Nugent, John | Endangered Gospel

Endangered Gospel: How Fixing the World is Killing the Church
John Nugent
Paperback: Cascade Books, 2016, 220pp.

Introduction

It’s not much of a stretch to say that American society today is marked by political polarization. This polarization is characterized by even more fear and loathing than usual, as people on both sides of the political aisle react in ways both apocalyptic and apoplectic to each news cycle, each public gaffe, and each real or manufactured scandal. Perhaps the most charitable reading of this mass hysteria is that people genuinely care. People across the political spectrum harbor hopes and anxieties about the direction of their nation, their world, and their neighborhoods. They long for leaders who share those hopes and anxieties, and mistrust those leaders whose vision is not compatible with their own. They feel compelled to do something to make their concerns heard, even if that something involves an angry Facebook rant or an irrational attack on an enemy. They want to effect change, to fix what is broken, and yet feel powerless to do so, disillusioned and overwhelmed. And of course, those in the church are not immune to such feelings or such behavior. Those who profess to follow Jesus can get just as caught up in this circus as the average citizen. This desire to make things better seems to be an integral part of our human disposition. To put it another way, as John Nugent writes in his 2016 book Endangered Gospel, we “yearn for a better place.”

This is just one of the many reasons why Nugent’s book is such a challenging contribution to the contemporary discussion on church and society. He develops a thesis that strikes at the heart of our desire to be world-changers and problem-solvers on a grand scale, “Let me be as straightforward and as clear as possible: it’s not the church’s job to make this world a better place” (8). Such a claim, Nugent argues, should not be mistaken for the brand of pious escapism that so often serves as a caricature of what it means to be in the world but not of it. What Nugent advocates here requires much more than that in terms of investment. “There are people who think that withdrawing – that letting go and letting God – is the way Christians should act.” He states: “I’m not one of those people. What God has actually called his people to do is far more demanding of our time, energy, and resources than most card-carrying agents of world betterment dare to imagine. It’s also far more in line with the world’s best interests. This book is not about retreating from the world, but engaging the world in the best possible way – the way that only we can” (8).

It is in that last phrase that the core of Nugent’s argument rests. There are many ways that believers might yearn for a better place, many ways that we might change the world, and many ways that we might insert ourselves into the world’s power structures as influencers of culture. Some of these might have positive effects on the people and places around us. But none of these, Nugent argues, is distinctive in the way that the church is called to be distinctive. To illustrate this further, he unpacks three popular views of a better place: the heaven-centered view, the human-centered view, and the world-centered view. The heaven-centered view is oriented toward escaping the “mess that sin has made of God’s good creation”(9) and going to a better place (i.e., heaven). The human-centered view is driven by the human responsibility to make the world a better place. The world-centered view, agrees with the human-centered view that the world will become a better place, but it is skeptical of the human capacity to usher in the kingdom of God on earth.

The world-centered view – with its hopes for a future divine intervention, its positive view of earthly creation, and its emphasis that God’s restoration of this world has already begun – represents an upgrade from the escapist heaven-centered view and the more secular human-centered view. Nugent, however, argues that even the improved perspective of the world-centered view is still lacking in its ecclesiology. Among other shortcomings, it fails to present the church’s nature and mission in a way that does sufficient justice to the robust biblical vision of God’s people. Specifically, in its narrative of the redemption of creation, it fails to acknowledge that the church, the new human order, is already participating in the new creation in a distinctive way. Thus, it fails to articulate how that distinctive participation shapes the church’s unique witness. In response to this failure, Nugent states that the church is the better place that God has promised, and the job of the church is to live as that better place – to embrace, display, and proclaim this new order so that others might participate in it rather than investing their hopes and fears in the old orders that are passing away. The remainder of the book advances the claim that this fourth view of a better place, which Nugent calls the kingdom-centered view, more fully exemplifies the distinctive calling of the community of God’s people. 

Active Disciplemaking

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the church community, as Nugent describes it, is the nature of leadership within it. Leadership, Nugent argues, is for the building up and empowering of all members in the church community. He writes, “Christ gave 

leaders to the church so they might equip other members for works of service. The congregation doesn’t elevate the leaders so they can get the work done; leaders elevate the members so they can do the work of the body” (135). He continues: “[Church] leaders help all members lead in their areas of giftedness so the whole body might reflect Christ and his kingdom. They serve the body by helping it grow into the better place God has called the church to be” (136, emphasis in original). How then are disciples made? Nugent emphasizes that disciplemaking is an active work of the church community: “Paul does not commission leaders—not even evangelists—to attract people. The body’s mutual love and reflection of Christ attracts people” (136).

Table Worship-Fellowship

Although Nugent only makes brief, passing references to the place of shared meals in the life of the church community, he is abundantly clear that the sort of fellowship that happens around a table is the true center of the church’s life. Nugent’s chapter on fellowship is the sort of passage that inspires, encourages, and emboldens readers to want to take hold of something that we maybe didn’t even know we were missing and demonstrates why a kingdom-centered view might be so transformative to the church’s way of being in the world. 

He writes: “Sharing meals was (in the New Testament world), and still is, an intimate practice. It is often said “we are what we eat”; even more so, we are who we eat with. Jesus was called a “friend of sinners” because he ate with them. He wasn’t content to preach at them from the hilltops; he made a point of dining with them. The practice of hospitality involves welcoming Christian brothers and sisters—even the unpopular ones—into the intimate space of one’s immediate family” (138, emphasis in original). New members, Nugent notes, are baptized into this intimate fellowship of the local church community: “a body where every member is equipped to do the work of ministry according to the Spirit given them in order to build up the body of Christ in love—each member doing its part—until it reaches fullness in Christ. We must baptize them into a body in which the various forms of ministering to ‘one another’ in Christ have become their new life rhythm” (142).

Radical Kinship

Radical kinship is, according to Nugent, an essential hallmark of the local church fellowship. “We still live in a world in which people regularly experience discrimination at work, school, and home,” he writes. “We still live in a world where race, gender, age, pedigree, and net worth confer privilege and deny access. People still yearn to be part of a community that appreciates them for who they are, welcomes them into a life of flourishing that revolves around something bigger than themselves, and includes others who are not like them” (142). Noting that Jesus’s disciples included both tax collectors and Zealots (two political groups as deeply polarized as any in the United States today), Nugent writes: “in the kingdom, friendship isn’t rooted in shared hobbies, taste in movies, sense of humor, or even good chemistry; it is rooted in a common commitment to God’s reign. Since that reign is all-encompassing, those who are obsessed with it find themselves caring about the same things, living by the same principles, and valuing the same goods” (159).

Deep Roots in Scripture

Over the course of the book, Nugent unpacks the scriptural story of a better place. Because he rightly believes that returning to the Bible’s story is important for reclaiming “key components necessary for getting our story straight,” Nugent spends ample time in his examination of the biblical narrative, reconfiguring the traditional “creation, fall, redemption” framework to tell a more expansive story about how God has been working to create the very best place. Nugent is an astute and faithful reader of Scripture, and thus offers much insight into elements of the story that even Christians familiar with the Bible often overlook. His discussion of the role played by “the powers” as background characters who make this world a “slightly better place” by tempering evil is significant, particularly for the way that he distinguishes this role from the one played by God’s set-apart people. Likewise, his depiction of Jesus’s inauguration of God’s kingdom as a gift serves as an important corrective to misunderstandings of the nature of the kingdom. It is in this second part of the book that Nugent is at his strongest, as he clearly and eloquently articulates the biblical argument for his kingdom-centered view. 

Nugent writes as one who is rooted in the life of a local congregation, which allows him to anticipate and address many of the concerns that readers might have about how this vision plays out on the ground. As an added benefit, an appendix provides answers to a series of questions that Nugent’s argument might provoke among church members. It is evident that Nugent’s primary concern rests in whether his argument connects with his audience in ways that inspire conversation within the church. And in that, this book will certainly succeed. Endangered Gospel is a challenging book, as it seeks to unsettle some of the modern church’s most deeply held convictions about its place in the larger culture. But even among readers who wrestle with the vision Nugent articulates, this book provides many opportunities for reflection about how the church might more faithfully bear witness to a world that yearns for a better place.