Have we lost sight of the central message of salvation?

Converted aged 20, I’ve been a Christian for 34 years and an ordained minister for 24. Add to that the fact that I was brought up in an evangelical family and you’ve got over half a century of life lived in and around the evangelical world.

Recently, I’ve found myself spending quite a bit of time ruminating on how evangelistic preaching has changed over that time period and how- much to my concern- it now tends to focus almost entirely on the benefits of the gospel at the expense of the substance of the gospel.

Algebra of the gospel

When I first came to Christ in the late 1980’s (and throughout my childhood spent in the orbit of evangelical churches) evangelistic talks generally concentrated on what might be described as the ‘algebra of the gospel’. The evangelist, after telling a couple of jokes or anecdotes to warm the audience up, would explain the universal problem of sin, describe the chasm that it created between us and a perfect God, introduce Jesus’ death on the cross as the solution to said problem, and issue an invitation to respond in repentance and faith. If the evangelist was particularly edgy and on point with the latest communicative tools, they might even illustrate it on a flannelgraph or OHP with a diagram of a valley and a cross and little stick men walking along the cross on a journey from ‘death’ to ‘life’, which really got everyone excited!