The Unfolding Gospel: How the Good News Makes Sense of Discipleship, Church, Mission, and Everything Else

By John P. Bowen and David Fitch

Many congregations and their leaders are discouraged about the future of the church. John Bowen's conviction is that the solution is to be found not in new programs or strategies but in a recovery of theological vision--that of Jesus and his gospel, which transforms every aspect of life. This vision restores hope in the only way realistically possible. 

Words like mission, discipleship, church, evangelism, renewal, and church planting are used like billiard balls--all rolling around a single table, unconnected and bouncing randomly off one another. This book pulls these ideas together into a coherent and organic whole. The gospel is the hermeneutical key for understanding each of these topics and what draws them together.

Thus, chapter 1 is an exposition of the gospel (God's determination to make all things new through Jesus Christ). Chapter 2 discusses discipleship (we only understand discipleship in light of the gospel), and chapter 3 covers church (we only understand church if we understand discipleship). Chapter 4 considers culture as the arena in which the gospel is lived and talked about, and chapter 5 builds on that with a discussion of translation, not only as a missional necessity but as a ministry which itself incarnates the nature of the gospel. The remaining chapters (on evangelism, the future of "inherited churches," church planting, and leadership) demonstrate how the gospel is the integration point for all. 

The author's hope is that church leaders--evangelical and mainline, young and old, emerging and traditional, present and future--will have a transformative "Aha!" moment as this gospel hypothesis unfolds. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Jul 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781506471686

Book preview

Praise for The Unfolding Gospel

Who better to remind us afresh of what the gospel is than a thoughtful, experienced, post-Christendom evangelist like John Bowen? He has the gift of discussing the complex, dynamic intersection of gospel, church, and culture in understandable, easy-to-listen-to ways. This is a much-needed, back-to-basics book that helps God’s people reaffirm the goodness of the good news.

—AL TIZON, affiliate associate professor of missional and global leadership, North Park Theological Seminary, and executive minister of Serve Globally Evangelical Covenant Church

Once again, John Bowen excels here in communicating with convincing clarity, warmth, grace, and faithfulness about the blessings that abound in sharing and living out the gospel in the world God loves. Laypeople, church leaders, and anyone interested in ‘what’s next’ for the church and the Christian movement will find this an engaging and worthwhile read.

—ROB FENNELL, academic dean, Atlantic School of Theology, and author of The Rule of Faith and Biblical Interpretation: Reform, Resistance, and Renewal

John Bowen writes as if you were having a conversation at the kitchen table over coffee, responding to unasked questions while exploring the great themes of the gospel, with stories from his experience as a teacher and theologian that capture the heart and imagination. With a thorough knowledge of Scripture, church history, and C. S. Lewis, alongside his experience mentoring evangelists and church planters, he invites us to hold firmly to the core of the gospel and lightly to what may need to change. He does it all with the joy and passion of his own winsome evangelistic gifts. A book for all grappling with the future of the church!

—ARCHBISHOP LINDA NICHOLLS, primate, Anglican Church of Canada

"With his usual wit and wisdom, John Bowen continues his lifelong commitment to equipping scholarly evangelists for church and academy in The Unfolding Gospel. Bowen is a docent for the reader in both senses of the word. First, his university classroom experience is evident in this thoughtful and theological exploration of evangelism. Second, he is a docent in the sense that he serves as a cheerful guide moving the reader through the ‘gospel gallery,’ reinterpreting everything from conversion to church planting along the way. The Unfolding Gospel is a must read for those curious about how to live, share, and speak the gospel as a faithful witness to God’s redeeming presence in the world today."

—ROSS LOCKHART, dean of St. Andrew’s Hall, Vancouver, and author of Lessons from Laodicea: Missional Leadership in a Culture of Affluence

"In The Unfolding Gospel, John Bowen brings his gentle humor and his perceptive observations to the business of telling the gospel story. If, like me, you sometimes feel that the gospel is ‘otherworldly’ or that ‘evangelism’ is best left to the extroverted or a special class of Christian, then this book will restore your confidence. Reading this book reminds you that Jesus journeys with us right where we are and that the gospel is always for these times and places."

—BETH GREEN, provost of Tyndale University, Toronto, and regional editor of the International Journal of Christianity and Education

Encountering John Bowen in print is not unlike encountering him in the flesh: wise, passionate, and articulate with an occasional dash of welcome irreverence! Each of these is abundantly evident in his fulsome exploration of how the good news has become—and is becoming—alive in discipleship, church, mission, and everything else! You will enjoy this engaging conversation with a trusted friend who knows how to both provoke and inspire.

—MICHAEL J. PRYSE, bishop, Eastern Synod, Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada

Finally! A book for those who want to follow Jesus and are serious about inviting others to do the same. John Bowen’s background in the English Renewal Movement, his participation in all things missional in North America, and his commitment to scholarliness make this an outstanding book. He not only lives this out but has helped many others like me learn to walk in the way of Jesus also. Now this book, written in his usual winsome and wonderful manner, will help many, many more live out the good news of the kingdom of God. I can’t wait to get my hands on multiple copies to give away.

—CAM ROXBURGH, global director of Forge Missional Network; team leader of Southside Community Church, Vancouver; and contributor to Green Shoots out of Dry Ground: Growing a New Future for the Church in Canada

"The Unfolding Gospel is an essential gospel primer for pastors, church planters, and regular run-of-the-mill apprentices of Jesus—the fruit of decades of teaching, practice, and thoughtful and prayerful reflection. John Bowen is a wise guide: logical, engaging, witty, honest, and sure footed as he leads us forward into the post-Christendom and postpandemic landscape."

—JILL WEBER, member of the international leadership team of 24-7 Prayer; director of Spiritual Formation at Emmaus Road Church, Guildford, United Kingdom; and author of Even the Sparrow: A Pilgrim’s Guide to Prayer, Trust, and Following the Leader

What John Bowen has masterfully accomplished in this book is a bird’s-eye view of the interconnectedness of many areas in our lives and how they all are linked to the sharing of the good news of Jesus Christ. Though he is a man of deep wisdom and theological knowledge who cares deeply for the good news, he imparts this with equally deep humility and humor.

—PILAR GATEMAN, executive officer and archdeacon of Calgary in the Anglican Diocese of Calgary

The Unfolding Gospel

The Unfolding Gospel

How the Good News Makes Sense of Discipleship, Church, Mission, and Everything Else

John P. Bowen

Foreword by David Fitch

Fortress Press

MINNEAPOLIS

THE UNFOLDING GOSPEL

How the Good News Makes Sense of Discipleship, Church, Mission, and Everything Else

Copyright © 2021 Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [e-mail] or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked MSG are taken from THE MESSAGE, copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries.

Scripture quotations marked FNV are taken from Walking the Good Road: The Gospel and Acts with Ephesians—First Nations Version. N.p.: Great Thunder, 2017. Licensed by Rain Ministries, Inc. under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-7167-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-7168-6

Cover design: Marti Naughton / sMartdesigN

Cover images: ID: 186827634 © petekaric | iStock

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To the Hamilton Pioneer Cohorts:

Every time you cross my mind, I break out in exclamations of thanks to God.

Philippians 1:3 MSG

Contents

Foreword by David Fitch

Introduction (The Kind You Really Need to Read)

1. What Is the Gospel? Complexity and Simplicity

2. The Gospel, Conversion, and Baptism: A Threefold Knot

3. The Gospel and Discipleship: Three Tools of the Trade

4. The Gospel and Discipleship: Three More—plus One

5. The Gospel and the Church: Back to Basics

6. The Gospel and Evangelism: Can It Be Redeemed?

7. The Gospel and Culture: Created, Damaged, Restored

8. The Gospel and Inherited Churches: Moving to Missional

9. The Gospel and Church Planting: Two Models

10. The Gospel and Leadership: The Many and the Few

Conclusion: The Gospel and New Beginnings

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Foreword

Christians today are bewildered in the midst of the cultural changes taking place in North America. In the span of just one lifetime, many Christians have moved from being in the majority of the culture to being a minority that is often viewed with suspicion, and even resentment, by the people around them. Where Christianity once dominated the culture, Christians now live in a society of multiple cultures where no one religion is the majority faith. The swiftness of these changes is dizzying. The magnitude of these changes is overwhelming.

The elder Christians among us remember a time when the church held a position of respect and influence in most North American cities and towns. Pastors and clergy were welcomed regularly into the schools or chambers of government. They were sought after for their advice and approval. Society as a whole, it seemed, would look to the church for moral guidance. Today that is all but gone. Who today dares bring a Bible with them to a local public school meeting? Even the language of Christians no longer connects with the culture. Christian words like sin and salvation now need to be explained when we use them outside the walls of a church building. When we say God, people ask, Which one? What are we to make of the future of the church that is now cast into such a sea of unfamiliarity?

When culture changes this fast and the rug gets pulled out from beneath our feet, we should expect knee-jerk reactions. The church has often reacted in knee-jerk fashion to these changes by either getting defensive or trying to accommodate. When the church gets defensive, it gets confrontational with those who challenge what it believes. It tries to hold on to lost authority and works urgently to preserve its way of life among a smaller and shrinking group of people. In the end, a defensive church retreats and fails to engage the ills or confusions of its surrounding culture. On the other hand, when the church gets accommodative, it tries quickly to become relevant to the changes, hoping to preserve its stake in influencing the culture. It tries to agree as much as possible with the existing culture in the hope of making friends and influencing people. This approach, instead of engaging cultural issues, blends in with the culture. Although both the defensive and the accommodative reactions are understandable, neither really engages the struggles, ills, and pains of its culture.

Ultimately, these defensive and accommodative reactions are power moves from a time when the church had cultural authority. Back then, it would defend its beliefs and people would listen. Back then, it had influence in the culture, so it expected to be relevant. When you’re used to being in charge, defending yourself or using your cultural influence is what you do. Old habits die hard. But the passing away of the Christendom culture has made both of these approaches to engage the culture either presumptive or off-putting. The church is badly in need of another option.

In what follows, John Bowen offers us another option. He starts with the only thing the church can offer to a world in massive cultural flux: the gospel. There is no defensiveness or accommodation to his approach. Instead, he begins with a careful clarification of what the gospel is. For John, the big statement of the gospel is the good news of what God is like, that God the Creator is on a mission to right all wrongs through Jesus Christ. He unfurls what this gospel entails for human life in all its true glory and then allows this gospel to unwind all our assumptions about what we are doing that we call church. John allows the gospel to do the work of realigning what we do as a church as we engage culture. After John is done, the church cannot help but become a full participant in the mission of God in the culture, because it is living out the gospel.

Please do not mistake John’s option for an oversimplistic proposal that the gospel is all we need. He’s not saying that simply preaching the gospel will meet the challenges we face in being Christians in the secularized West. John is doing so much more than that. He is leading us through the church’s mounting problems, its massive disconnect with culture, and its hangover of bad habits from Christendom that many of us have experienced as Christians these past few decades. He helps us understand them all through a clarifying of the gospel.

With remarkable candor, John untangles the dilemmas, unwinds the assumptions, and attacks the frameworks, which then opens pathways for the gospel to realign all we do as churches. Everything we do as a church, including worship, evangelism, discipleship, and church planting, gets illumined by the gospel. After reading each chapter, working through each issue of being church, we have a sense of what we can discard and what is essential to retain in being the church. He does not throw away the great traditions of our faith. Instead, he carefully discerns their purpose and refashions them through the lens of the gospel. Through it all, what John is doing is giving us an alternative to the defensiveness and accommodation of our age as we engage our changing culture. It is the option of a new faithfulness for mission.

So I encourage the reader to sit back, take a deep breath, and allow what follows to impact your soul. Let this book challenge your mind and reshape your vision for what is possible in the Christian life. Let John Bowen shape in us all a new faithfulness for mission, one the church desperately needs in the secular West.

David Fitch

Betty R. Lindner Chair of Evangelical Theology

Northern Seminary, Lisle, Illinois

Introduction

(The Kind You Really Need to Read)

This is a superficial book, and I feel good about that. In my opinion, there are far too many deep books around, and it is time someone provided an alternative.

Superficial? I bought my granddaughter a globe for Christmas. Not any old globe, however. This one came in the form of a four-hundred-piece three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Yes, really. If you started at the bottom, with the South Pole, the pieces could be put together one after another, in a kind of spiral, until you reached the North Pole—and there you had the world. Very cool.

But it was a superficial gift, in the same way that this is a superficial book. Abby could learn all sorts of stuff about individual countries, or even individual continents, and do so in great depth. But to stand back and see the world as a whole puts everything into perspective. The depth and the superficiality are both necessary for a full understanding.

This book covers a wide waterfront: huge topics like gospel, mission, discipleship, church, evangelism, culture, leadership, and so on. Inevitably, I only touch on each one quite briefly, and I suspect you will find this frustrating at times. (Did I mention the book was superficial?)

But this skimming of the surface is intentional. My goal is not to explore these topics in depth, because others have done that, and continue to do that, far better than I could do. What I am trying to do—and I don’t think this is so often done—is to try to show the connection among all these things. And that, I like to believe, has the same kind of value as having a globe of the world.

Other Things You Need to Know

We are all culturally situated. We were born at a particular time in a particular place. We have all been shaped by whatever influences our families of origin brought to bear on us and by whatever was going on in the culture and the wider world around us. That’s just the way it is. We can’t escape that reality, and (as I argue in chapter 7) it is a good thing, and a God-given thing.

But it does help if we are aware of what has shaped us and realize that those things are not absolutes. For one thing, to be self-aware about these influences, and to be upfront about them, nurtures humility in us. We tend to be less dogmatic. We are more likely to say I could be wrong, but . . . or I realize I may be a bit biased in saying this, but . . . This is a particularly important posture when we are talking to people who have been shaped differently (date of birth, place of origin, parental influences, cultural forces, and so on)—which is more or less everyone on the planet—and trying to communicate across those divides.

So it will help as you read this book to know some of the things that have shaped me. I hope that will help you make allowances. It will mean you can sit lightly to some of the things I say (Well, naturally, he would think that . . .) while taking others more seriously (Hmm, that’s a different perspective: I’ll have to think about that).

Where I Am Coming From

I was born in 1946, just after the Second World War, so yes, I am an early baby boomer. My parents were born just after the First World War, so they grew up between those wars, and that was part of what shaped them. I am white, middle class (my father was an architect, and my mother never worked outside the home), and privileged (I spent four years at Oxford University). Even during the lean times in the early years of our marriage, when we sold possessions to have enough to live on, I never doubted that we would have food on the table and a roof over our heads. I hope I am duly thankful.

I have a strong sense of roots. I was born in Wales, not England, and three of my family of four voted for the Welsh Nationalist Party, Plaid Cymru. (I don’t think it’s betraying confidences at this stage to say that my mother was the odd one out.) I grew up in the house my grandparents had bought when they married in 1904 and in which my father had been born.

From my early years, I was made aware that the Welsh had been oppressed and colonized by the English for seven hundred years and that we had survived. But I recognize now that on the whole, we had survived largely by assimilation. One example will illustrate. My father grew up speaking the Welsh language at home, but by the time he married my mother (who was English), he spoke Welsh only in conversation with his mother, who lived with us, and with certain clients who preferred Welsh. I learned Welsh in high school for a few years but never became fluent. You would never know I was Welsh from my accent or from anything else except the Welsh flag on my bumper, unless I told you. But that sense of being Welsh, and therefore distinct and outsider-ish, goes very deep. Hence the bumper sticker.

Spiritual Roots

Spiritually, I grew up in my mother’s church, which was Anglican, a denomination that came from England and never managed to put down deep roots in Welsh soil. As a teenager, I was deeply impacted by a religious education teacher in high school. (In those days in the UK, religion was a required subject, and religion meant Christianity.)

That brought me into an evangelical form of Christianity that in one way or another has nurtured me ever since. It grew and evolved through university (with involvement in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship [IVCF], where I met my wife), seminary (Trinity College, Bristol), work for IVCF (in the UK from 1973 until 1977 and then in Canada until the late 1990s), and my last paid job, as professor of evangelism at Wycliffe College in the University of Toronto (1997–2016).

I like to qualify the much-despised term evangelical by saying I am an Anglican evangelical, which I realize sounds to some like an oxymoron. In the early years of my spiritual formation, I turned my back on the Anglican church in which I had grown up and favored Baptist and Congregational churches instead. But at university, I encountered churches and teachers who were happy to identify as Anglican and evangelical, and I immediately felt at home. The evangelical fire seemed to burn brightly in the Anglican fireplace.

I should add that this background has not stopped me from learning from and being enriched by other Christian traditions: Catholic and Orthodox, Reformed, Charismatic, and Anabaptist. Some of those influences will become obvious.

Like most evangelicals (but not only evangelicals¹) these days, I have been deeply influenced by C. S. Lewis, which in a way is strange because Lewis would not have self-identified as an evangelical. He describes himself as a very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially ‘high,’ nor especially ‘low,’ nor especially anything else—in other words, as a mere Christian.² In his day, the evangelical movement was probably narrower and more partisan than it is now, which may explain why he did not associate with it.³

Lewis has become the single biggest influence on my understanding of Christianity, as will be obvious from the many references and notes. I think I particularly appreciate that, like me, he was not ordained (and would have been horrified at the suggestion). His theology was self-taught and incredibly far-ranging. I remember checking one of his quotations (unfootnoted) and found it was deeply buried within the third volume of Thomas