9780310267133

How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the GospelIf you're brave enough to take an honest look at the issues facing the culture-controlled church-and the issues in your own life-read on. Do you ever look at how the Christian faith is being lived out in the new millennium and wonder if we're not doing what we're supposed to be doing? That we still haven't quite "gotten it"? That we've missed the point regarding many important issues? It's understandable if we've relied on what we've been told to believe or what's widely accepted by the Christian community. But if we truly turned a constructive, critical eye toward our beliefs and vigorously questioned them and their origins, where would we find ourselves?Bestselling authors Brian McLaren and Tony Campolo invite you to do just that. Join them on an adventure-one that's about uncovering and naming faultyconclusions, suppositions, and assumptions about the Christian faith. In Adventures in Missing the Point, the authors take turns addressing how we've missed the point on crucial topics such as: salvation, the Bible, being postmodern, worship, homosexuality, truth, and many more.

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Missing the Point about Missing the Point

10

(8)

GOD

Missing the Point: Salvation

18

(14)

Brian D. McLaren

Missing the Point: Theology

32

(14)

Tony Campolo

Missing the Point: Kingdom of God

46

(14)

Tony Campolo

Missing the Point: End Times

60

(14)

Tony Campolo

Missing the Point: The Bible

74

(20)

Brian D. McLaren

WORLD

Missing the Point: Evangelism

94

(18)

Brian D. McLaren

Missing the Point: Social Action

112

(16)

Tony Campolo

Missing the Point: Culture

128

(14)

Brian D. McLaren

Missing the Point: Women in Ministry

142

(14)

Tony Campolo

Missing the Point: Leadership

156

(14)

Brian D. McLaren

Missing the Point: Seminary

170

(16)

Tony Campolo

Missing the Point: Environmentalism

186

(12)

Tony Campolo

Missing the Point: Homosexuality

198

(18)

Tony Campolo

SOUL

Missing the Point: Sin

216

(10)

Brian D. McLaren

Missing the Point: Worship

226

(16)

Brian D. McLaren

Missing the Point: Doubt

242

(14)

Brian D. McLaren

Missing the Point: Truth

256

(18)

Brian D. McLaren

Missing the Point: Being Postmodern

274

Brian D. McLaren

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Adventures in Missing the Point: How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel
Copyright © 2003 by Brian D. McLaren and Tony Campolo
Youth Specialties products, 300 S. Pierce St., El Cajon, CA 92020, are published by
Zondervan, 5300 Patterson Ave. S.E., Grand Rapids, MI 49530
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McLaren, Brian D., 1956-
Adventures in missing the point : how the culture-controlled church neutered the Gospel /
by Brian D. McLaren and Tony Campolo.
p. cm.
Originally published: El Cajon, CA : EmergentYS, c2003.
ISBN-10: 0-310-26713-7 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-26713-3 (pbk.)
1. Theology, Doctrinal—Popular works. I. Campolo, Anthony. II. Title.
BT77.M388 2006
230—dc22
2005024180
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible: New
International Version (North American Edition). Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by
International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Edited by Tim McLaughlin
Design by Burnkit
Printed in the United States of America
06 07 08 09 • 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
MISSING THE POINT:
Salvation
Brian D. McLaren

Are you saved?
For people who come from evangelical and fundamentalist
backgrounds (as I do), life is about being (or getting) saved,
and knowing it. I was taught that the ideal Christian could tell
you the exact date—and maybe even the hour and minute—
when he was saved, when he experienced salvation. Are you
saved? was a question that everyone understood meant one or
all of the following:
• You had accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Savior.
• You believed that Jesus died on the cross for your sins,
and you believed his death, not your good deeds, made
it possible for your sins to be forgiven.
• At the end of a church service, during the “invitation,”
you had said “the sinner’s prayer,” then during the
“invitation” walked to the front of the church—this was
the “altar call”—or perhaps only raised your hand to
acknowledge your conversion.
• You gained an assurance that you were going to heaven
after you died.
I assure you, I think it’s good to be saved in this way. Yet I also
think that the Bible has less to say about these four things than
many Christians may think. Consider:
• The phrase accept Christ as your personal Savior is not in the
Bible. Even personal Savior is absent from the pages of
the Bible. In fact, the Bible seems to make the focus of
salvation on us as a people, not on me as an individual.
• Having your sins forgiven is no doubt a part of (or a
prelude to) salvation. But in the Bible salvation means
much more than that: if anything, being forgiven is the
starting line, not the finish line, of salvation.
• Nowhere in the Bible is the term sinner’s prayer
mentioned, and no one in the Bible ever says it—at
least not in the form that prospective converts are
taught to say it today. And it wasn’t until the last 150
years or so that Christian services included
“invitations” or “altar calls.” Furthermore, no one has
ever or will ever walk down an aisle or raise a hand to
“get saved.” Invitations, altar calls, and sinner’s prayers
are wonderful and often useful traditions or rituals—I
just don’t think that salvation lies in them.
• If you had asked the apostle Paul, “If you were to die
tonight, do you know for certain that you would be with
God in heaven?” I’m certain Paul would have said yes.
But he probably would have given you a funny look and
wondered why you were asking this question, because to
him it missed the point. To Paul the point of being
Christ’s follower was not just to help people be
absolutely certain they were going to heaven after they
died. Paul’s goal was to help them become fully formed,
mature in Christ, here and now—to experience the
glorious realities of being in Christ and experiencing
Christ in themselves.
So if we are missing the point about salvation, what is the
point?
For starters, in the Old Testament the Hebrew word that is
translated salvation means rescue—especially rescue from sickness,
trouble, distress, fear, or (this especially) from enemies and
their violence. You see this meaning clearly in passages like this
one, in which the people rejoice that God has saved them from
the Egyptians who had violently oppressed them as slaves for
generations:
The Lord is my strength and my song;
he has become my salvation.
He is my God, and I will praise him,
my father's God, and I will exalt him. (Exodus 15:2)
Or take David, who expresses the same joy over being rescued
from violent people—in this case, King Saul:
My God is my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield and the horn of my salvation.
He is my stronghold, my refuge and my savior—
from violent men you save me. (2 Samuel 22:3)
A Jewish priest named Zacharias understood salvation in this
same sense. At the birth of his long-awaited son (who would be
known as John the Baptizer), Zacharias sang a song about salvation—
but the enemies he sang about were certainly the
Romans, who oppressed the Jewish people and denied them
their full freedom:
He has raised up a horn of salvation for us
in the house of his servant David
(as he said through his holy prophets of long ago),
salvation from our enemies
and from the hand of all who hate us—
to show mercy to our fathers
and to remember his holy covenant,
the oath he swore to our father Abraham:
to rescue us from the hand of our enemies,
and to enable us to serve him without fear
in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. (Luke 1:69-75)
It’s clear that in these passages the speakers aren’t talking about
being saved from hell. They’re talking about being saved from
the Egyptians, King Saul, the Romans—about being liberated
from violence and oppression and the distressing fear they
engender.
Not that being saved from hell is unimportant or
unbiblical. It is only that I think we sometimes jump to that
interpretation of salvation too quickly—and in so doing, we miss
the full point of salvation.
For just a minute or two, box up your understanding of
salvation and saved long enough to listen to a story, as if it were
the first time you ever heard it.
Back in about 1400 B.C., the Bible tells us, the Jewish
people were slaves in Egypt. They prayed for relief, and God
sent them Moses, who led them to freedom. Moses didn’t take
the credit, though—he knew it was God who saved the people
from slavery. After the people escaped Egypt and settled in

Excerpted from Adventures in Missing the Point by Tony Campolo, Brian D. McLaren, Mclaren
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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Adventures in Missing the Point : How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel

Adventures in Missing the Point : How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel

0310267137

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