Written by T.S. Weidler |
Saturday, March 2, 2024
Those who teach the nice gospel will usually maintain that the gospel is good news but that they don’t want to be mean. This is false thinking. The opposite of the nice gospel is not a mean gospel, it is the true gospel. The true gospel is not mean, nor is it nice. It is the righteousness of God, the judgment of sin, the eternal hope of Christ, and the salvation of the world.

Last Sunday there was a shooting at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. A celebrity prosperity preacher, Osteen boasts forty to fifty thousand attendees each weekend and is among the world’s most well-known pastors.
Joel Osteen is not a good pastor. Only God knows if he is truly a Christian, but he is certainly famous. He is best known for his book Your Best Life Now and for his extremely diluted prosperity gospel messages. He doesn’t teach the Bible in context. He doesn’t preach about repentance, the blood of Christ, the cross, or the wages of sin. In other words, he doesn’t preach the gospel.
Instead, he preaches about being nice and about the nice things that can happen to you, primarily related to money, relationships, and health.
Evil and Tragedy
On Sunday, February 12, an armed woman entered Lakewood Church and began to open fire before being killed by church security staff. The shooter was a woman who used the name “Jeffrey” and is believed to have been “transgender” to some degree. MSN called her a transgender Palestine supporter. The shooting’s sole fatality is currently the shooter herself, though she brought her seven-year-old son along who was struck by a bullet and is in critical condition at the time of this writing.
Joel Osteen made a brief statement about the matter: “There are forces of evil, but the forces of God are stronger than that.” This is possibly the first time Osteen has used the word “Evil” in a pastoral capacity. He is very conscientious about avoiding the word “sin” as well. A number of years ago he famously described homosexuality as “Not God’s best,” atoning for offense to the homosexual community by praying at the inauguration of Houston’s first lesbian mayor in 2010. Everyone smiled at the ceremony, while she continued down her road to perdition, and Osteen helped make sure it was wide and smooth, and “sanctified” by prayer.
The Nice Gospel
Osteen is the poster child of the problematic “gospel of nice,” a gospel that he perfectly exemplifies. He is always smiling, always has something amusing to say, and always has a winsome and pleasant reply. He never complains, never points fingers, and never identifies sin. If his goal is to be inoffensive and agreeable, and he’s doing his job immeasurably well.
But this is not the goal of the pastor – rather, the goal is meant to be bringing glory to God. If Osteen (or any “nice guy evangelist”) wins a convert by being nice, who gets the glory? The nice guy who smiled at them and made them feel welcome, or the Son of God? If Osteen fails to win a convert, what lessons are learned? “Be nicer” next time?
In addition to robbing God of his gospel glory, the “nice gospel” does not work. It has no explanation for human depravity.
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It is entirely right to use logic to work out what seems right and true. However, we should not make our logical reasoning ultimate. For one thing, it depends on our prior commitments as to what appears logical. Unless we are able to assess all our priors, whilst we will reason logically, commitment to logic alone won’t lead us to a helpful conclusion. What do we do, for example, when the Church says things that are contrary to our logical understanding? It may be that what the church is arguing is totally illogical; it may be that our logic is faulty. We might be right in not merely accepting every word that comes from the pulpit just because it is uttered in church, nevertheless, it isn’t necessarily wiser to slavishly follow what is logical to us. The Lord, by his own reckoning, does not always work as we believe he ought.

If you are in church leadership, it won’t be long before someone disagrees with something you do or some doctrine that you teach. And that’s okay, we aren’t expecting total agreement on every issue within the church membership. It is okay to disagree.
But when we disagree, there need to be clear grounds for doing so. All too often, we default to certain arguments that really aren’t credible. Here are some of the common ones.
I was brought up to think…
There is, of course, nothing wrong with drawing upon what you were brought up with. No doubt, if you have been to a bible believing church, there will be some good things that they established. But some of those things, that may well be legitimate, are not demanded by the bible. Other times, it may simply be a blind spot in our church that what we were doing wasn’t biblical.
When we hit upon other churches doing things differently, defaulting to ‘I was brought up to believe…’ doesn’t get us very far. Two people, brought up in two different places, might be brought up to believe two different things. Who is to say which tradition is right and which is wrong? This is not a solid ground for reaching a biblical conclusion.
Our tradition says…
This is usually a more nuanced version of the previous point. We might not be rooting things in our particular, individual church’s practice, but in the established practices of our denomination. That might be a legitimate thing to raise if you are in an Anglican Church, who claims to hold to Anglican doctrine, polity and practice, but you think might be departing from that tradition. It isn’t unreasonable to say that, assuming the purpose is to be in line with the tradition and not some biblical matter on which the tradition is being challenged. Even then, no tradition can be above the scriptures. The aim of any tradition should be to act in line with scripture, so even a reference to tradition may not end matters.
But let’s say you have moved beyond denominations. You clearly are not wedded to your denominational way of doing things. You are now dealing with two different traditions. Again, which tradition is right? We can’t settle that with reference to our particular tradition. Instead, we have to go back to the scriptures to reach a conclusion.
Everybody interprets the Bible differently
Well, that’s not entirely true. Some of us do interpret the Bible in the same way as a significant chunk of other believers. So, we might be able to establish a fairly consistent pattern of thinking. It isn’t quite true to say we all interpret differently; many of us agree on significant amounts.
But where there is a disagreement that arises from interpretation, what are we to do?
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Correctional facilities must grapple with unprecedented levels of overcrowding, violence, and suicide, as well as rampant mental illness among inmates. The tightening of budgets and the resulting loss of vocational, educational, and treatment programs pose additional difficulties. In the midst of these struggles, faith-based approaches, led by faith-motivated volunteers and prisoners, are providing the most innovative, holistic, and effective programs available in correctional facilities today.

It’s hard to overstate the current challenges facing the American prison system. Rampant violence, extremely high levels of offender recidivism, mounting taxpayer cost, and difficulty retaining employees, typify recent headlines from the world of American “corrections.” But prisons do little to meaningfully correct offenders’ past transgressions, nor do they deter future offending.
Many American prisons have become so violent that they comprise what Cambridge University prison scholar Alison Liebling describes as “failed state” institutions. In “failed state” institutions, even the most basic levels of safety and control are not provided by authorities. For an example, look no further than the New York Times, which recently reported on the horrifying conditions at Rikers Island, where whole sections of the prison are run by detainees, who fashion make-shift weapons out of the complex’s crumbling buildings. Staff members and detainees have been beaten and stabbed. One detainee reports having been denied food for two days by the gang that controls his unit. Thirteen people have died at Rikers so far this year.

These institutions not only cause more human damage than they prevent, they produce emotionally crippled citizens and elevate the likelihood of reoffending. New research from the nonpartisan Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C., moreover, highlights the likelihood of “mass incarceration” becoming a permanent feature of American society.
In the midst of these failures, a new, more successful model of correctional programming is quietly taking hold in the United States. The model draws on innovative work inside some of America’s largest and most violent prison environments. These new approaches are being developed primarily at maximum-security prisons, which have long been under-resourced until lethal violence has boiled over. In the face of this reality, prison administrators have become increasingly open to “outsourcing” rehabilitation programming to religious volunteers. As a result, in an increasingly large number of prisons, religious programming is now the dominant source of inmate rehabilitation.
An Interracial, Ecumenical, Personal Church
For many inmates, religious practice not only provides a momentary escape from prison life. It does something deeper and much more foundational: it helps them redefine and reclaim their lives.
Over the past ten years, as we conducted the research described in our new book, we have had the distinct privilege of sitting with men in prison as they engaged in religious worship. Many of these experiences have taken place in America’s largest maximum-security prisons, including Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Sing Sing (NY), Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman (MS), Darrington Unit Correctional Institution (TX), and Lawtey Correctional Institution (FL), among several others. We have been struck by the reverence, energy, and seriousness with which inmates cultivate a practice of faith.
Perhaps the most striking feature of “church in prison” is the robustly interracial character of the “congregation.” As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out in 1960, American religious practice is nothing if not racially segregated. By necessity, religious worship in prison, however, is both racially integrated and remarkably ecumenical. To witness the sign of the cross and hear a call-and-response during one and the same ceremony—sometimes even from the same practitioner—is not uncommon. For long-time inmate religionists, cross-fertilization of worship becomes a normalized practice, with inmate lifers often referring to themselves as “Bapticostal,” “Catholipalean,” or as one Florida inmate put it, “agnosti-pizza” (“I just come for the pizza”).
Religion in prison is characterized by a relaxed and non-hierarchical openness to various forms of religious practice in a doctrinally neutral space. It is first and foremost preoccupied with the meeting of immediate physical and spiritual needs. Prisoner prayer groups, Bible studies, outside church volunteer groups, yoga practitioners, Buddhist meditation leaders, and many others all combine to create a remarkably elaborate menu of religious options for prisoners. Diverse practitioners and non-believers are welcomed by faithful inmates, who understand themselves to be imperfect seekers. Perfectionism in faith and the performative gestures that often accompany corporate worship are simply not present in prison. By definition, everyone there has fallen.

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