The Gospel-Driven Church Quotes

“A church that emphasizes evangelism over discipleship has not entirely understood the purpose of the church.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“The Metrics of Grace (Ch. 3) 1. A growing esteem for Jesus Christ 2. A discernible spirit of repentance 3. A dogged devotion to the Word of God 4. An interest in theology and doctrine 5. An evident love for God and neighbor”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“Gospel truth lovingly and consistently applied,” Ray Ortlund says, “creates a gospel culture.” Do not grow faint in this good endeavor. Don’t just overcommunicate the vision for gospel-centrality; overcommunicate the message of the gospel.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“Do not assume that vision-casting is a one and done deal. Communicate what you’re doing, where you’re going, how you’re getting there, and especially why you’re doing it, and don’t stop. Overcommunicate. Then re-overcommunicate. Then re-overcommunicate again. As Thom Rainer says, “I have never seen or heard a major change initiative and its accompanying vision repeated too much.”6”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“Know-it-alls will almost always identify negative reactions to their decisions as the cost of standing for the truth and suffering for the Lord. But leaders may not realize they can wrongly wound people with the right thing. The right thing done the wrong way demonstrates a lack of pastoral wisdom and care.5”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“Embracing meekness keeps us from treating every meeting like a battle, every conversation like a conflict. If you die to yourself, you won’t need to die on every hill.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“Sin is sin, of course, and pastors must address divisive, short-tempered, gossiping, or otherwise quarrelsome members. But a lot of conflict could be prevented if we were slow to speak, quick to listen, and reluctant to engage in unfruitful debates. Forgive people. Give them mercy by not fighting back.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“One way I have learned to work against handling conflict sinfully is to advocate in my mind for my critics. What if their problem isn’t with you but with change? Maybe they’re taking out frustrations on you, but it’s not really about you. What if they’re just uncomfortable? Or confused? Or unaccustomed to managing their feelings in productive ways? Or going through a difficult personal problem that is bubbling over?”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“You’re just a worker. The church is God’s field, God’s building. The church belongs to him, and he will cultivate you, he will build you, he will sustain you, he will empower you, he will nourish you, he will transform you, and he will save you.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“Don’t forget what you are: a servant. A waiter. A busser. But it’s not enough to remember what you are.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“Deep down, most people just want to be understood. A lot of us, of course, just want to be agreed with! But I think most of us just want to be heard. Heard and understood.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“Leader after leader, religious consumer after consumer, may come to you with a laundry list of reasons why you should abandon this post. “Shouldn’t you be more creative?” No, this is nonnegotiable. “You should talk more about politics.” No, this is nonnegotiable. “Why aren’t you being more applicational?” This is nonnegotiable. “Not every text is about Jesus.” No, the whole Bible is about Jesus. This is nonnegotiable.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“allegedly abandoned identities as unbelievers. Today too many churches believe that we can reach the world with the message of Christ by appealing to people with the things of the world, with spectacle, showmanship, and production. Paul never thinks to do this. He never suggests that more of what you left behind is the best route to what lies ahead. You don’t win godly saints in worldly ways. You don’t turn sinners into saints with a worldly message.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“Your model is only as strong as your mentality. Of the gospel and gospel ministry, Martin Luther wrote in his commentary on Galatians, “Most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and beat it into their heads continually.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“The Bible has a metanarrative, a grand story of God’s redeeming purpose and Spiritual mission in the earth. We often miss this grand story in our preaching and teaching.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“The experience of gospel community allows us to see things in each other we cannot see ourselves. Again, this is not so we can find out who the real losers are, but so that we can find out that we are all equally losers! And so that we might, as Luther says, join together as beggars pointing each other to where we’ve found bread.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“I was once speaking to a crowd of Christian college students, and after my sermon a young man approached me to challenge my use of the phrase “Christ took the wrath of God.” He wanted to argue against my affirmation of the penal substitution view of the atonement. While I don’t think penal substitution is the only facet of Christ’s atoning work, I do think it is the most important”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“Every time Barna, Gallup, or Lifeway releases the latest survey results on theological beliefs among confessing evangelicals, we see further slippage in those affirming the basic tenets of Christian orthodoxy. Fewer people accept the exclusivity of Christ for salvation, the existence of hell, the infallibility of the Bible. Not only is our nation becoming less Christian, but the evangelical church is becoming less Christian.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“If your idea of God, if your idea of the salvation offered in Christ, is vague or remote, your idea of worship will be fuzzy and ill-formed. The closer you get to the truth, the clearer becomes the beauty, and the more you will find worship welling up within you. That’s why theology and worship belong together. The one isn’t just a head-trip; the other isn’t just emotion.4”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“The power for salvation and the sanctification that follows comes only from the gospel, not the law. In other words, the power for to-dos comes not from to-dos, but from the “was-done” of Jesus Christ.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“I know, I know. Many of us come from traditional church backgrounds where doctrine was all that mattered and the people were cold or harsh or uncaring about their neighbors. That’s another way to be upside down and antigospel.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“Don’t miss that statement by James Gilmore: “The only thing of value the church has to offer is the gospel.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“The primary way we reveal God’s glory in Christ is by saturating our preaching in the gospel of grace. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23). If our sermons present people with the law alone or give them a list of to-dos or advice to follow, we will only exacerbate their sense of alienation when they fail to do everything we’ve told them to do to experience success as a Christian.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“The church is called to reach the lost, and we must be faithful. The church is called to be evangelistically hospitable and welcoming in its culture and evangelistically adaptable in its preaching and teaching (I’ll say more on that in chapter 8). But the church’s primary worship service should be designed with the saved in mind, not the seeker.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“But there are at least two errors embedded in this reasoning, no matter how sincere it might be. The first is mistaking what the worship service is for. The second is mistaking what changes people.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“As my friend Joel Lindsey has written, “A gospel-centered church is so because the gospel is the engine that propels its mission. . . . The gospel is the primary lens through which to view the world and the people and things in it.”5 In other words, the gospel isn’t just a fad or style you lay over your philosophy of ministry—something traditional, something Baptist, something Reformed—as if “gospel-centrality” were an Instagram filter for your church.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“The word gospel, from the Greek word evangelion, means “good news.” The gospel refers to the good news that God sent his Son Jesus to live a sinless life, die a substitutionary death, and rise from the dead so that sinners who repent and trust in Jesus will be forgiven and have eternal life. We can expand this or shorten it, but this is a basic summation of the message we are called to share with others.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“Let me play my hand, if you haven’t seen it already. My goal in this book is to convince you that your church and its slate of programs and ministries—no matter how successful they have been in attracting people—should be centered on the good news of the finished work of Jesus Christ. The attractional model cannot be the foundation for your methods and programs. It must give way to the gospel because the gospel is where the power of God is manifest. The gospel swallows up our pragmatic paradigms like a white dwarf swallows planets. Pragmatism has a place, but it’s not at the center. We must be gospel centered.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“The Holy Spirit does not always follow our formulas. “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). In preaching Acts 2:43 (“and awe came upon every soul”), my friend Ray Ortlund said, “That’s not something you can put in the worship bulletin: ‘10:00 a.m. worship in song. 10:30 a.m. awe comes down.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace

“So how do we extricate ourselves and our churches from the spirit of consumerism and pragmatism that has infected the church and reclaim the essence of biblical Christianity? What we need is to repent of decades of relying upon pragmatic methodology and materialist theology and to reclaim the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ as the power of salvation for anybody, anywhere, anytime. The United States, in particular, desperately needs churches to recommit to the countercultural supernaturalism of biblical Christianity. This entails a greater commitment to rely on the Spirit working through his prescribed mean, not ours.”
― Jared C. Wilson, The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace