What Is An Evangelical? One Way Or Many? Acts 4:5-12 page 1

NOTE: The slide numbers refer to the PowerPoint presentation of this sermon.

SLIDE 1

SLIDE 2
"I go to synagogue, I study Hinduism ... all paths lead to God."
[Quoted in Dan Kimball, The Emerging Church, p67]

Madonna was raised in a Catholic home; she wears Hindu symbols on her CD covers; she studies Kabbalah, a mystical strain of Judaism; her second marriage and the christening of her second child were performed by a Church of Scotland minister.

To long-standing churchgoers, it might sound wacky. It isn't. It's quite conventional today.

Many of us grew up in a world where if one thing was true, another thing was automatically false. So if you concluded that salvation was in Jesus, other paths could not be true. But today that makes us the strange ones. It has been well put by Martin Turner, the superintendent minister of Westminster Central Hall:

SLIDE 3
"Evangelicals will be rooted in the view that faith in Jesus and his cross is the only sure way to God, an attitude which is often greeted with amazement that anyone still believes that!"
[Martin Turner, 'How Broad A Church Are We?', Headline magazine (the magazine of Headway) Winter 2003/4, p23]

If we are to consider this morning this question about whether there is one way to God or many, we must understand not only the Bible, but also our world. It's no good just lobbing Bible verses at people like spiritual grenades (and believe me, they will feel like we are attacking them sometimes). We must take the trouble to understand why people believe differently from us. There is no future in the Church being a Christian ghetto: we must relate our faith to the world in which we live.

I propose to do this in four parts. Firstly, we need to hear why the thinking of western society has changed. Secondly, we shall remind ourselves why the Bible sees Jesus as unique. Thirdly, we shall look at some responses to his uniqueness. Fourthly, I shall suggest a way in which we may relate Jesus to a world that believes, like Madonna, that 'all paths lead to God'.

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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration.