I Think We Should Stop Saying People Are "Far from God"
by Brian Rutherford
This has been bugging me for close to ten years.
The phrase "far from God" is everywhere in the contemporary church. It is so embedded in how church leaders talk about people that most of us do not even notice that we are saying it.
And every time I hear it, something in me pushes back.
I keep coming back to a passage in Acts 17. Paul is standing on Mars Hill in Athens, talking to a crowd of pagan philosophers and idol worshippers. By any metric the modern church would use, these people would be the definition of "far from God." And here is what Paul says to them:
"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being." (Acts 17:24-28)
Paul does not put these people on a scale or measure their distance from God. He looks at a crowd of people who do not know Jesus and tells them God is already near.
Where the Language Came From
I think "far from God" came from a good place. It was an attempt to move away from more judgemental words like "lost" or "unsaved," and it felt more compassionate. Over time, it got adopted broadly across the contemporary church.
But language does subtle things we do not always intend.
If "they" are far from God, the unspoken implication is that we are the ones who are close. You cannot hold that kind of superiority and genuine humility at the same time. In Luke 19, when Jesus went to the house of Zacchaeus, the crowd grumbled that he had gone to be the guest of a sinner. The crowd inferred that Zacchaeus was far from God, but Jesus saw it differently and went to him anyway.
It also undermines what we say we believe about God. We use words like omnipresent and omniscient to describe him. We teach that God is everywhere and knows everything. But when we say someone is "far from God," we reinforce a picture that looks less like the theology we teach and more like the Bette Midler song: "God is watching us from a distance." Our language reveals our believed theology, not just our stated theology.
And once someone is on a scale, the temptation is to track their progress instead of loving them as a person.
A Different Way to See People
I have been working through this for years, and I am trying to make a shift.
Instead of placing people on an artificial scale, I am trying to train myself to look at every person and think: this person is God's beloved. Not a project. Not a point on a spectrum. Someone God loves right now, right where they are.
That changes how I talk to people, how I talk about people, and how I think about the Great Commission. The language we use about people reveals what we believe about God's posture toward them, and that belief shapes everything our churches do to reach them.
I wrote in our last post that your view of God quietly shapes your church's entire philosophy of ministry.
I think our language is where that shows up first.
One of the best things about working with Intentional Churches is that we get to gather with leaders in person every year. The IC Conference is May 5 and 6, 2027, in Chicago, IL. If that sounds like your kind of room, we hope to see you there. Learn more at intentionalchurchesconference.com.
