A Socially Engaged Gospel

Now Available on Amazon!

Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.

by Herb MontgomeryAvailable.

After two successful decades of preaching a gospel of love within the Christian faith tradition Herb felt like something was missing. He went back to the gospels and began reading them through the interpretive lenses of various marginalized communities and what he found radically changed his life forever. The teachings of the Jesus in the gospel stories express a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of those in marginalized communities. This book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, and presents a compelling argument for a more socially compassionate and just expression of Christianity. Herb’s findings in his latest book are shared in the hopes that it will dramatically impact how you practice your Christianity, too.

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New Episode of JustTalking!

Season 2, Episode 3: John 3.14-21. Lectionary B, Lent 4

Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking.

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it.

You can find the latest show on YouTube at

Season 2, Episode 3: John 3.14-21. Lectionary B, Lent 4

 or (@herbandtoddjusttalking)

Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment

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A Socially Engaged Gospel

Herb Montgomery | March 9, 2024

To listen to this week’s eSight as a podcast episode click here.

Our reading this fourth weekend of Lent is from the gospel of John:

“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.” John 3:14-21

Most New Testament scholars today recognize the proto-gnostic or gnostic tendencies of the Johannine community that produced the gospel of John. Later Gnostic Christians even only honored and read from the gospel of John (cf. Irenaeus, Against Heresies). 

Some of the Gnostic elements we encounter in John’s gospel include glorifying the Moses’ snake (a symbol in early Jewish gnosticism); a dualistic way of dividing our experiences between the material, deemed evil, and the spiritual, deemed good; and defining salvation as when our souls are finally liberated from our bodies and this finite, material plane.

Although those who won the power in the early Christian church deemed Christian gnosticism a heresy, much of western protestant Christianity today ironically looks a lot like early gnosticism, at least relation to the elements we have mentioned here.

Today, John’s gospel is the favorite of the New Testament gospels for many who practice the kind of Christianity that is hyper-focused either on gaining heaven or attaining the inward, individual, privatized spiritual experience with a cosmic Jesus often referred to as having “a relationship with God.” If either of these kinds of Christianity happens to be your experience, I don’t want to degrade that experience in the slightest. I just want to push it further. Whether someone’s focus is getting to heaven or having a private relationship with their individual Lord and savor, we must be honest about how those two focuses can divert our attention from the focus of the Jesus in the synoptic gospels. That Jesus was a source of healing and liberation for folks, not from a private internal hell unattached to the society around them or a post mortem one but from the living hell they were suffering through concrete social realities.

In 1958, responding to a complaint that someone’s pastor was talking about the NAACP during their sermon, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King responded, 

“Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men [sic] and is not concerned about economic conditions that cripple them and the social conditions that damn them is a dry as dust religion in need of new blood. Therefore your minister by including so-called ‘worldly things’ in his sermon revealed that he is a man of great spiritual depth and deep civic conscience. He revealed his awareness of the fact that the gospel of Jesus Christ deals with the whole man [sic]—his [sic] body as well as his soul, the earthly as well as the heavenly.” (Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Advice for Living, September 1958)

There are two ditches on either side of the paths we journey as Christians. One ditch is to be only focused on heaven. This is what some have referred to as being “so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good.” The other ditch is to only be focused inwardly on private and personal piety or a cosmic “relationship” to the exclusion of the center: our path following Jesus which is being a source of life-giving change in our world here and now. 

It doesn’t matter which of these ditches we fall into. Whatever we believe, our beliefs should make us a more engaged and better humans in relation to our world we are living in today.

Why does this matter in relation to our text this week? This week’s passage is a favorite for those who live solely in either ditch. For those in the ditch of getting to heaven, the phrase “whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” has special resonance. For those focused on a private, individual relationship with Jesus or God’s love, the phrases “God so loved the world” and “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world” especially resonate. And rightly so. 

While there may be some value in these beliefs, there is no reason why this passage should only belong to those who focus on them. This passage can also speak to those who care about making a difference in our material world and on personal and systemic suffering today. 

Why can’t the condemnation in this passage be similar to how the Hebrew prophets defined divine condemnation? In the Hebrew prophets, condemnation was not focused on individuals but on people groups, societies, and communities. When their social systems engaged in harmful practices toward the poor, the stranger, the fatherless, or the widow (in a patriarchal society), that society would suffer divine condemnation. They understood that condemnation was expressed through a calamity, natural, military, or a combination of both. If the teaching in John was similar to the Hebrew prophets’ teaching, God did not send God’s son into the world to perpetuate this cycle of unsustainable injustice and the intrinsic fruit of oppression and violence, but to shows us a way out.

And this leads to us defining salvation socially not individually. As Walter Rauschenbusch so rightly stated almost a century ago, “If our theology is silent on social salvation, we compel [people] to chose between an unsocial system of theology and an irreligious system of social salvation” (A Theology for the Social Gospel, p. 7) This social salvation can lead us into some beautifully inclusive realizations and practices. As the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis so beautifully states, “If there is such a thing as salvation, none of us are saved, until all of us are saved.” 

“Perish” can refer not to some post mortem hell, but to literally perishing here, now, today. As Gustavo Gutierrez often stated, poverty is death and means an early death. Eternal life can be about quality not quantity: about the abundant life now, where there is enough for everyone to thrive (cf. John 10:10) .This vision is for a world that prioritizes making sure everyone is taken care of rather than shaping the world with greed and funneling our resources into the hands of the few in positions of power. 

Today, we can lean into this passage: God actually does loves the world! And if God’s love is universal, then we are to care about justice for everyone included in that world as the objects of that love. As Rev. Dr. Emilie Townes says, “When you begin with the idea that God loves everyone, justice isn’t very far behind.” Or as so many today are fond of saying, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” This world that is loved, we must be careful to define as everyone, with no exclusions. Those who comprise our world that are loved includes those that are different from ourselves, even those whose differences trigger our own bigotries and prejudices. We must be honest here. 

I’m thinking of how women in positions of authority can trigger insecure or patriarchal men. I’m thinking of how racial and cultural differences trigger those whose internal bias is some form of White or western supremacy. I think of how trans and nonbinary differences and gender nonconformity triggers those who have cis-biases. Or how folks who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual trigger those with heteronormative biases. I think of class bias. I think of educational bias with what is now being called the paper ceiling. 

If we are serious about leaning into the belief that every person is the object of divine love, then this would radically impact how we relate to those around us. Every person we meet is our sibling. Every person we meet is a part of ourselves. What impacts and affects one affects us all. Whether we like it or not, we are all connected to each other as part of this beautifully diverse human family that is loved by a universal love. 

And this has grave implication for our everyday choices as well. You can’t love others and not care about the things they suffer from the way our society is shaped. You can’t love them and vote for legislatures who seek to do them harm. To come full circle, you can’t love them and be focused on only your own arrival into heaven or your own personal relationship with the Divine. Otherwise, our focus on God’s love mutates from God’s loving us alongside everyone else in the world into a self-absorbed need to be loved by God above all else. It’s an only-child-like syndrome where God may love others, but privately and inwardly we begin to believe that we are God’s favorite. This is the root of Christian and too often national exceptionalism. 

To authentically reinterpret our passage this week through the lens of the Jesus we see in the Mark, Matthew, and Luke can still give us assurance of heaven, and still usher us into a relationship with the divine if that is your thing. And it also has the potential, when understood more broadly and deeply, to shape our practice of Christianity in ways that shape us into humans who make our world a safer, more compassionate, just home for everyone. 

Discussion Group Questions

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s eSight/Podcast episode with your discussion group.

2. How do the gospel stories call you to be more socially engaged? Share and discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone? 

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

I want to say a special thank you to all of our supporters out there. And if you would like to join them in supporting Renewed Heart Ministries’ work you can do so by going to renewedheartministries.com and clicking donate. 

I want to also say a special thank you this week to Quoir Publishing, Keith Giles who wrote the foreword to my latest book, all the special people on our launch team, and all of you who made this release a success. 

Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and soon also on Audible in audio book format.

As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on X (or Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s new Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts. Also, if you enjoy listening to the Jesus for Everyone podcast, please like and subscribe to the JFE podcast through the podcast platform you use and consider taking some time to give us a review. This helps others find our podcast as well.

You can watch our new YouTube show called “Just Talking” each week. Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking.

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it. You can find JustTalking each week on YouTube at youtube.com/@herbandtoddjusttalking. Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

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