The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

by Jared C. Wilson

Many church people are familiar with the call of Jesus, “I will make you fishers of men,” and they’ve been led to think of evangelism like baiting a hook to lure a lost person into the church boat. (To be filleted and eaten? I’m not sure.) Seen this way, it makes sense to think of church as a place of enticement and attraction. Get people in the door, and they’ll hear about Jesus. In the sales world, we call that the “bait and switch.” Is that what Jesus meant when he called his disciples to be “fishers of men”? For one thing, fishermen in those days didn’t typically use hooks. They used nets. For another, it’s not likely that Jesus was trying to make a neat correlation between literal fishing and reaching the lost. He was trying to get fishermen to consider how they might serve the mission of God in the midst of their everyday life (including in their job as fishermen). In other words, Jesus was not giving us an evangelism technique but a missional mandate. And this mandate becomes clearer to a church as the gospel becomes clearer. As Joel Lindsey says, Primarily, a missional church recognizes the centrality of the gospel as its people live out the calling to be “for” the culture. This means a church must derive its purpose from the gospel (1 Corinthians 15:1–4); it must be a servant of the gospel that glorifies God by telling people the story of Jesus through word and action (1 John 3:16–17). A gospel-centered church’s ministry cannot be separated from the person of Jesu...