For Christians, the ‘good news’ of the Gospel is at the heart of everything. If there’s one thing we want to be able to explain to our friends, it has to be the Gospel. And yet, when we try to do that, increasingly it doesn’t seem to ‘make sense’ to them. It isn’t sounding like the good news that it’s supposed to.
Perhaps it’s the way we’ve been telling it. But surely we don’t have the right to change it to suit our audience. Isn’t that why it’s called the ‘Old, Old Story’ in the first place?
Yes… and no. It comes as a surprise to many Christians that the unchanging Gospel has been conveyed in multiple ways from the outset-drawing from the rich and varied biblical materials to enable it to communicate to people living in very different eras and cultural contexts.
Once we understand this heritage, we’re empowered to follow in their footsteps-to tell that Old, Old Story for ourselves in ways that are both faithful to the Bible and make sense for people in an increasingly Postmodern world.
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STEPHEN BURNHOPE (Ph D, King’s College London) is a writer, speaker, and church consultant and former Senior Pastor of Aylesbury Vineyard Church in the UK. He is the author of Atonement and the New Perspective (Pickwick, 2018) and How to Read the Bible Well (Cascade, 2021).