An Old Temptation with New Language

​

It has become fashionable to treat the reduction of Christianity to usefulness as a peculiarly American defect. Another symptom of a pragmatic culture addicted to results, metrics, and slogans. But to call this an American phenomenon mistakes the latest expression of the disease for its origin. There is nothing new here.

​

The truth is less flattering. The church has always been eager to justify itself by its benefits. Whenever Christianity has been asked to prove its worth by producing virtue, stability, happiness, or social order, it has agreed far too quickly. The only thing that changes from century to century is the vocabulary used to disguise the transaction.

​

Long before church marketing programs and church growth conferences, the church learned to defend itself by its outcomes. Christianity was praised as the best guarantor of morality, the firmest foundation for law, the most humane civilizing force available. These arguments were meant to protect the faith. Instead, they quietly hollowed it out.

​

The pattern was established early. When Constantine the Great marched under the sign of the cross, the symbol of execution was recast as a guarantor of victory. The faith was no longer merely proclaimed; it was deployed. It did not need to be true so long as it was effective. It sanctified success, stabilized authority, and conferred divine endorsement on what was already in motion.

​

This was hailed as triumph. In reality it was a bargain. Christianity gained protection, patronage, and prestige. In exchange, it learned to justify itself by what it could deliver; unity, obedience, order. The gospel survived, but only by being pressed into service. And once a religion consents to be useful, it forfeits the right to speak a word that cannot be conscripted by any system that provides better outcomes.

The church has been living with that arrangement ever since.

​

Whatever Works

​

When religion is judged primarily by usefulness, it submits itself to a test it cannot survive. Usefulness invites comparison. Comparison invites competition. Competition invites replacement.

Once Christianity presents itself as a means to an end, be it moral improvement, social justice, psychological resilience, or national renewal, it places itself on a curve of performance. And anything placed on a curve invites a simple question: Why this rather than something else?

​

If meditation calms anxiety more effectively, replace prayer. If policy achieves justice more reliably, discard proclamation. If therapy produces healthier individuals, demote forgiveness. This is not hostility to religion as some in the church are quick to argue. It is the logical consequence of religion volunteering to be useful. Why should the church be surprised when the world takes it at its word?

​

A religion that must justify itself by its effects has already conceded the argument. It has agreed that its truth is secondary to its utility. From there, the slide is inevitable. If the same effects can be produced elsewhere more efficiently and with fewer metaphysical claims, religion becomes unnecessary clutter. And, to be frank, there is no shortage of Christian religion that fits that description. History is not short on examples of this exchange. It is littered with them.

​

Good News is Not a Strategy

​

Preachers are fond of saying they know that people are crushed by responsibility, that the burdens of living can be unbearable, that the last thing people need is another demand disguised as help. They say it often, and sometimes with genuine sincerity. But what is striking is how rarely this knowledge survives contact with the sermon itself.

​

For all the talk of compassion, the pulpit continues to function as a distribution center for obligation. Responsibility is acknowledged, even lamented, and then promptly returned to the hearer in a more refined form. The language shifts. Now it is “calling,” “participation,” “obedience,” “faithfulness,” “discipleship,” “response”. But the transaction remains intact. You are still responsible. You are simply expected to carry it with better theology.

​

A preacher who truly believed that the gospel relieves responsibility rather than reallocates it would have to tolerate silence where instruction usually lives, trust where management feels safer, and outcomes that cannot be defended in advance. That is a difficult position to occupy, especially when one takes a paycheck and is expected to appear useful.

​

When Compassion Returns the Burden

​

The gospel is allowed to comfort, but only briefly. Soon enough it must justify itself by producing something visible, something orderly, something that reassures the preacher that the weight has not simply been dropped but properly redistributed.

​

This is why the gospel so often feels insufficient on its own. A word that does not immediately justify itself by visible outcomes feels irresponsible. Surely it must be supplemented, guided into usefulness, aimed toward improvement, translated into something more manageable. Respectability, after all, feels like care. And control can masquerade as love.

​

The difficulty, then, is not that preachers fail to understand the pressure people are under. It is that they understand it too well to risk a gospel that actually removes it. Yet that is precisely where hope begins. A living word of assurance and promise arrives when the pressures of living finally have no place left to land.

​

A Word That Does Not Ask Anything Back

​

The gospel does not arrive as a method. It is not that the gospel fails to work. The gospel refuses to justify itself by working at all. It does not promise measurable improvement. It does not guarantee progress, personal or social. It does not offer a roadmap toward becoming a more successful self or a more functional society. It announces something already finished, spoken to people who are not gradually improving in any reliable sense, but who are instead running out of explanations, energy, options, and hope. This is not something that now depends on you allowing it to be true. It is already true for you.

Any sober understanding of the Incarnation of Christ should make this self-evident, at least to those who claim to speak in His name.

​

Jesus did not live a life that would recommend itself by ordinary measures of success. He did not improve institutions, stabilize the political order, or leave behind a sustainable movement with reliable metrics. He attracted confusion more often than admiration, provoked opposition rather than consensus, and ended not in vindication but in a gruesome, public execution. By any reasonable standard of usefulness, His life was a failure.

​

And yet this is the life to which the gospel points as decisive.

​

One would think that a faith centered on such a figure would be permanently inoculated against the temptation to justify itself by outcomes. Instead, the church persists in behaving as though the crucified Jesus is an embarrassment that must be explained away, translated into effectiveness, redeemed by results, or retrofitted into a success story. Dressed up, of course, in the language of resurrection, Spirit, momentum, and vision.

​

The vocabulary is unmistakably theological. The logic is entirely managerial. Failure is no longer failure; it is “hidden fruit.” Absence of results becomes “faithfulness.” Delayed vindication is recast as “God’s timing.” In this way, the cross is spared the indignity of remaining what it is by being quietly absorbed into a narrative of eventual effectiveness.

​

Any gospel that arrives with an assignment attached that asks what you will make of it, how you will respond, or what outcome it might yet achieve is not gospel at all. It is law in religious costume. It explains God in order to make room for human contribution and then has the nerve to call that grace.

What remains is not proclamation but spin; sanctified, well-intentioned, and reassuringly productive.

That this vocabulary survives among those who speak most confidently about the Incarnation is not a mystery. It is a refusal to take it seriously.

​

When Christianity is reduced to an instrument for producing good outcomes, what is lost is not relevance. The church is very good at setting the sails to catch every new breeze that blows. What is lost is honesty about the gospel. Honesty that is difficult to sustain in a world that demands solutions.

The honesty to admit that human beings are not merely underperforming, but fundamentally unable to rescue themselves, even when their intentions are sincere.

The honesty to speak a word that does not flatter potential or reward effort. The honesty to proclaim something that cannot be defended by data, testimonials, or visible success.

​

Most of all, what is lost is the strange freedom of a gospel that does not compete. A Word that does not claim to work better than other systems. That does not argue for its superiority. That refuses to become an instrument. And that refusal, so often judged as impractical, unhelpful, ineffective, or negligent, is not a failure to care. 

​

It is God’s care.

​

This Word comes to you as gift. It meets you where your strength has thinned and your questions have grown heavy, and it places into your life what has already been accomplished on your behalf. It gives before you ask, speaks before you decide, and claims your life without waiting for your contribution.

Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is spoken over you as God’s own promise. He is given to you as the word that stands when everything else has been spent, the truth that holds when nothing remains to explain or manage. In this Word, freely given, without condition or calculation, you are loved, you are forgiven, and you are free.

​

​

​​

​

​You are welcome to explore the rest of God’s Word Is Life at your own pace.