Above all the things I focus on here at CROSS + PEN, perhaps the most essential “thing” we need to set our minds on is Christ, and the worldview that comes from our faith in him.

This mindset insight stems from my own passion project as a vocational pastor and a minister. In addition to my own interests as a Christian, as a follower of Christ in this world. This passion project of mine is what I call the Vintage Christian Faith.

It is this recognition that there is a set of essential beliefs that Christians have always held to—from the earliest apostles through the earliest Christians. believers on through the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the modern era into this contemporary Christian world.

The GospelWise Author™ is a reader-supported publication. Become an insider to get actionable advice and inspiration to write, publish, and market your books.

The vintage Christian faith is really about the Christian worldview, how Christians have understood the human story in relationship to the God story.

And over the years, decades, centuries, generations, Christians have framed that story in this way: creation, fall, redemption, consummation. In my own pastoral ministry, I have sort of re-framed this as creation, rebellion, rescue, and then recreation. I use this language because it is sort of a bit easier to understand, a bit clearer, easier to grasp, in order to make sense of the way that Christians have understood God’s Story of Rescue.

This is something that I, myself, as a believer, retrieved for my own Christian walk twenty years ago or so. Something that I have explored in my fiction writing in my Faith Reimagined series. And as a pastor and as a writer, I have sought to connect that story to the real lives of real people in both a church context as well as a non-Christian context.

Communicating the essence of the Christian story, and how we understand God’s story, and how we fit within that story has been a passion project of mine, because answering those deep questions of faith, life, and everything in between that the world is asking is crucial to offering the hope of Christ. You’ve probably asked what others are asking:

• Where did we come from?
• Why are we so messed up?
• Why is the world so messed up?
• What’s the fix to that messed-up-ness?
• How do we get right with ourselves and God?
• Where is this whole human story, this whole world story, heading?

These are questions that all worldviews seek to answer in some way or another. Consider the way the prevailing modern worldview answers them, humanism.

In the creation sense, where did we come from? Well, we evolved from nothing. We sprang from the primordial ooze of nothingness, eventually springing from reptiles into birds, on into mammals and monkeys. Now as humans, we are talking monkeys, right? That’s sort of the human origin story. Evolving from nothing to something. Order coming out of chaos.

And the fall, the rebellion part of that humanistic worldview, is that we do bad things because of the bad systems and the bad stories and the bad things that happen to us that cause us or influence us in bad ways.

So the fix is learning better stories and creating better systems. It’s about righting wrong systems, the powerful being overturned in order for the weak to be given the keys to the kingdom. It’s about the oppressed toppling their oppressors to right the systemic wrongs and the systemic dangers.

Of course, all of this means that the human story is shaped by humans. We save ourselves! We are the masters of our ship, and we are taking it into this utopian vision of humanity. Where there are no wrongs, where there is no poverty, the or the climate is rescued by our technological innovations and our political machinations, and in the end, we’ll all sing Kumbaya. There is this sort of base level humanistic worldview and the story to the humanistic worldview.

Now the Christian story tells something very different. I’m bringing this up in this up because as Christian writers, we need to have the mindset of Christ.

Which means we need to have the mindset of the Christian worldview. We need to have a firm grasp on the essentials of the Christian faith in order to tell stories, write studies, and craft other resources that offer insight and inspiration, transformation and hope for those who read them.

That hope we seek to offer as Christians through our writing is ultimately going to come from the hope of the gospel. Which, in essence, is the hope of the Christian worldview—creation, rebellion, rescue, recreation.

We were created on purpose and with purpose as imagers God, meant to glorify him and enjoy him forever in an intimate relationship of mutual love.

Except we threw it all away, rebelling against the Most High God, still rebelling against God, in any number of ways—vandalizing God’s good creation and plunging it into chaos, ruin, and death.

But God wasn’t through with us; he came back to the people who rejected him—literally taking upon himself the flesh and blood of human nature and moving into our neighborhood.

All to live the life we should have lived, but couldn’t. To die the death we should have died to pay the price for our rebellion—payving the way for the forgiveness of our rebellion, release from shame and guilt, and salvation and adoption as children of God.

With the ultimate hope that death doesn’t have the final word in our story because it didn’t have the final word in Jesus’ story. His resurrection inaugurated God’s rule and rein now, his movement to re-recreate the world in any number of ways with the ultimate hope of a moment when he returns to make all things new, bear justice and judgment upon wickedness, and bring heaven to earth as he intended from the beginning.

Creation, Rebellion, Rescue, Recreation. It’s God’s story. It’s our story too.

The one we’re living, the one we’re telling—whether through actual stories or the resources that will shape them.

If you do want to do a bigger, deep dive into the essentials of the Christian worldview, I have a free training called The Simple Guide to the Christian Worldview. You can get that for free at www.crossandpen.com/worldview.

I would love to pass that training along to you to equip and empower you to grasp the essentials of the Christian faith so you can offer the hope of Christ through his gospel in your stories, studies, and resources.

Let’s create for Christ together 🖊️

/ jeremy