Greg,
I've been thinking about this very question since the day we started this site...
Somehow, we've come up with a version of the "Good News" that we have to convince people that it is actually "good" news.
When the ancient culture had many gods to serve, always worrying about how to appease one without stepping on the toes of another, wondering what they truely wanted, etc., the fact that "God is one" and the ten commandments was "good" news to them. For once, they were not being torn in every possibly direction in their religious life and they had direction for what God was looking for.
In Jesus' day, the people lived under the oppression of the Roman government and were looking for rescue ("salvation"). Jesus came, they expected a military leader, yet he showed them a salvation that transcended their previous understanding of their predicament. He showed them a life above the life they were experiencing, even amidst their current situation. This was "good" news to them.
While there are other examples throughout the Bible that show the "Good News" of God and His kingdom, you get the idea... The "Good News" was actually "good" news. Where is the "good" news for our current times?
Growing up, I always heard that the "good" news was the fact that if I believed that Jesus died for my sins, that when I died, I'd go to heaven instead of hell. While that was certainly "good" news for a young boy preoccupied with what would happen in 80 years when I died unless something happened that took me sooner (and of course the rapture was supposed to happen a few different times during my childhood), it did little to provide anything "good" for this life. It was just something we had to make it through, spend as much time gathering up as many other souls to be "saved" as well, in preparation for our life beyond death. Ok, so maybe I'm simplifiying it a bit, but that's the gist of it.
While going through my pastoral training, I began to reread the Bible, and in particular, the story of Jesus, in a new light (thanks also in part for being neck-deep in post-modern culture, desperately in need of "good" news). Jesus didn't dwell upon what happened and where we went when we died, His "good" news was that God's kingdom was "at hand". While it was easy to confuse the two at first, the more I read, the more I studied, the more I thought about it all fit into the bigger picture that the whole of the Biblical story was presenting, the more I became convinced that we were somehow missing the point (by "we", I don't necessarily mean the collective Christian population, but at least our little circle of it that I grew up in).
From the first mentions of Jesus' public ministry to the sermon on the mount, to His death and resurrection, Jesus' consistant message is "behold, the kingdom of God is at hand". I think within that phrase we have the answer to "what is the Gospel". My thoughts are that we don't always understand that answer. It comes with a lot of baggage that 2000 years of religious tradition have placed upon it. It's become an overly complex idea that makes it very hard to sort through and see the "good" in the midst of all of the requirements for fulfillment.
I'm not going to go too much further as I want to see what kind of feedback you guys have so far and would rather dialog on it than preach on it. But fast forward the conversation to the end... what if the "good" news were something like this:
We do not need to be slaves to materialism, individualism, consumerism, but instead, we can know one God who can help us to live above all of that. That Jesus came in the flesh to show us that very "life" which transcends the "death" of all of that other stuff. That salvation comes when we leave our worldly dependency and enter in living the way that God had intended for us. And that the whole world would be a better place as each of us move into the global community of God fulfilling our individual and communal roles of bringing God's dream to reality.
To me this brings hope for this life, the life to come, the world in which my kids will grow up and raise their own kids.
Again, please push back or help move this conversation forward as I've left out a lot of stuff in order to not write a book on the subject, but I feel it's worth discussing to unpack the conversation further :)
Respectfully,
Brian