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David Fitch is an unusual church planter because he is also a theologian, occupying the Lindner Chair of Evangelical Theology at Northern Seminary. And he is an unusual theologian and professor because he is a church planter, immersed in Life on the Vine, a "missional" church in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. This double life has made his writing, both online at his weblog, Reclaiming the Mission, and in his provocative book The Great Giveaway, must-reading in emerging, evangelical, and mainline settings. One of Fitch's great gifts is his willingness to challenge his readers' assumptions, and his own. Here, he turns the tables on our big question for 2008, "Is our gospel too small?"

Can the gospel be too big? For some of us in the missional church movement, this question borders on heresy. We regularly caution that the gospel is not only about what Jesus can do for me. It is primarily about the transformation of our very way of life into God's mission for the world. We resist any temptation to turn the gospel into anything that might be too "user friendly." The mission of God (missio Dei), so we proclaim, must be all-encompassing, and we must become participants in it.

Yet for all the good in this approach, there may be another heresy beneath the surface. For in protecting the bigness of the gospel, we risk making the Christian life inaccessible to those outside of it. As a result, amid the current swell of appreciation for missio Dei theology in American churches, and the outcries against a gospel that has become too small, I find myself concerned about the ways we may unintentionally be making the gospel too big.

Theologian Darrell Guder has observed that the church is always in the process of reducing the gospel in order to translate it for a given culture. In translating the gospel, we inevitably emphasize certain aspects of it over others. This unavoidable process only becomes a problem when we become fixated on a particular translation, permanently shrinking the gospel instead of leading people into its fullness. Guder calls this process the "challenge of reductionism," and calls for the "continual conversion" of the church, in which the church must always re-inhabit each new context with the gospel in a way that is suitable for its particular time and place. Being the gospel in the world, therefore, demands a continual traveling back and forth from the grand scope of all that God is doing in Christ to the simple offer of salvation to the stranger and back again.

Guder is proposing that the church must follow this process to be faithful missionaries of the gospel. But there is a complementary danger of refusing to reduce the gospel out of disdain for a particular culture's sin. We resist the accommodation of the gospel to a culture that seems to have such evident deficiencies. But in so doing, we refuse to speak a gospel that can be heard by those afflicted by these very cultural ills. We insist, maybe sinfully, on keeping the gospel out of reach.

My wife and I learned this when we moved to the northwest suburbs of Chicago to plant a church. Chicago's suburbs stretch across hundreds of square miles of highways, tollways, subdivisions, monster malls, gated communities, and corporate offices. Thousands of cars speed along the expressways carrying people to their homes, jobs, and children's sport programs. The breakneck pace pulsates so heavily that it is difficult for any individual not to be swallowed up. The same forces press upon churches as well, urging them to make the gospel as convenient as possible for people on the move.

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September 2008, Vol. 52, No. 9