Charlie Webster

Even as a teenager, I believed that if the message of the Bible is supposed to be really good news, what I was experiencing couldn't be right. I began to see that there are at least some traditions common to all churches that actually work against the good news that Christianity is meant to be, and I wanted to learn the truth.

Believing that an education in these things would help, I earned a Bachelor of Arts in ministry. But more and more I saw that some things I was being taught had to be wrong if Christianity was really supposed to be good news. I entered the professional ministry, but soon found that my health wouldn't hold up to what was expected. Meanwhile, my conviction that something is seriously wrong with what I had been taught and what American Christians in general teach and practice kept growing.

After a scramble to find another occupation, I wound up as a highly respected Space Shuttle control systems engineer, but my heart still longed to find the reality of Christianity. And the more I looked, the more I found problems.

During a brief retirement from the space industry, I went back to school to earn my Masters degree in New Testament Studies. For a time I taught New Testament at the college level until the commute through Atlanta traffic got to be too much for me.

About that time NASA asked me to return to work, and soon I was working full time again. During that time I was invited to lead a workshop at a Christian university on some of the issues I saw as hurting American Christianity. The materials I developed for that workshop became the basis for my first book, Revitalizing Christianity, a book focused on the things that are supposed to motivate us as Christians, but that we get wrong.

I kept doing the workshops annually, digging deeper into the topics. In preparing for these workshops, I found more and more issues with available translations of the Bible. I realized that a large part of the problem was that key words used in almost all translations of the Bible had taken on meanings that didn't communicate what the biblical authors had intended. On top of that, I found key passages in the Bible that were poorly translated, actually concealing the real meaning. So I decided to translate the New Testament into conversational English, fixing the problems I saw in so many of the available translations of the Bible. I decided that the best way to start would be to blend the four Gospel accounts into a single story so that anyone could read this one account and find everything from all four Gospels. I wanted this account to be faithful to the original sacred writings, but easy to read for anyone. I also wanted to include a lot of background information to help people understand what the authors were trying to communicate. That effort led to my latest book: Good News: The Life and Teachings of Jesus. That book is presently available only for electronic distribution (Kindle, PC, tablet, etc.). About half of that book is the translation of the Gospels, and the other half is the background information in a Glossary.

Meanwhile, I'm working on a series of discipleship training materials and on translating the rest of the New Testament. I recently published Discipleship 1, the first of a series of study guides for small groups. This study starts with the heart and soul of Christianity—the caring love that is Christian love. It includes four sections on Christian love, four sections on Christian faith, and four sections on heaven—the Christian hope that was meant to motivate Christian living. In all three of these areas, I found that what we typically believe and teach doesn’t match the real biblical message. I found that the biblical message is much, much better news than what we’ve been teaching.

I continue to travel promoting the ideas provided in these books and materials and researching what's going on in churches—what works and what doesn't work. For more information or to arrange for a workshop or seminar, visit www.NewCenturyMinistries.com.