Why kingdom living shrank to belief alone — and how to recover the gospel of the kingdom
It seems that many sincere Christians trust Jesus with eternity, yet hesitate to trust His way in the ordinary pressures of life. The result is a quiet erosion of kingdom living — the embodied, livable life under God’s reign that Jesus actually announced. I could be wrong of course, but it does seem like that would be a fair statement to make. I know it’s true in my own faith journey.
Here’s what I’ve experienced. Belief remains orthodox. Doctrine remains clear. And yet confidence that the life Jesus describes is genuinely good, wise, and sustainable in the real world often feels thin. I’ve struggled with this personally, and I still do.
Obedience can feel costly but uncertain.
Discipleship can feel earnest but exhausting.
Church can feel true, but strangely weightless.
The more I learn, the more I read thinkers that have come before me, the more I think that this does not appear to be a crisis of belief. It seems to be a crisis of formation.
Or more precisely: a crisis of kingdom living — of inhabiting what we say we believe.
Table of Contents
A disconnection worth examining
It seems worth asking how belief has remained strong while lived confidence has weakened. Why is that? We have more access to sound biblical teaching than anytime in human history. Yes, access to some not so biblical teachers as well, but the point is that this crisis doesn’t seem to be an issue of a lack of knowledge.
Why do so many of us know Jesus’ teachings well, yet instinctively rely on other strategies when life becomes stressful or complex? Why does trust in Jesus often feel firm at the level of confession, but fragile at the level of instinct?
Psychologist Todd Hall, in Relational Spirituality, offers language that helps clarify this tension. He distinguishes between explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge.
Explicit knowledge is conscious, verbal, and propositional. It includes doctrine, theology, and articulated belief. By this measure, many Christians are well formed.
Implicit knowledge is pre-reflective, emotional, embodied, and relational. It is shaped through attachment, story, repeated experience, and what has proven reliable under pressure.
What if the problem is not that Christians lack instruction, but that these two forms of knowing have drifted apart?
People may explicitly believe God is good and present, while implicitly expecting distance, disappointment, or silence. They may affirm Jesus’ teachings, while instinctively trusting control, productivity, or self-protection when the stakes are high.
If this is true, then discipleship has not failed because belief collapsed, but because trust was never fully trained.
A gospel trusted only partway
It also seems worth asking whether the gospel many of us have learned to trust has been subtly narrowed.
What if salvation has been framed primarily as forgiveness and future hope, while transformation and present participation were assumed rather than practiced? What if belief was emphasized more clearly than apprenticeship?
Dallas Willard warned that the church had become effective at producing converts while neglecting the formation of disciples. Not because leaders were careless, but because formation was treated as secondary to belief.
In that environment, Jesus can quietly become the one who secures heaven later, rather than the one who teaches us how to live under God’s reign now.
The gospel does not become false.
It becomes smaller.
And when the gospel shrinks, formation weakens not through rebellion, but through neglect.
The gospel of the kingdom Jesus actually announced
This raises a more fundamental question. What did Jesus mean when He spoke of the Kingdom of God?
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15, ESV).
If the Kingdom was “at hand,” what kind of life did Jesus believe was available?
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus speaks as if God’s reign is not only future but present. He teaches people to pray for daily provision (Matthew 6:11, ESV), to release anxiety rather than be ruled by it (Matthew 6:25–34, ESV), to forgive in ways that heal rather than harden (Matthew 18:21–35, ESV), and to trust the Father when obedience feels risky.
This does not sound like abstract theology.
It sounds like a way of life.
Jesus’ invitation to discipleship was not primarily informational. It was vocational. “Learn from me,” He said (Matthew 11:29, ESV). Learn how to live. Learn how to trust. Learn how to participate in kingdom living — the daily, embodied life under God’s reign.
And this learning was never meant to depend on effort alone. Jesus promised the Spirit would dwell within His people, making Kingdom life possible from the inside out (John 14:16–17, ESV). Obedience was not framed as earning, but as participation empowered by presence.
Why imagination may be necessary
If Jesus announced a present and livable Kingdom, another question follows. Why does that Kingdom so often feel abstract, even to sincere believers?
How do people come to trust a way of life deeply enough to live by it?
Here imagination begins to matter. Not as a replacement for discipleship, but as a condition for it.
Imagination shapes plausibility. It trains perception. It helps people recognize what a life under God’s reign might look like in concrete situations and whether such a life can be trusted as good.
James K. A. Smith has argued that human beings are formed less by ideas than by practices and stories that aim their loves. N. T. Wright has emphasized that the Kingdom is not a metaphor but an alternative reality that must be learned and inhabited.
Without imagination, the Kingdom remains a concept.
With imagination, it becomes visible.
Jesus consistently taught this way. Through parables, He invited people to see seeds, fields, meals, and mercy as sites of God’s active reign (Matthew 13:31–33, ESV). He was not avoiding clarity. He was training perception at the level where trust is formed.
Imagination does not replace obedience.
It helps obedience make sense.
What kingdom living actually looks like
If kingdom living is real and available now, it has to look like something. Not in the abstract, but in the texture of an ordinary day.
Dallas Willard described it as apprenticeship to Jesus — learning to do the things Jesus did, in the way Jesus did them, because we trust that His way is genuinely good. Not as a performance of holiness. As a daily training in how to inhabit reality the way Jesus inhabits it.
What does that look like in practice?
It looks like a parent absorbing the irritation of a difficult evening without weaponizing it on the people in the room. It looks like a leader making a costly decision because mercy is the right move, even when the spreadsheet doesn’t support it. It looks like the slow, often invisible work of forgiving someone whose harm you have not forgotten. It looks like prayer that does not need a result to remain genuine. It looks like rest that does not require productivity to feel justified.
Kingdom living is not a stricter version of moral effort. It is a different kind of life altogether — one trained in the practices Jesus practiced, oriented toward the Father Jesus trusted, sustained by the Spirit Jesus promised.
This is what kingdom now theology has tried to recover for the Church over the past century. From George Eldon Ladd’s work on the inaugurated Kingdom, to N. T. Wright’s emphasis on the Kingdom as God’s reign on earth as in heaven, to Willard’s insistence that the Kingdom is “the range of God’s effective will,” the conviction has been the same. The Kingdom is not deferred. It is available. And the Christian life is the daily, ordinary work of learning to live in it.
Why this series exists
It seems, then, that something vital has been misplaced.
Not belief.
But apprenticeship.
Not doctrine.
But coherence between what we confess and what we trust.
This series exists to explore that gap carefully and faithfully. The Battle for the Christian Imagination is fourteen articles working through one shared question: how the Church learned to believe without learning to inhabit, how the gospel of the kingdom narrowed into something smaller, and how kingdom living can be recovered as the actual shape of Christian discipleship.
The aim is not louder conviction.
It is deeper formation.
An invitation to attend
Rather than rushing to solutions, this series begins with attention.
Where do your explicit beliefs and your lived expectations quietly diverge? What do you find yourself trusting when pressure rises? What picture of the world seems to guide your instincts?
Jesus is not merely inviting agreement to a set of doctrines.
He is inviting apprenticeship, relationship, and partnership.
Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:21, ESV).
Kingdom living may be closer than we have learned to expect — and more available than the way the Church has taught us to imagine.
FAQ
What is kingdom living?
Kingdom living is the daily, embodied life under God’s reign that Jesus announced and made available now. It is not a stricter version of moral effort or a deferred reward for the faithful. It is apprenticeship to Jesus — learning to inhabit reality the way He inhabits it, sustained by the Spirit He promised (John 14:16-17, ESV).
What does the Bible say about kingdom living?
The New Testament treats kingdom living as the central invitation of Jesus’ ministry. He opens His public work by announcing that the Kingdom of God is at hand and inviting people into it (Mark 1:15, ESV). He teaches kingdom living through parables, the Sermon on the Mount, and direct instruction to His disciples — always presenting it as a present, livable reality, not a distant ideal.
What is the gospel of the kingdom?
The gospel of the kingdom is the good news Jesus actually preached — that God’s reign has come near in Him and that humans can live under that reign now. Dallas Willard argued that much of contemporary Christianity has narrowed this gospel into a “gospel of sin management” focused on forgiveness and future hope, while losing the present, transformational life Jesus offered. Recovering the gospel of the kingdom means recovering the whole vision Jesus announced.
What is kingdom now theology?
Kingdom now theology is the theological recovery, developed across the twentieth century, of the conviction that the Kingdom of God is genuinely present and accessible in this life — not only future. It draws on the work of George Eldon Ladd on the inaugurated Kingdom, N. T. Wright on God’s reign on earth as in heaven, and Dallas Willard on the Kingdom as the range of God’s effective will. It does not deny the future consummation of the Kingdom; it insists that the Kingdom Jesus announced was always meant to be lived now.
How do I begin to live in the Kingdom of God?
Begin by paying attention. Notice where your explicit beliefs and your lived expectations diverge. Notice what you actually trust when pressure rises. Then take small, repeatable steps of apprenticeship — learning the practices Jesus practiced (prayer, Scripture, rest, generosity, forgiveness) not as performance, but as training in a different kind of life. Kingdom living is recovered the way Jesus taught it: slowly, in community, by trusting His way enough to actually try it.
Continue the series
This is the first of fourteen articles in The Battle for the Christian Imagination — a series exploring how kingdom living was lost, how imagination shapes belief, and how the Church can recover an embodied vision of the gospel of the kingdom.
Read Part 2: When the Gospel Shrunk
Or follow Zach’s writing on Substack at substack.com/@zacharyleighton for ongoing thinking on kingdom living, formation, and the imagination of the Church.
