pat loughery

Michael Spencer aka Internet Monk writes what might be the best post he’s ever done (and that’s saying a lot), this time about the tragic truth of the Gospel we tend to believe

Link: The “Real” Prosperity Gospel

iMonk says:

The real prosperity gospel isn’t the overt appeal to wealth. It is the more subtle appeal to God guaranteeing that we are going to be happy, and the accompanying pressure to be happy in ways that are acceptable and recognizable to the community of Christians we belong to.

The real prosperity gospel is the belief that God will- must?- keep things at a level where it’s still possible for us to follow Jesus without overt appeal to rewards in this life. The real prosperity gospel is revealed not in the promises of a yacht or a large home, but in the unspoken approval of a level of prosperity that allows us to live the Christian life on our own terms. It is the ratification of our private, sometimes entirely secret, arrangements with God of what his “goodness” means.

iMonk then writes about his recent experience writing about some struggles he was going through, and being surprised at how negative the reaction was. People couldn’t grasp the idea that things were imperfect in his life. As a minister of the Gospel, is that even an option? they seemed to ask.

The “real prosperity” gospel especially appeals to the idea that the church is fixing things, people and situations. In this kind of thinking the church has a repository of wisdom and power that can actually cause us to live in a different world than our neighbors, a world with different rules and a different outcome to the usual situations.

I don’t know of many Christians who want to stand up in front of a room full of unbelievers and say “I live in the same world as you do; a world with the same problems, the same questions and the same kinds of pain and failure. God doesn’t provide some kind of insurance or protection from this world, and Christians aren’t wise enough to understand or fix everything in this world.

The world we live in is filled with more shades of gray than blacks and whites. Or at least that’s the world I live in, and I suspect it might be your world also.

Again, I strongly recommend that you read the full story from iMonk. The Real Prosperity Gospel.

I can’t say that you’ll enjoy it, but perhaps there’s a deep trigger for discipleship in your reaction as there is in mine.