I can completely understand why there has been such a reaction against the insecure responses of many toward those who doubt from within Christianity. What I can’t understand is the answer becoming the glorification of doubt itself. That is to say, doubt seems to be no longer seen as that which is to be overcome but rather that which itself is a sign of wisdom and virtue. It’s not uncommon now to hear about the “new discovery” that “dwelling in the uncertain territory of doubt is a surprisingly vibrant and affirming way of life,” and that doubt is “enriching and beneficial,” and that it is to be “celebrated.” What do we have to say to that?

Yesterday we focused on the first response, "Remember the Teaching You Received," by taking a look at Don Carson's 2007 address entitled "What is the Gospel." Today we focus on the second response, "Build Yourself Up in That Teaching," by directing one another back to that same gospel again.

In other words, the primary driver of spiritual growth (or the way to build yourself up in the faith) in the New Testament is going back, again and again, to the gospel of grace. Our mission statement at Gospel Life Church is the same as our definition of discipleship: “Rooting all of life in the good news of Jesus for his glory and the city’s good.” We believe that the gospel is the power of God for salvation and the power of God for sanctification (becoming more like Jesus) in the life of the believer.

What is the gospel? This question is central to Christianity and therefore central to the Christian's task of "contending for the faith once delivered" (Jude 3).

We’ve been preaching through Jude together on Sunday mornings at GLC and I’d like to spend some time this week following up (in various ways) with what we’ve been learning together and offering resources that might help us grow in the realities of the gospel. The first way that Jude instructs believers to respond in the midst of false teaching is to remember the teaching that we received (17-19). It's impossible to contend for the faith once delivered if we fail to regularly remember the gospel that we received.

This has been a hard year for so many people. Any time we go through something in which we see so many lives lost, death itself becomes more real to us. Now, people die every day, obviously. But it’s difficult to attempt to go about life-as-normal when every single day we turn on the television or scroll through our social media feeds and see a rising death count in the world. We’re constantly reminded that life is often hard and it’s very short. What kind of hope could we possibly have, then? How could we possibly face such a painful and certain enemy as death? What can even be done about it?

One of the cornerstones—perhaps the cornerstone, from my perspective—of the post-evangelical movement is what we’ve referred to as the “rebuke of certainty.” While some might think that the word “rebuke” is a bit strong in describing the post-evangelical posture toward “certainty,” I believe it to be accurate. The claim being made is that evangelicals are idolatrous and sinful for claiming to know with a high level of certainty what the Bible says or doesn’t say regarding even some doctrines that historically have been viewed by all three major branches of Christendom as being fairly straight-forward. And this is helpful to consider at the front end. Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism went through schism and reformation, and yet even in the midst of all of that, they still continued to maintain agreement throughout church history on a whole host of issues that now seem to be up for grabs interpretively (e.g., the Trinity, biblical ethics, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, etc.). In addition to that, as a reformed protestant, the central issue of the protestant reformation—the question “what is the gospel”—is also seemingly up for grabs. This rebuke finds itself at the heart of biblical interpretation.

Like most millennials (born 1980 until about 1996, depending on the reference point), I have an inherent posture of skepticism. But there does seem to be a big distinction, too. The way that my skepticism has worked itself out over the years has sometimes found itself on the opposite end of the spectrum from many of my millennial brethren, especially with regard to claims about the nature of the Christian faith. Interestingly enough, the dividing line appears to me to be this: While many millennials find themselves skeptical of older, historical claims, I tend to find myself deeply skeptical of relatively new, novel claims. One of the more obvious contemporary examples of this can be seen in examining the phenomenon known as post-evangelicalism.

And yet some of the questions related to what this looks like are still unanswered. The reason for this is because it’s sometimes difficult to answer those questions without dealing first with the primary hesitations that we tend to have with them. Nevertheless, the Scriptures do give us direction as it relates to how the local church makes disciples from context to context. And as I’ve claimed throughout, rather than being rooted primarily in an attempt to prescriptively apply a descriptive account of the life of Christ, I believe we would be better served in seeking out the prescriptive instructions that we find in the Scriptures on the basis of what Christ has accomplished for us. When the indicatives of the gospel are proclaimed and applied, what imperatives then emerge in the Scriptures? When we seek the answer to that question, we find at least three areas of focus for discipleship in the local church that come with many implications for our ministries. That will now be our focus.

We live in interesting times. As mainline churches decline and evangelical churches struggle to connect meaningfully and relationally to broader culture, we have at the very same time embraced something of a distrust in the means that the Scriptures have given us for disciple-making. It doesn’t take long in conversations from within evangelicalism to hear someone throw shade on things like preaching, gospel-repetition, biblical-theological study, liturgy, or catechesis as a framework for disciple-making. And yet, bathed in prayer and reliance on God’s Spirit, these are the very things the Scriptures instruct us toward, as we’ll see.

Countless books have been written on the topic of “discipleship.” Many thousands of conference hours have been applied to discussing what it means and how it works. It isn’t uncommon to hear exhortations from speakers or authors who say something like, “If your church doesn’t have a ‘disciple-making pathway,’ then in all likelihood you’re not really making disciples.” We also commonly hear of research suggesting that if your church adopts some form of a pathway approach to discipleship, you’ll see more growth. This “pathway” focus on discipleship has had both positive and negative effects on the way we attempt to make disciples.

I was recently catching up with two friends who are part of a church plant far away from Minnesota. Their church was planted for the same reason we planted Gospel Life Church: To make disciples of Jesus Christ in their specific context. They’re struggling to do that though. Let’s look at this story and see two things we can learn from it:

About a year ago, a small group of adults and children began meeting in the Sandberg Chapel of New Hope Church in order to dream and pray together about what it might look like to plant a new church in the Marcy Holmes neighborhood of Minneapolis. We didn’t have a building or meeting space in the neighborhood. We didn't have a detailed strategy for planting a new church. We didn't even have a church name. What we did have were three foundational points of vision that unified us as a team (the desire to be a church for skeptics, a church for the neighborhood, and a church that plants churches). We had a shared sense of calling to this vision. We had a deep conviction that the good news of Jesus brings transformation. And we had new and growing relationships with one another as a church planting family.

Since that point, we’ve chosen a name for our church and crystalized much of our vision and mission. We’ve been graciously given an amazing space in which we’ve been able to meet weekly as a team. We’ve also hosted numerous community gatherings and worship gatherings alongside of many hours of prayer and preparation as a launch team. It hasn't always been easy. In fact, it's been incredibly challenging. Church planting is hard work. But we have seen the Lord at work—many times in unexpected ways.

One of the things that we have been learning together as a church plant over the past few months is the gap that we often see between “theory” and “reality.” In other words, often times in our preparation and training, we would read or hear about a theory on a particular area of church planting that sounded like it would probably be what we would experience—especially given the context in which we were planting—only to then discover that it was not even close to the reality on the ground. Nowhere, from my perspective, has this been more evident than in the area of evangelism. Here are some of the theoretical myths that have been busted in our neighborhood as we’ve been engaging people in spiritual conversations.

In the summer of 2007, I had the privilege of leading a group of high school students to co-host an English Camp with Josiah Venture in the Czech Republic. Our desire was to share the good news of Jesus with students in Czech. God had gone before us and blessed us immensely by partnering us with extraordinary servants and missionaries in Czech, Trevor and Cassie Long. Our hope was to create more opportunities for them and their church in Sumperk to connect with high school students throughout the year.

As Gospel Life Church has been gathering with our launch team and friends for prayer, worship, and community over the course of these last few months, one of the primary areas for discussion and teaching has been our mission statement:

Rooting all of life in the good news of Jesus for his glory and the city’s good.

This is what we want to be doing together at Gospel Life Church because this is how we believe the Bible describes what it looks like for the church to make disciples. In other words, we believe that this is just another way of summarizing how the Scriptures talk when it comes to what we should primarily be about as a church in Southeast Minneapolis. We also believe that this mission is timely for the church and for the city. Here are three reasons why (and three convictions that serve as the foundation for our mission):

So what does it look like to reach non-believing people with the good news of Jesus? Well, we’re still in the very early phases of asking this question at Gospel Life Church, as our launch team is still primarily made up of believing people who want to introduce their friends to Jesus. But here are a few points of discussion that we’re trying to have on a regular basis. These points of discussion aren’t intended as a critique of established churches at all—far from it. We recognize that not only does a new church planting effort stand on the shoulders of established churches, but we continue to learn and grow so much from their faithfulness. Rather, these points of discussion are meant to uniquely describe our heart/vision and the way we are processing these things right now.

One consistent realization that I’ve had these past few months as I’ve prepared for church planting in Minneapolis is that if you talk to ten different people about church planting, you get nearly ten different ideas of what church planting is and why we should engage in it. So I thought it would be appropriate and timely to kick off the Gospel Life Church blog by describing in a bit more detail why we desire to plant a church in Southeast Minneapolis.