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questionsRecent surveys indicate that the question of “where one goes after death” is no longer a pressing issue for most people today. Instead, people are asking fundamental questions about life’s purpose and ultimate meaning.

At the same time, many evangelicals have discovered that the gospel is not merely about “going to heaven when you die”. The gospel tells the story of Jesus Christ and what he has done to bring about salvation. The gospel leads to mission, which transforms our life here on earth and provides us with the purpose for which we long.

Readers of this blog know that I have supported efforts to keep the gospel from being merely the answer to the question “How do I get to heaven?” Books like Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright and Heaven Is a Place on Earth by Michael Wittmer have rightly challenged our emphasis on the “where do I go when I die?” question.

But in recent days, I have noticed that some gospel presentations have ceased speaking of the afterlife question altogether. The gospel becomes solely about salvation “here and now” and has little bearing on what takes place when one dies.

The motivation for leaving aside the question of the afterlife is the desire for relevance. Since fewer people are concerned about their eternal destiny, today’s evangelists have left behind that issue and are seeking to answer the questions people are actually asking.

A popular saying goes like this: Find out what questions the people in your culture are asking. Then answer those questions with the gospel.

On the surface, I agree with this statement. If people in our culture are asking questions concerning purpose and meaning, then perhaps we ought to consider that the most effective evangelistic technique will probably not begin with: “If you were to die tonight, where would you spend eternity?” This question isn’t bad. But it might not be effective as an evangelistic tool.

The gospel does indeed answer a variety of questions. Discovering the questions of the culture and then answering them can lead to creative ways of telling the good news.

But this kind of contextualization only takes us so far. I am uneasy saying, “Answer the questions of the culture” and leaving it at that. Why? Because this impulse can reduce the gospel to a mere response to whatever questions our culture puts forth. In the end, we let others frame the question, while we seek to fit the gospel into that cultural framework.

But what if the culture isn’t asking the right questions?

What if the culture has so downplayed the idea of guilt that a biblical understanding of sin has all but disappeared?

What if the people in our society refuse to grapple with the fact of their own mortality?

The gospel does not just morph and adapt depending on the culture. Instead, the gospel is culture-creating. The gospel does not merely answer the culture’s questions. It includes those answers, yes. But it also creates a culture of its own… a culture that leads to other fundamental questions.

So the gospel provides us with not only the right answers to the world’s questions, but also the piercing questions the world does not want to deal with. The gospel tells us what the world should be asking.

As witnesses to the gospel, we can and should seek to answer the questions of the culture. But we must go further – pointing people to the right, biblical questions that they may not have thought to ask. We are called not to fit the gospel into our current cultural framework, but to challenge the cultural framework with the earth-shattering, death-defying news of a risen King.

Christians are lazy to rely on past evangelistic strategies and formulas to present the gospel in this day and age. If we think the “unchanging gospel” refers to our pet methods for presenting the gospel, we deceive ourselves, reduce the gospel, and fail to think through ways of presenting the gospel that might be more effective in our contemporary society.

On the other hand, we are lazy if we let the culture define the terms in which the gospel must be presented. If we think that contextualization is merely adapting the gospel to whatever questions the world is asking, we too reduce the gospel and fail to provide a full-orbed presentation.

What is the way forward between these two extremes? A gospel presentation that uses the culture’s questions as the starting point for evangelism, and then opens up the full-orbed understanding of Scripture, which will include biblically faithful questions.

We can contextualize in order to be effective. But we mustn’t gut the gospel message of the elements that are not culturally popular or relevant. Instead, we can begin where the culture is, answer the questions the culture is asking, and then move forward to the answers and questions that arise from a biblical worldview.

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