Brief Historical Overview of the 20th century gospel

Historical Context of Salvific Focused Preaching in America

Maybe you’ve heard the statement “there’s no atheists in foxholes”.  In the 1950s, we were in a state of complete trauma and ptsd.  The 1800’s ended with the Civil war and the freedom for slaves.  I contend slavery still exists, just much more reclusive today.  (another article).  

World War 1 ended 10 years before the Great Depression swept our nation,  World War 2 ended in 1945 and the Korean War lasted the first three years of the 1950’s.  Ooof, it was hard to even write through that part of history.  

Let’s say a person was born in 1910.  You could say this person was the culmination of a loved one who had just returned home, alive from War War 1.  The Model T had just been introduced 2 years prior, the lightbulb was only 30 years old, and America was building itself up quickly.  

As an early teen, the Roaring Twenties are upon the nation.  

What a breath of fresh air.  

Families needed a time of reprieve, of peace, of thriving.  

Now as a 19 year old, it’s your turn.  You are now a young parent, a working adult, a contributor to society.  The bottom drops out again, as the Great Depression takes the limelight from the economic burst over the prior decade.   At this point, there’s a good chance the parents are developing abnormally thick skin.  As a thirty-year-old, news of another War is on the horizon which finds fulfillment from 1939-1945.  The news of another neighbor or family member being killed has simply become numbing.  There is so much inconsistency in the nation.  So much anger, so much fear.  Five years later, yet another disaster as the Korean War breaks out.  

There is no atheists in foxholes means when your very breath of life is in Jeopardy minute by minute, the reasons we have to disprove the reality of God seems to lose their validity.  A human heart goes on quite a journey when we are facing closing our eyes for the last time.  Even the staunchest atheist becomes a believer when bullets are breezing by like rain drops in November.  

Our country was a train wreck.  It was survival of the fittest and frankly we just wanted people saved.  Our hearts wanted to know our loved ones would end up with their savior.  We wanted to be ensured we would see them once again, too.  We got caught up believing war could change a beating heart, but even today we are blind to see that war can only stop a beating heart.  Only Jesus can truly change one and us forcing God's good order on people by use of deep pockets and hand grenades still isn't working.

Our message became about salvation, and I can’t say I don’t understand why.  I really have a hard time believing any preacher or minister ever starts out believing one day they would preach a false or incomplete gospel, but the cycle has been happening for much longer than the birth of Amerilon.  (The North American version of Babylon) 

Bill Bright and Billy Graham, two of America's most influential evangelists, were cut from this generation, and it's easy to understand how this way of preaching came to fruition. I believe many were brought to a revelation of Jesus through their efforts, and I still believe that Jesus's name being preached in any context can bring forth a harvest if the Lord allows.

We started to preach that lives are at stake.  Lives were in fact at stake, and they still are today, but lives always have been at stake.  We became desperate, and in my opinion, we started to preach out of desperation and fear and just like Rome did with the church, just like Adam and Eve did in Eden, we broke off our allegiant covenant with God and his good order, and we created a gospel that was predictable, it was measurable, and it was manmade.  We once again ate from the tree of knowledge and took our reasoning into our own hands.  Instead of being overwhelmed to be back in the garden walking once again with God simply maintaining order and creating life, we wanted the whole farm.  We wanted yet again to be the cultivator, the planter, and the harvester.  

The entered into one more war, which was a disaster. The people had enough. The hippy movement stood up to the ways of Ceasar, but just like modern day extremists, took their beliefs so far to the other side, the message was void of anything prophetic.

This new message of love was no different than that of fire and brimstone. It was another movement that took one attribute of God's character that fit their agenda and created a theology out of it.

The harvest has always been the Lord’s.  It is a gift in and of itself to see fruit grow in someone’s life, but our crux, our struggle has always been to trust God to be God and stay in our lane as children.  We still think we know better.  We even think we know more about His word than he who spoke it.  

The downside of a salvific focused message is we find ourselves living the same, self-focused lives that got us in trouble and separated from God in the first place.  The salvific message teaches us “he get’s us” but over and over the Bible reiterates that he’s been communicating transformation only comes from us “getting him", being connected to the vine, the tree of life, the source of living water.