For Christian theologians there are guiding ethics, (i.e. Enemy love, non-violence, Love for God and Neighbor, care for the earth, the poor, the orphan, the widow, the stranger etc.) that if not practiced stagnate the Christian way of life from its intended and earliest forms into dismal misconceptions. If the Christian does not put into practice these ethics, it transforms their entire attempt at religion into a contemptible facade. Christians cannot afford to neglect their mandate to care for the poor, the earth or to participate in a loving activism toward all others. These are examples that Jesus set before the church, that we were intended to follow. These ethics or ‘Gospel’ are present and have precedent in the earliest Christian writings and history and can be found throughout church history.

The Gospel literally means ‘good news’ in its original Koine Greek ‘euangelion’. The Gospel is God’s good news to the suffering, the dominated, the oppressed, the victimized and the marginalized persons in this world. The church, as most Christians understand it in the United States, is the body of believers both locally and globally who are to act as ambassadors and participants in Kingdom of God. The church is entrusted with the ‘good news” and is to proclaim and live out that good news in the hope of repairing and restoring the world. This Gospel is good news because it doesn’t merely rely information it is supposed to foster and provide solidarity and reconciliation among all people. Because the Gospel is an announcement that our world can change, that our world should change, that our world will change.

The church in the United States is almost unanimously guilty of the heresy of Gnosticism. The heresy includes the belief that secret knowledge that one must acquire leads one toward salvation. Special incantations and secret knowledge understood in specific ways allow one access to salvation. This was contested by the orthodox church in the fourth century as a major threat to the views implicitly held by the Church regarding the deity of Jesus. With the rise of Arius, an Alexandrian presbyter, and thus his ideas of Gnosticism becoming more formidable, they were examined and found to be a heresy by the early church fathers.

Yet the church in The U.S. today has these special prayers, and special doctrines, or things one ought to believe if they are to be a Christian. These special prayers and special doctrines vary from church to church and denomination to denomination. Many Evangelical churches refer to this special prayer as ‘the prayer’, it is an action where an individual asks Jesus Christ to come into their heart, to forgive their sins and to open their lives to Christ’s teachings.

This asking Jesus into ones life, refers to an individual accepting the Lordship or guidance of Christ as the force through which they will attempt to live differently in this world. This prayer allows one to give up the things in which they were previously held captive to, addictions, emotional scars etc, through the healing power of Christ, or so the claim of many attest. However, if one where to attempt to find these mandates in the New Testament or the Hebrew scriptures they would discover that this special knowledge and these special prayers are entirely undetectable.

There is no mention in the Christian scriptures of any sort of special prayer that one must pray in order to become a follower of Jesus. There is no mandated or required cannon of theological principles one must acquire or accept in order to become a Christian. There is not a theological statement that one must understand or an amount of scriptures one must have memorized in order for the good news to be for them. The Gospel is an announcement, not a secret, that the way in which the world is currently is not the way in which it is supposed to be, nor the way in which it will always be.

The Gospel is God’s loving, accepting, forgiving, exciting, shocking, counter-cultural announcement that our world is not the world. This announcement to those who don’t have everything together in the way that the world tells them they should have it together. It is an announcement to those who are not thin, attractive, rich, smooth, charming, intelligent or that are getting ahead in this world. Rather it is an announcement to those who have a feeling that they are not getting their slice of the pie, to those who are always falling behind, to those who can’t get it all together. Its the Good News that all the marks that this world tells us are important really aren’t that important, that we were created to love and to be loved, to repair and to be repaired to restore and to be restored, that dear readers is Good News.