{"id":1857,"date":"2011-03-09T14:16:09","date_gmt":"2011-03-09T21:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=1857"},"modified":"2011-03-09T14:16:09","modified_gmt":"2011-03-09T21:16:09","slug":"the-ventriloquists-gospel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2011\/03\/09\/the-ventriloquists-gospel\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ventriloquist's Gospel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I attended an event sponsored by a para-church organization that was aimed at evangelizing children and their parents.\u00a0 The main attraction was a ventriloquist.\u00a0 He was a skillful ventriloquist and his schtick<\/em> was pretty funny.\u00a0 By the end of thirty minutes, he had most of the audience on his side.<\/p>\n

If you’ve ever been to this kind of evangelistic event, you will recognize what happened as his routine began to wind down.\u00a0 Slowly he became serious.\u00a0 It was time for the illustration, the connection between ventriloquism and the gospel.<\/p>\n

“I speak for my ventroliquist dummies,” he said, “but before God, no one can speak for me or for you.”\u00a0 He continued with the dilemma: “God is perfect and he can only let perfect things into his heaven.\u00a0 But if you’ve done even one wrong thing, you aren’t perfect.”\u00a0 Then, the product \/ solution:\u00a0 “Now, God sent Jesus to die for you and so he has done everything necessary for you to get into his heaven.\u00a0 But he has left one thing up to you — only you can do this one thing.”\u00a0 And, the pitch:\u00a0 “You need to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior.\u00a0 Only you can do it.\u00a0 Your parents, your grandparents, your church — they can’t do it for you.”\u00a0 Finally, the close:\u00a0 “Let’s bow our heads and close our eyes while we pray.\u00a0 Maybe you want to pray these words….”<\/p>\n

I don’t use the language of sales — dilemma, solution, pitch, close — to demean this man’s character.\u00a0 He seemed to be, and I think he was, earnest and sincere in his desire to share the gospel.\u00a0 Yet this language fairly describes, I think, the techniques<\/em> that were employed.<\/p>\n

Maybe “techniques” aren’t so bad.\u00a0 All communication employs some methods, tropes and techniques.\u00a0 But what if the drive to simplify the technique distorts the message?<\/p>\n

Driving home from the event, I reflected on the message distilled into this exercise of technique.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Only perfect things can get in to God’s heaven.”<\/em>\u00a0 How distant is the idea of “getting in to God’s heaven” from the Bible’s vision of creation and new creation, of God’s purposes for the “very good” of each person and this world, of the physicality of the Resurrection!\u00a0 The Gospel is good news precisely because — and only when — it\u00a0unveils God’s transformation of this created world.<\/p>\n

“God left one thing up to you….”\u00a0 <\/em>How vastly alien to the Biblical Gospel!\u00a0 You and I on our own have gotten it all wrong.\u00a0 We have bound ourselves to the addiction of sin.\u00a0 The Gospel is good news precisely because — and only when — we realize that God did everything<\/em> because we could do nothing.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Only you can do it — not your parents, your grandparents or your church.”\u00a0 <\/em>How utterly foreign to the Biblical ekklesia<\/em>, the “body of Christ,” the authority given to loose and bind, the great cloud of witnesses of the saints through the ages!\u00a0 Yes, God calls each of us to respond with\u00a0 repentance, faith, worship, and good works.\u00a0 But it is not all about you or me as individuals.\u00a0 It is all about participation in Christ through participation with the Church.\u00a0 The Church is the bearer of the Gospel’s good news\u00a0precisely because — and only when — the individual sinner is enfolded into the community that is engrafted into the vine of Christ.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is the Gospel:\u00a0 new creation!\u00a0 This is the Gospel:\u00a0 God did it because you cannot.!\u00a0 This is the Gospel:\u00a0 Christ lives in and through the Church\u00a0because you cannot do this yourself!\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is the invitation:\u00a0 you are invited to participate in the Church, joined to Christ by the Grace of God, in the life of the new creation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently I attended an event sponsored by a para-church organization that was aimed at evangelizing children and their parents.\u00a0 The main attraction was a ventriloquist.\u00a0 He was a skillful ventriloquist and his schtick was pretty funny.\u00a0 By the end of thirty minutes, he had most of the audience on his side. If you’ve ever been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-tX","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1857\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}