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The waters off Vancouver Island, British Columbia, are clear and cold, making for some of the best scuba diving in the Northern Hemisphere. The weather can be cloudy, making the ocean steel gray with flecks of white, but below the surface are teeming schools of wildly colorful fish. When pastor and writer Mark Buchanan emerges from the water in his scuba gear, he is inevitably grinning. The author of books like Your God Is Too Safe and The Rest of God consistently finds surprises in deep places. So we thought he was an important voice to respond to the Christian Vision Project's big question for 2008: Is our gospel too small?

I had a Paul-like conversion.

There were no horses, voices, blindness—no bloody trail at my feet. But it was dramatic. Something like scales fell from my eyes. I stood in the shadow of Christ's cross and in the light of his resurrection. Christ met me, embraced me, forgave me, and gave me himself. I never looked back.

That was more than 25 years ago. For 18 of those years I've been a pastor, a fact that has not yet ceased to amaze me: that God would take me, the worst of sinners, the least of the "apostles," and make me his chosen vessel to carry his name before kings and gentiles and homemakers and dentists and plumbers and schoolchildren.

How could a gospel that performed such a feat be too small?

I was saved into a midsized Baptist church, suburban in its sentiments, conservative in its theology. It was a world both familiar and strange to me. The music was awful, third-rate lyrics set to fourth-rate melodies, as C. S. Lewis is said to have described the music at his Anglican church. The preaching was interminable and often bewildering, an exercise in splitting hairs over doctrinal points that, until then, I knew nothing about. We signed a members "covenant" to the effect that we wouldn't drink and wouldn't chew and wouldn't go with those who do.

But I loved it. I was taught the Bible, rote teaching methods notwithstanding, and soon enough I could split a doctrinal hair as thin and fine as the next guy. I even started to like the bad church music. But even more, I came to a deeper and deeper awareness of the gift of God, vouchsafed me by no merit of my own: that Christ died for me and lives in me and prepares a place for me. I am a new creation, heaven-bent. I am an enemy of God who, by the Father's grace and Christ's work and the Spirit's quickening, has been made his child and his ambassador.

So how could a gospel that performed such a work not be enough?

Yet I look out week upon week on the congregation I now lead and wonder this very thing: Is the gospel I inherited, and now preach, too small? Is there a stump where an oak once stood? I wonder.

The conversions I witness generally aren't as radical as they seem to be elsewhere and at other times. Our hunger and thirst for righteousness, the first mark of kingdom-dwellers, is for the most part anorexic, and our lust for self-vindication appears as hearty as ever. Domestic problems seem to be as prevalent among evangelicals as they are among the wider public. The amount of interchurch migration, and the low level of actual net church growth, is embarrassing. The willingness, as the apostle Paul put it, to share in the fellowship of Christ's sufferings so that we might attain to the resurrection from the dead is at a low ebb in most North American churches.

Is our gospel too small?

Let's go back to its early days, when the Good News was new news. Let's go back to a jail in the city of Philippi, to two men sitting in the inner cell, bound in manacles. Paul and Silas. They're bleeding. Their flesh blooms with welts bright as red roses, bruises dark as purple dahlias. And they're singing.

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February 2008, Vol. 52, No. 2