Recovering the Gospel Without Returning to Fear-Driven Christianity
Francis E. Madojemu
For years, I have been uncomfortable with a particular kind of Christianity.
I watched churches learn how effectively fear could move people.
The language was familiar.
Somebody is after you.
There is a power in your family.
Something happened in your village.
An enemy has delayed your marriage.
A spiritual force is fighting your children.
Your lack of progress is not ordinary. Somebody is responsible.
Come to this programme.
Attend this prayer meeting.
Bring this offering.
Receive this deliverance.
Some of the claims were impossible to establish. Some bordered on the ridiculous.
But there was one uncomfortable fact I could not deny:
they worked.
People came.
Fear created urgency. The possibility of loss made people pay attention. A frightening diagnosis created demand for a spiritual solution.
I wanted nothing to do with it.
So I moved deliberately in the other direction.
Preach Christ.
Preach grace.
Preach the Gospel.
Do not frighten people into church. Do not build a ministry in which Christians become permanently suspicious of neighbours, relatives, villages and invisible enemies. Do not create a congregation that needs the pastor continually to protect them from dangers the pastor himself has taught them to fear.
I still believe that correction was necessary.
But I am beginning to see another possibility.
What if, in running away from manufactured bad news, we also became uncomfortable with the real bad news that makes the Gospel good?
That is the question I have had to return to.
Not because I want to go back to fear-driven Christianity.
I do not.
But there is a difference between manufacturing a problem and truthfully naming one.
Perhaps in reacting against one error, we can create another.
The Gospel does not need fabricated enemies.
But it does have a diagnosis.
Sin is real.
Alienation from God is real.
Death is real.
Judgment is real.
Human beings cannot rescue themselves.
The Cross was not unnecessary.
And if we remove those things because we are afraid of sounding negative, what exactly remains of the Good News?
This has forced me to formulate a principle that I now think is important for preaching, evangelism and even the way churches communicate publicly:
Do not manufacture the problem. Do not minimise the problem. Tell the truth about the problem. Then make Christ unmistakably greater than it.
That is the tension I want to explore.
Because the church has made serious mistakes in both directions.
We have sometimes exaggerated darkness until Christians became afraid of everything.
And sometimes, in correcting that distortion, we have spoken about light without explaining why darkness matters at all.
Neither is the Gospel.
GOOD NEWS ONLY MAKES SENSE IN RELATION TO SOMETHING
“Jesus saves.”
It is one of Christianity’s most familiar statements.
But imagine hearing it for the first time.
A reasonable question follows:
Saves me from what?
We say:
“You can be forgiven.”
Forgiven for what?
We speak of redemption.
What needed redeeming?
We speak of reconciliation.
What relationship was broken?
We speak of grace.
Why is grace necessary?
We speak of eternal life.
What happened to life?
Good news does not become meaningful simply because we attach the adjective good to it.
Something makes the news good.
If a doctor says:
“Wonderful news—the treatment worked,”
the statement only makes sense because something required treatment.
If a rescue team tells you:
“You are safe now,”
the words assume there was danger.
The Gospel works in the same way.
Paul does not introduce salvation by pretending there is no human crisis.
In Romans he writes:
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes…”
But by verse 18 he is already confronting human ungodliness and unrighteousness.
The proclamation of salvation and the diagnosis of the human condition belong to the same argument. (Bible Gateway)
Read Romans 1:16–18 in context
Later Paul brings problem and remedy together:
“for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”
Sin.
Grace.
Redemption.
Christ. (Bible Gateway)
Read Romans 3:23–26 in context
The New Testament does not make grace magnificent by pretending sin is insignificant.
It tells the truth about sin and then tells the greater truth about what God has done in Christ.
THE PROBLEM WAS NEVER THAT CHURCHES TALKED ABOUT BAD NEWS
This is where I have had to sharpen my own thinking.
The problem was not simply that churches were talking about frightening things.
Some things genuinely should disturb us.
The question is whether what is being preached is true.
There is a profound difference between saying:
“Human beings are alienated from God through sin.”
and saying:
“Your uncle is spiritually blocking your promotion.”
The first is a biblical diagnosis.
The second requires evidence we usually do not possess.
There is a difference between warning people about the consequences of sin and inventing invisible conspiracies to explain every disappointment.
There is a difference between acknowledging spiritual warfare and creating a spirituality in which every inconvenience requires a demon.
So the real choice is not:
POSITIVE MESSAGE OR NEGATIVE MESSAGE?
It is:
TRUTH OR MANIPULATION?
That is a much more demanding question.
WHY FEAR WORKS SO WELL
This is where something I encountered in the teaching of Myron Golden helped me understand a phenomenon I had already observed pastorally.
Myron frequently teaches that people can respond more readily to recognised pain than to promised pleasure.
In one of the clips I studied, he contrasts:
“Seven Steps to Seven Figures”
with the idea of:
“The Seven Biggest Mistakes Keeping Entrepreneurs from Seven Figures.”
His argument is that the second may be easier to believe because the entrepreneur already knows the problem exists. They do not yet need to believe a large promise; they already possess evidence of the gap.
In another clip, he argues that people may trust a stranger to lead them away from recognised pain before trusting that stranger to lead them towards unfamiliar pleasure.
This fits his broader public emphasis on solving the customer’s problem rather than merely describing the product. In his words, the value is in the answer the product provides. (LinkedIn)
Read Myron Golden: “Sell the Answer, Not the Product”
I would not turn Myron’s formulation into a universal law of human behaviour.
But the underlying insight is useful:
Pain commands attention. Potential loss creates urgency. A recognised problem may be easier to believe than a promised future.
Behavioural research gives us some support for that observation.
Daniel Kahneman, reflecting on the work he developed with Amos Tversky, described loss aversion as the tendency for losses to produce a more intense response than corresponding gains in many decisions. (Nobel Prize)
Read Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel lecture on judgment, framing and choice
Research on fear appeals tells us something equally uncomfortable. A large meta-analysis covering 127 articles, 248 independent samples and more than 27,000 participants found that fear appeals could influence attitudes, intentions and behaviour, particularly when the communication also provided a credible way to respond to the threat. (APA)
Read the APA summary of the fear-appeal research
That helps explain something I had seen in church.
Fear works.
That does not make it right.
But pretending fear has no communicative power does not make us wiser.
The real question is:
How do we tell people the truth about danger without becoming merchants of fear?
That is a pastoral question, not merely a marketing question.
THE CHURCH DID NOT NEED MARKETING THEORY TO DISCOVER PAIN
Churches have long understood the power of fear.
Fear of death.
Fear of poverty.
Fear of barrenness.
Fear of enemies.
Fear of witchcraft.
Fear of ancestral forces.
Fear of losing a marriage.
Fear of business failure.
Fear that somebody else is progressing while you are being spiritually delayed.
These fears are powerful because many are connected to real human anxieties.
Financial hardship is real.
Infertility is painful.
Marital failure hurts.
Illness is frightening.
Betrayal hurts.
People experience injustice.
The manipulation begins when a communicator takes genuine pain and supplies an explanation that cannot be established.
Someone in your village is responsible.
An enemy has tied your destiny.
Somebody has taken your name somewhere.
And once the explanation has been accepted, the ministry can provide the answer.
Attend this programme.
Sow this seed.
Come for this deliverance.
See this particular spiritual authority.
The structure is powerful:
PAIN → THREAT → URGENCY → SOLUTION
But Christianity cannot evaluate that sequence simply by asking:
Did people respond?
Response does not establish truth.
A FULL BUILDING IS NOT A THEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
Fear can fill a building.
So can anger.
Tribalism.
Sensationalism.
Entertainment.
And the Gospel.
Attendance alone cannot tell us which one produced the crowd.
So ministry requires better questions.
What picture of God are people leaving with?
What picture of themselves?
What understanding of Christ?
Are they becoming more discerning—or merely more afraid?
Are they becoming more dependent on Christ—or more dependent on spiritual intermediaries?
Do they understand Scripture more deeply—or simply know which programme to attend whenever something goes wrong?
Communication does not merely produce attendance.
It forms people.
What we repeatedly teach people to fear eventually shapes their understanding of what is most powerful.
THEN THERE IS THE OPPOSITE ERROR
This is where I have had to challenge my own instinct.
It is possible to see all that abuse and decide:
Then let us preach only positive things.
God loves you.
God has a purpose for you.
You are valuable.
Your future is bright.
Grace is available.
Jesus wants to help you.
There is truth in many of those statements.
But if that becomes the whole Gospel, something essential disappears.
Ephesians 2 does not describe humanity outside Christ as merely confused, unfortunate or underperforming.
It says:
“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked…”
It speaks about disobedience, sinful desire and wrath.
And then comes one of Scripture’s great turns:
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us… made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved…”
The darkness is not the destination.
But it is not deleted from the story either. (Bible Gateway)
That movement matters:
DEAD → MADE ALIVE
WRATH → MERCY
SIN → GRACE
BONDAGE → FREEDOM
ALIENATION → RECONCILIATION
Remove the first half and the second begins to lose its weight.
Grace becomes kindness.
Salvation becomes self-improvement.
The Cross becomes merely an example of love.
Repentance becomes unnecessary.
Jesus becomes somebody who improves the lives of people who were basically all right already.
That is not the New Testament Gospel.
GOOD NEWS DOES NOT NEED FAKE BAD NEWS
This is the distinction I now think the church desperately needs:
THE GOSPEL DOES NOT NEED US TO INVENT BAD NEWS. IT ALREADY ADDRESSES REAL BAD NEWS.
We do not need a witch in somebody’s village to make the Gospel urgent.
We have sin.
We do not need an imaginary enemy to explain every failure.
We have human rebellion, foolishness, injustice, broken systems, suffering and death.
We do not need to manufacture obscure spiritual conspiracies.
Scripture already speaks soberly about evil, temptation and spiritual opposition.
And we do not need to promise that Christianity will prevent every painful circumstance.
Christ did not make that promise.
The Christian diagnosis is already serious enough.
The uncomfortable possibility is that we have sometimes found the biblical diagnosis less commercially exciting than the invented one.
“Sin has alienated humanity from God” may not fill a prayer poster as quickly as:
WHO IS THE STRONG MAN BEHIND YOUR DELAY?
But one belongs at the heart of the Gospel.
The other may be speculation.
That difference cannot be surrendered simply because speculation markets better.
THE GOSPEL HAS A PROBLEM BEFORE THE PROMISE
There is something useful in the communication principle we studied earlier:
the problem before the promise.
But Scripture must govern that framework.
The framework must never govern Scripture.
The Gospel does have a problem before the promise.
But the problem is not whatever produces the most fear.
It is the problem God identifies.
Romans 3 does not tell us that humanity’s deepest problem is delayed promotion, barrenness, lack of financial breakthrough or a hostile relative.
It says:
“for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…”
And then:
“…all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” (Bible Gateway)
That is not fear marketing.
It is diagnosis followed by remedy.
A physician does not manipulate someone by accurately diagnosing hypertension.
Manipulation would be inventing a disease.
Exaggerating a minor condition.
Or frightening a patient into unnecessary treatment.
But refusing to tell somebody about a real illness because negative information makes us uncomfortable is not compassion either.
Truth matters in both directions.
JESUS DID NOT AVOID THE WOUND
It is striking how often Jesus begins where people actually are.
To the weary, He speaks of rest.
To the thirsty, living water.
To the hungry, bread.
To the sick, healing.
To the guilty, forgiveness.
To the self-righteous, He exposes blindness.
To the fearful, He says not to fear.
To those attached to wealth, He reveals what wealth is doing to them.
The entry point is not identical for everyone.
But Jesus does not invent a problem in order to create demand.
He reveals what is actually there.
That may be one of the simplest corrections the church needs:
NAME THE REAL WOUND. DO NOT INVENT ONE.
THE GOSPEL IS NOT “COME TO JESUS AND YOUR PROBLEMS WILL DISAPPEAR”
Another distortion occurs when we identify the wrong pain.
If the Gospel is sold primarily as the answer to poverty, delayed marriage, business failure, infertility, immigration difficulties, sickness or enemies, Christianity quietly becomes a technology for obtaining a better life.
Christ becomes the means.
My desired outcome becomes the end.
But the Gospel’s deepest problem is not that my life is uncomfortable.
It is that humanity is alienated from God.
That does not make God indifferent to human suffering.
Scripture demonstrates divine concern for sickness, poverty, injustice, oppression, family pain and human flourishing.
The church should care about all of them.
But they cannot replace reconciliation with God as the central issue.
Otherwise we can create a Christianity in which a person apparently receives everything Christianity offers while remaining unreconciled to the God Christianity is about.
THE CROSS TELLS US HOW SERIOUS THE PROBLEM IS
Perhaps the Cross itself is the strongest argument against a Gospel without diagnosis.
If humanity merely required inspiration, why the Cross?
If our fundamental problem were low self-esteem, why the Cross?
If we simply needed principles for successful living, why the Cross?
If all God needed to do was remind us that He loves us, why the Cross?
The scale of the remedy tells us something about the seriousness of the disease.
Romans 3 does not simply say that God overlooked the problem. It connects justification with Christ’s sacrificial death and God’s righteousness. (Bible Gateway)
Grace is astonishing precisely because grace is not God pretending sin does not matter.
Grace is God dealing with sin.
A Gospel without sin eventually produces a Cross without necessity.
And a Cross without necessity becomes decoration.
FEAR MUST NEVER BECOME THE DESTINATION
The Gospel is not:
Be afraid.
It is:
Here is what is true—and here is what God has done.
Ephesians does not stop with:
dead in trespasses.
It moves to:
But God…
The danger is real.
But mercy is greater.
Sin is real.
But grace is greater.
Death is real.
But God makes alive in Christ. (Bible Gateway)
That may be one of the clearest differences between Gospel proclamation and religious fear marketing.
Fear marketing says:
The danger is enormous, therefore you need me.
The Gospel says:
The danger is real, and God has acted in Christ.
The pastor is not the rescuer.
Christ is.
THE PASTOR MUST NOT BECOME THE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM HE ANNOUNCES
This is where manipulation can become particularly serious.
If I convince people that invisible enemies surround them and then establish myself as the person uniquely qualified to defeat those enemies, I have created a powerful dependency system.
The more frightened they become, the more valuable I become.
That should trouble us.
New Testament ministry points beyond the minister.
Paul’s Gospel does not end with:
therefore come to Paul.
It ends with Christ.
The minister is a witness.
A messenger.
A servant.
Not the product.
Here is a practical diagnostic question for ministry:
Does this message leave people more dependent on Christ—or more dependent on the preacher?
That is not a small question.
FELT NEED AND REAL NEED ARE NOT ALWAYS IDENTICAL
Problem-centred communication does not mean every sermon title now needs to become:
“Seven Things Destroying Your Marriage.”
That would merely replace one formula with another.
It means listening.
What are people genuinely facing?
Loneliness.
Debt.
Shame.
Parenting difficulties.
Grief.
Sexual temptation.
Anxiety.
Meaninglessness.
Marriage.
Ageing.
Death.
Disappointment.
Ambition.
Even success itself.
The Gospel speaks to real life.
But preaching cannot merely repeat the audience’s own diagnosis.
Someone may come worried about money.
Scripture may expose fear, greed, stewardship, injustice or contentment.
Someone may come obsessed with an enemy.
Scripture may expose bitterness, vengeance or the need for wisdom.
Someone may want God to change everybody around them.
Scripture may reveal what God wants to change in them.
The felt problem is often the door.
It is not always the final diagnosis.
That is one place where pastoral ministry must go farther than marketing.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR PREACHING
This changes the architecture of preaching.
Not every sermon must begin with hell.
Not every message needs a crisis.
Not every invitation requires frightening people.
But neither should we rush to promises before establishing what those promises address.
A sermon on forgiveness should help people understand guilt and offence.
A sermon on grace should help us understand why self-salvation fails.
A sermon on Christ’s lordship should expose competing loyalties.
A sermon on resurrection should take death seriously.
A sermon on holiness should help people understand what sin does and what belonging to God means.
A sermon on hope should not pretend despair is imaginary.
This is not negativity.
It is context.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR EVANGELISM
We may also need to reconsider some forms of evangelism.
Simply saying:
“Jesus loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life”
can leave enormous questions unanswered.
Why Jesus?
Why the Cross?
Why repentance?
Why faith?
Why salvation?
Why not simply continue living as I choose and add Jesus as an inspirational influence?
The Gospel announces something more radical.
God is Creator.
We are accountable to Him.
Sin is real.
We cannot reconcile ourselves to God.
God has acted in Christ.
Christ died and rose.
Grace is offered.
Repentance and faith are appropriate responses.
A new life begins under the lordship of Christ.
Now Good News has architecture.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR CHURCH ADVERTISING
This may be where the correction becomes especially practical.
We need to stop behaving as though our only alternatives are:
BORING ANNOUNCEMENT
or
SPIRITUAL SENSATIONALISM.
There is another possibility:
TRUTHFUL TENSION.
Instead of:
“Come and receive your miracle.”
or:
“The enemy behind your delay shall die.”
we can ask real questions.
Why do I keep repeating what I already know is destructive?
Why can success fail to satisfy?
What do I do when God seems silent?
Why do relationships keep breaking in the same places?
What is forgiveness when the injury is real?
What happens when prayer becomes avoidance of obedience?
What does grace actually change?
Those are serious questions.
Nobody needs to invent a witch to make them relevant.
The Bible and human life already provide enough tension.
PAIN • TRUTH • GRACE • FORMATION
This gives us a framework I think is worth preserving.
Not:
PAIN → FEAR → PROGRAMME → DEPENDENCY
But:
PAIN → TRUTH → GRACE → FORMATION
PAIN
Where does it hurt?
What is the person actually experiencing?
Listen before speaking.
TRUTH
What is really happening?
Not what will create the biggest crowd.
Not what provides the most dramatic explanation.
What does Scripture reveal?
GRACE
What has God done?
Where is Christ?
Where is mercy?
Where is forgiveness?
Where is God’s power for change?
FORMATION
What does faithful response now look like?
Repentance.
Faith.
Obedience.
Community.
Restitution where necessary.
New habits.
Growing into Christ.
This moves beyond simply getting somebody to an altar.
It asks what kind of person the Gospel is forming.
MAYBE WE HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT THE WRONG PAIN
Perhaps the church’s problem is not that we talk about pain.
Perhaps we have often talked about the wrong pain.
We have amplified speculative enemies and minimised sin.
Magnified curses and minimised character.
Talked endlessly about people stopping our destiny while rarely asking whether disobedience is stopping us.
We have taught people to fear witches more than pride.
Enemies more than greed.
Generational curses more than habitual irresponsibility.
What somebody may have buried in a village more than what bitterness may be doing inside our own heart.
That is not merely bad communication.
It is bad discipleship.
Because whatever we repeatedly teach people to fear eventually shapes what they believe is most powerful.
And Christianity is supposed to teach us that:
Christ is Lord.
THE GOSPEL DOES NOT DENY DARKNESS
But neither does it glorify darkness.
Christianity is not naïve about evil.
It does not deny the devil.
It does not deny spiritual powers.
It does not deny temptation, persecution or human wickedness.
But neither does the New Testament produce a spirituality obsessed with locating a demon behind every inconvenience.
The centre is Christ.
His death.
His resurrection.
His lordship.
His kingdom.
His Spirit.
His people.
His coming.
Darkness is understood in relation to Him.
It is not the main character.
THIS HAS BECOME A CORRECTION FOR ME
So my earlier reaction needs refinement.
I was right to reject fear-driven Christianity.
I was right to reject manufactured spiritual threats.
I was right to insist on the Gospel.
But perhaps I occasionally confused preaching the Gospel with removing tension from the Gospel.
Those are not the same thing.
The Gospel has tension.
Sin is serious.
Death is real.
Judgment matters.
Human beings cannot save themselves.
The Cross was necessary.
Repentance matters.
And then—
grace.
Mercy.
Reconciliation.
New life.
Hope.
Resurrection.
The extraordinary power of the Good News is not that Christianity refuses to look at the bad news.
It is that Christianity looks directly at it and declares:
GOD HAS ACTED.
THE CORRECTION IN BOTH DIRECTIONS
That is finally where this study lands.
Not:
apply marketing to evangelism.
Not:
use more fear because fear works.
And not:
avoid everything negative because the Gospel is Good News.
The correction is in both directions.
Against manufactured fear.
And against a Gospel emptied of diagnosis.
The church must understand human pain.
But Scripture must define the deepest problem.
The church must communicate urgently.
But truth must govern the urgency.
The church must speak about danger.
But it must not invent danger.
The church must offer hope.
But not hope detached from repentance, grace and Christ.
And the church must never turn fear into dependence upon itself.
So I return to the principle with which I began:
Do not manufacture the problem. Do not minimise the problem. Tell the truth about the problem. Then make Christ unmistakably greater than it.
That is strong enough to guide preaching.
Evangelism.
Church advertising.
Prayer meetings.
Programme titles.
Altar calls.
Pastoral counselling.
Even the way we tell our testimonies.
Because Good News does not become good by hiding the bad news.
It becomes good because, in Christ, God has done something greater than it.
SOURCE & ATTRIBUTION NOTE
This article is a pastoral and theological reflection by Francis E. Madojemu.
One part of its communication analysis was sharpened by the public teaching of Myron Golden, particularly his emphasis on recognised pain, problem-centred communication and solving the audience’s problem rather than merely presenting the communicator’s product. The theological conclusions in this article are not being attributed to Myron Golden.
The specific Myron Golden observations quoted here came from transcripts supplied for this study, including his teaching that entrepreneurs may respond differently to a problem-focused headline than to a large promise, and his statement that people may more readily trust someone to lead them away from recognised pain.
His broader public teaching can be explored here:
Myron Golden — Official Website
About Myron Golden and his approach to business and biblical principles
Myron Golden — “Sell the Answer, Not the Product”
Biblical Sources
Romans 1:16–18 — Gospel, salvation and the human condition
Romans 3:23–26 — Sin, justification, grace and redemption in Christ
Ephesians 2:1–10 — Death in sin, mercy, grace and new life in Christ
Communication & Behavioural Research
Daniel Kahneman — Nobel Prize Lecture: Maps of Bounded Rationality
Daniel Kahneman — Nobel biographical discussion of loss aversion
American Psychological Association — Research on Fear-Based Appeals
Full meta-analysis: Appealing to Fear — Psychological Bulletin
The behavioural research above is used to help explain why threat and potential loss may attract attention. It is not offered as theological authority and does not establish fear as an ethical method for Christian ministry.
The biblical interpretation, pastoral reflections, cautions, applications and conclusions are mine.
Francis E. Madojemu
THINK • BUILD • PERSONALIZE
