“Different Kinds of Gospel Result In Different Kinds of Discipleship”

Abstract

Due to troublesome symptoms emerging and accelerating in American Protestant and Evangelical communities, this article discusses how the Gospel and how discipleship manifests in the American church today. Using Bill Hull’s suggestions about six variations of “Gospel Models,” the first section of this article briefly describes each model and shows in which ways each model impacts discipleship. In the second section, using The Hartford database of US Megachurches, the article analyzes how a subset of the churches in the database define their mission. The conclusion is that discipleship is rare as the primary mission for American churches in terms of actual wording if there is any standing in the words at all. The article concludes that troublesome symptoms emerging and accelerating in American Protestant and Evangelical communities are organizational, caused by the underlying tensions between the Kingdom-focused Gospel of Christ, and the historical traditions and societal morphing underfoot in Western Christianity. Because the trends are organizational, they are, by definition, a leadership issue rather than attributing deficiencies to defective individual followers of Christ. Only leadership has the authority and influence to change an organization, excluding anarchy.