Posted on September 12, 2007 - by Stephen Murray

Don’t Forget Entailments: What We’ve Missed #3

The missional church places a high premium on the entailments of the gospel – things such as living in community, social concern, doing justice etc. I think its still important that we make a distinction between ‘the gospel’ and its entailments (and you can see why here) but at the same time that doesn’t mean we ignore the entailments.

Does this undermine the proclamation of the gospel? No, it shouldn’t. I think a lot of people think in terms of percentages of church effort. So you might say the church aims to do 60% gospel proclamation and spend 40% of its efforts on the entailments – this way the entailments get some sort of recognition but the church rightly keeps gospel proclamation as the main thing. Now whilst the concept of keeping gospel proclamation the main thing is an admirable concept I think the outworking into percentages is flawed. As I see it a faithful reading of scripture would have us place 100% effort into gospel proclamation and 100% effort into the entailments and not pick and choose like we tend to do, often ignoring the entailments. If you take the proclamation away you’ll either get legalism or a social gospel. On the other hand if you take the effort away from the entailments you end up with a powerless and beggarly gospel.

I do want to argue for an order however. I’m convinced that the only thing that will keep us persevering with the entailments (and let’s be honest – its hard work) is a right understanding of the gospel. We will never faithfully answer the call of things like social concern and doing justice if our hearts are not completely gripped by the love of Christ displayed to us in the gospel. Without it our works turn into a legalistic system of religion. Where many of us have forgotten or neglected the entailments the missional church provides us with an opportunity to put the balance right in this area – let us lift high the gospel and all of its entailments with zeal and dedication.