Member Spotlight: Jared Wilson and Gospel centricity

Jared Wilson has been called to two vocations and his answer has been the same each time:

“Jesus.”

Christ is at the center of Jared’s teachings as a pastor and writer and in his roles as husband and father. He builds his sermons around the Gospel. He writes books like Your Jesus Is Too Safe, Gospel Deeps: Reveling in the Excellencies of Jesus, and Gospel Wakefulness. He blogs for the Gospel Coalition.

“To me the Gospel has to be the central part of everything that I do from counseling to preaching to everything else,” Jared says.

While having Christ and the Gospel at the center of church life might seem like a no-brainer for any evangelical pastor, Jared says it is, unfortunately, not a given. That’s one of the reasons he calls his Gospel Coalition blog The Gospel-Driven ChurchThe Gospel-Driven Church.

Jared also calls for Gospel centrality as key to the “ongoing reformation of the Church” because, he says, too much of the Church’s message has become self-help and moralistic rather than Christ-focused.

“I think the place that we need the most reformation is in what we preach and teach as the primary message of the church,” Jared says. “To say the Church needs reformation is not to say that pastors or churches are evil, or what-have-you, or that what they’re doing is not coming from a sincere place. They want the lost to be saved and they want the Christians to glorify God, but I think we’ve got a skewed view of what the Bible teaches towards how that’s achieved.”

That’s achieved through being “saved by God through His grace received through our faith.”

“I want to encourage pastors, encourage Christians, encourage the Church to make more conscious what the Bible teaches, to make more explicit what the Bible teaches, that the Gospel is of first importance, that we should hold true to what we’ve already attained,” Jared says.

“To press the Gospel into every corner of the room so that it becomes a focal point of every aspect of our churches. Not just something we assume, not just something we save for special occasions or evangelistic presentations, but that we make the Gospel the centerpiece of everything.”

Jared tries to do that as pastor of Middletown Springs Community Church in Vermont.

“When I get up on a Sunday morning to preach to my congregation, I’m not coming to say, ‘Here’s what I want to say to you today,’” Jared says. “Really what I’m trying to do is to say, ‘This is what the Word is saying to us today.’ Everything that I say must in some way illuminate, adorn, explain what the Bible is saying. It’s not myself, but Christ.”

Jared does the same in his writing, but also has more room to explore issues. “I can be more topical, I can be more lengthy, that kind of thing,” Jared says.

He usually writes about topics he has “wrestled with and thought about.”

“What I write next usually comes through what I’m personally wrestling with, personally chewing on, something that I’m processing at the time,” he says. “A few months after that, thoughts start galvanizing.”

For instance, the next book he’ll work on has to do with the “attractional model” or “seeker model” of church ministry. He has taught on it, written bits and pieces about it but has never fully explored how the Gospel addresses the subject. Now he’ll dive into it.

Before that, though, he has two new books coming out in 2014. The first is The Storytelling God: Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables, to be released February 28. The Wonder-Working God will be a companion volume about Jesus’s miracles and will be released later this year. The first book he ever wrote, a novel titled Otherworld, was just published in September. It was shelved for business reasons for 15 years, but Jared was encouraged to dust it off recently, and David C. Cook publishers released it. Even though Otherworld is fiction, it still has Jesus at the center, telling a sometimes chilling story of the victory of the Gospel over evil.

The pastorate and writing occupy only a part of his time, though. Jared reserves days for his wife and two children: Friday for Becky, Saturdays for the whole family, which includes his children Macy, 12, and Grace, 10.

“That’s been really helpful and I protect that pretty fiercely,” he says. “My favorite thing to do is hang out with my wife. When I’m not working, when I’m not writing, when I’m not engaged in ministry, my favorite thing to do is just to spend time with my wife, even if it’s just watching television or driving around so Becky can take pictures. She’s my best friend.”

Wednesdays usually find him working from a coffee shop in nearby Rutland, a few miles from where he lives in West Rutland. It’s not unusual to find him there midweek writing and enjoying a sugar-free vanilla latte at The Coffee Exchange.

Jared likes the people in Vermont.

“There’s a real community spirit,” he says. “People take care of each other. They look out for each other. They’re trying to create this sort of communal peace, a downhome, small-town, take-care-of-each-other kind of thing.”

The problem is that they’re doing it without Jesus for the most part. That’s not uncommon for New England, an area of the U.S. that tends to be hostile to the deep things of the Gospel.

“A lot of them end up rejecting the Church or rejecting Christianity,” he says. “They say, ‘We’re doing good things already.’ A lot of them are homeschooling their kids. They don’t let their kids watch television. When someone is hurt or when someone’s house burns down or what have you, they’re pitching in. They’re taking care of the poor and all these sorts of things. They’re kind of saying, ‘We’re already doing all of that without all of your religious baggage.’”

Which gets back to Jared’s concern that the Church itself isn’t stressing Jesus and the Gospel enough.

“The distinction becomes necessary that we actually proclaim the Gospel and not some kind of moralism, that we get the order right between salvation and obedience, because what they hear is obedience is the way to salvation,” Jared says. “They reject that.”

What Christians need to do in such environments, Jared says, is to “actually bring the Gospel to bear and surprise people with the Gospel to where they’re offended by the right things.”

“Usually when we start talking about sin and that kind of thing, that’s where you want people to be offended,” he says. “If people are going to be offended, you hope it’s by the scandal of the cross and not by a message that’s not the essential message of Christianity.”

Jared began to understand that essential message early in his life. He felt called to the ministry during a summer youth camp in his native Texas, between seventh and eighth grades.

“I hadn’t ever considered that I would be a preacher,” he says. “I struggled with it. In looking back, that’s something that I kind of felt was confirmation for me.”

He had felt called to writing at an even earlier age.

“In first grade, we had school progress books where you post your photo, put down what your favorite class is and favorite food, and it always had that ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ question,” Jared says. “I remember writing in that little book in Mrs. Palmer’s class in first grade ‘author,’ because I love to read and I wanted someday to be able to write my own books. That’s something that I don’t ever remember not wanting to do. It comes somewhat naturally. I just have always expressed myself that way.”

But Jared insists that local church ministry is his primary calling and will always take priority over writing and speaking engagements.

“I find that for me local ministry is the grounding for my public ministry,” he says. “It creates legitimacy. If I were to cut back, it would be on the public platform.”

But never on the Gospel.