastor’s audience cheered with enthusiasm as he concluded his articulation of the church’s ministry philosophy. I, however, wonder how this vision of ministry fits into the apostle Paul’s vision in 1 Corinthians 1.

A Weak View of the Gospel Message

While I want to be charitable in my assessment of the pastor and his church’s approach to the gospel and acknowledge that I believe his intentions are likely good, I cannot ignore the implications of his comments. By drawing a parallel between the gospel and guacamole and ministry methods and containers, the implication is that the preservation of the gospel’s potency depends on the culturally-shaped methods of the minister and his church. In other words, the pastor believed (as he clearly articulated in his statement) that the effectiveness of the gospel was proportional to how it was communicated (or packaged) for the audience.

The seeker-sensitive approach, which this pastor and his church openly embrace, begins with questions about what the people are looking for in a church. If this pastor and church had existed in first-century Corinth and surveyed what the people in their community were seeking, they would have found that the “Jews sought signs and the Greeks sought wisdom.” There is no reason to believe that the church and the pastor would not have sought to give them signs and wisdom. This tends to be the quintessential mark of a “seeker-sensitive” approach to ministry: giving people what they are seeking. But what if what the people are seeking is actually in conflict with the gospel?

How does the apostle Paul respond to those who are seeking? According to 1 Corinthians 1, “He preaches Christ crucified,” which is a “stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks.” Paul essentially gives them the opposite of what they were looking for in life. Why would Paul do that? It is not because Paul does not want to persuade people to come to Christ. In certain settings, Paul is willing to “become all things for all people for the sake of the gospel.” Yet, Paul will not compromise the gospel in order to reach people. Compromising the gospel in order to reach people is like a physician that dilutes the potency of life-giving medicine for his patients because they claim that it tastes too bitter. In the end, if you dilute the medicine by removing the bitter elements that give life to the point that it is no longer medicinally beneficial, all you have are dying patients enjoying their daily dosage of candy while believing that the more palatable substance is somehow healing them of their terminal disease.

Paul recognizes that the gospel is often contrary to what people are seeking. As two commentators stated:

The cross is nonsense to some because it represents such a repugnant worldview. It is an assault on the values of power, glory, honor, and success, so dear to Corinthian and many other societies. Paul’s argument suggests that it is possible, although in reality highly inconsistent (and theologically and morally offensive), to embrace the message of the cross as the basis of one’s relationship with God in Christ while continuing to live in a way that rejects its lifestyle implications as foolishness, preferring to live according to the standards of human wisdom (as the Corinthians were guilty of doing).[1]

Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner

The world does not naturally look favorably at the gospel of Jesus Christ. The message is foolishness to those who have not been given eyes to see and ears to hear. As Leon Morris noted in his commentary on 1 Corinthians, there was “a well-known graffito in Rome that depicts a worshipper standing before a crucified figure with the body of a man and the head of an ass and the inscription ‘Alexamenos worships his god’. That was the way the worldly-wise regarded the message of the cross.”[2] No amount of pop music, skits, or edgy backdrops can or will make the gospel less foolish in the eyes of the world. No matter how you package the gospel, for some people, it will always taste bitter and smell repugnant. It is a scandal to the world’s deformed senses and tastebuds.

There is, however, another group of people that Paul addresses after noting the “Jews and the Greeks.” It is the group that is “being saved” by the gospel. Regarding this second group,

If the first group regards the cross as foolishness, the second knows it to be the power of God. The cross was a shocking image in the ancient world—of evil, shame, rejection, and punishment. Carson thinks that an equivalent image today might be a Hiroshima cloud or an Auschwitz gas chamber. Thus for a cross to be a positive or significant thing is deeply ironic, even paradoxical. For Paul to equate it with the power of God would have seemed strange indeed. The power of God is the effective action of God, the exercise of his authority, with regard to something or someone for a specific purpose.[3]

Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner

As ministers of the gospel of Christ, we must not only see but embrace the paradoxical design of the message we preach. When we attempt to repackage or reform the gospel to make it more palatable for our audiences, we actually dilute its power to change lives, which leads me to the second point of this article.

A Weak View of the Gospel Method

Not only is it possible to have a weak view of the gospel message itself, but ministers can also fall prey to having a weak view of the gospel method as well. Paul was aware of this potential threat. According to 1 Corinthians 1:17, there is a way of packaging the gospel that “empties the cross of its power.”

In the context of 1 Corinthians, Paul warns about the dangers of preaching the gospel with “wisdom and eloquence.” To be sure, as Ben Witherington notes, “Paul’s opposition is not to rhetoric per se but to any form of speaking that emptied the gospel of its content and power and to any form of philosophy that did not comport with the counter-order wisdom Paul as a sage believed he had received through revelation and was called upon to dispense.”[4] So, there is a very real sense in which our method of communication can affect the message that we are communicating so that we empty the message of its effectiveness. According to Paul, this happens when we seek to adjust the message of the gospel to the expectations of the world.

Paul makes this clearer as we work through 1 Corinthians 1:20-31, where Paul relates “wisdom and eloquence” to the Greco-Roman culture in which the early church existed. Paul asks, “Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” As I noted above, Paul goes on to mention how the “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom.” The temptation in the early church was to conform to the methods of communicating the gospel to the methods of communication in the world. And the temptation remains for churches and ministers that view the gospel as a product to be peddled to a particular market in shiny packaging. When we succumb to such temptation, we fail to understand our calling to faithfully preach the gospel in all of its gloriously, scandalous, worldly-wisdom confounding power.

Our methods of ministry ought not to undermine the message we bring to those that God has given us as an audience. While we should care enough about the people in our audience to understand our culture and communicate well within it, we ought not to capitulate to our culture. We are here to engage our culture with the good news of the gospel, which is the good news about how sinners are saved from God’s holy judgment through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ’s life, death, burial, and resurrection. The culture should not be allowed to shape the message or the method of Gospel ministry. We should not be ashamed of the perceived foolishness of the cross of Christ. For it is the power of God unto salvation. The packaging of preaching that God has ordained for the gospel is more than adequate to preserve its power. The gospel does not need the wisdom of the world to be effective. The gospel by its very nature is effective because it is God’s Word that will not return void. It always accomplishes what God purposes for it. The gospel is not perishable like some fruit in need of a trendy, more effective container. The preached gospel is enough to accomplish God’s work in the world.

May our aim in ministry be to be found faithful in imitating the apostle Paul, who challenges us with these words in 2 Corinthians 4:1-6:

Therefore, since through God’s mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart. 2 Rather, we have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God. 3 And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. 4 The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 5 For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. 6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.

CBH

[1] Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians, PNTC (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans, 2010), 91.

[2] Leon Morris, 1 Corinthians: An Introduction and Commentary, TNTC (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1985), 49.

[3] Ciampa and Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians, 92.

[4] Ben Witherington III, Conflict and Community in Corinth: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 110.