In search of the Gospel

[dragoness_e]

I've been commuting to work lately, and as a result listening to the local gospel station, as it has the fewest commercials and no sports-talk, and actually has something interesting on, usually.

Things I've noticed: whoever manages station programming seems to farm out air-time to anyone that fits their demographic, with no consistent theology: we get everything from Health & Wealth preachers to Joyce Meyers, with some guy pitching "natural foods" and herbal medicine in between. What "natural" medicines have to do with gospel radio I'm not certain.

There's a couple of radio evangelists I enjoy, because they get seriously into the text of the Bible and preach lessons around them: Rev David Paul, Rev David Jeremiah and Joyce Meyers, among others. There's a few that make me scream and switch to the nearest classic rock station when they come on--the health & wealth "evangelist", who I find utterly offensive, Bob & George's little phone-in show, because they never actually address their callers' spiritual issues seriously but just regurgitate the same pap for the last 20 years (Do you guys actually listen to your callers, or do you just use keywords in their call to launch off into a pet lecture?), and the local preacher who is seriously of the "hellfire & brimstone" variety.

There's also the other local preacher I can't take seriously because he ends every single sentence with "yes, yes," and makes me think of Beast Wars Megatron. BW Megatron preaching gospel is just not the right mental imagery taking a preacher seriously, no....

So in all this I finally notice that a lot of evangelists talk about "the Gospel", and tell us how important it is that we receive the Gospel, and that we preach the Gospel to others, and so on and so forth... but they never actually tell us what the Gospel IS. They talk about how important it is to believe in Jesus, and through Jesus you are saved, but they don't mention what Jesus said. The ones that are preaching from the Bible (rather than generic anti-non-Christian ranting) are preaching on Old Testament lessons.

If my local "gospel" station is typical of the smaller, evangelistic Protestant denominations, something is seriously missing from the picture. Also, where do the mainstream denominations hide their radio programs? I don't catch anything Lutheran or Catholic or Orthodox on this station during my commuting hours.

This curiousity sent me back to the New Testament looking for what Jesus actually preached. What was "the Gospel"?

So far, I've discovered that the Gospel of Matthew and Mark aren't redundant; Mark talks about Jesus' preaching and discipleship, but he doesn't say what Jesus preached. Matthew, however, is a gold mine: he repeats many of the sermons of Jesus. I'm looking forward to re-reading Luke and John, and then the Apostolic letters, with an eye toward re-discovering the Gospel.

I'll have more to say later on.

Comments

[evilnel.livejournal.com]

*pokes in head*

Hi!

I find that many mainstream or "pop Christian" speakers preach ideals with little or no scripture to back it up. You need to spread the word, you need to live like Jesus, you need to follow the law. Well... what IS the word? Did Jesus say love your neighbor? I'm pretty sure he did, so why not discuss the ins and outs of a particular passage about WHAT Jesus said, to further your understanding of HOW to spread the word, or how to live like Jesus?

I was horrified when, helping out with VBS at my church, the kids didn't learn a single Bible verse, didn't really get any messages about Jesus, barely did anything that related to the Bible. I was helping in the toddler room and I had to ask no less than four people WHAT the Bible story for the day was, and none of them knew! Shouldn't that be the focus? I find it to be a sad epidemic. When I went to school (Lutheran school) and Sunday school, we memorized passages from the scriptures and talked about what they meant, and we memorized Luther's Small Catechism and talked about what our denomination said about theology. Nowadays (I sound really old here, but I'm actually only 22 haha) it seems like at church camp kids don't know the Bible, they know that Jesus is their Lord and Savior, but they don't really understand what that means.

Maybe that's okay, maybe you don't need to understand to have faith. God knows I don't understand everything. But I guess I believe that when we simply have feel good messages and don't really understand what it means to live the Word (because we don't KNOW the word) that we are building our houses on the sand, and we all know how Jesus feels about that.

[raisedbymoogles.livejournal.com]

There's also the other local preacher I can't take seriously because he ends every single sentence with "yes, yes," and makes me think of Beast Wars Megatron. BW Megatron preaching gospel is just not the right mental imagery taking a preacher seriously, no....

*splorfle*

[faithinfire.livejournal.com]

I guess it's like fanfic, in an odd way. These preacher guys aren't referring back to their canon enough, so the end result is distorted, OOC and inconsistent; and the newbies are hearing this and thinking it's all there is, and so their perceptions of the fandom faith reflect the canon even less and it keeps getting weirder. *pictures an icon saying "Christianity - GO READ THE BOOK!"*

(Mind you, now I'm picturing certain hateful evangelical preachers as being the equivalent of those disturbing BNFs who write crappy mpreg epics and somehow still get all the reviews...)

[horsetechie.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah... one reason why I gave up on radio gospel years ago, and just listened to music only stations like K-Love and AirOne.

Until a couple years ago. There's this gospel station that I found from a random search. Based out of Anderson IN (I live in Indy) and has a good section from the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. At the time of my commute to work in the mornings, they would have a 15 minute segment spoken by Michael Easley. Normally I change the channel when they go into uber evangelical sessions, or stuff that just doesn't mesh with my thinking. But for some reason I decided to hang around to hear this guy... and I fell in love. He was good! He would take a reading right from the Bible, and then adds his input on what it means in our day to day lives. This was my way of keeping in touch with my faith since I also was in between churches and didn't go to any on Sunday.

Apparently, a lot of other people also liked Michael Easley's lessons, and they wanted it longer and at a better time. So it was moved from 7a to 9a, and now I have to make more of an effort to track his sessions down. *sigh*

It still makes for a fascinating listen, if you're curious too. ^^
http://www.moodyradio.org/brd_programtoday.aspx?id=18260