What happens when we move the Gospel from the center?

What happens when we move the Gospel from the center? In 1996, D.A. Carson authored an insightful chapter entitled "The Biblical Gospel" in the book For Such a Time as This: Perspectives on
Evangelicalism, Past, Present and Future. I encourage you to read the chapter here! In the chapter, he explains what the Gospel is and what threatens our championing of it in our day. He explains what happens when we fall prey to "displacing the primacy of the gospel":

A litany of devices designed to make us more spiritual or mature or productive or emotionally whole threatens to relegate the gospel to irrelevance, or at least to the realm of the boring and the primitive. The gospel may introduce you to the church, as it were, but from that point on assorted counseling techniques and therapy sessions will change your life and make you happy and fruitful. The gospel may help you make some sort of decision for God, but ‘rebirthing’ techniques—in which in silent meditation you imagine Jesus catching you as you are born from your mother’s womb, imagine him hugging you and holding you—will generate a wonderful cathartic experience that will make you feel whole again, especially if you have been abused in the past. The gospel may enable you to be right with God, but if you really want to pursue
spirituality you must find a spiritual director, or practise asceticism, or discipline yourself with journalling, or spend two weeks in silence in a Trappist monastery...

This is a time for Christians to return to the basics, the comprehensive basics, and quietly affirm with Paul, ‘I am not ashamed of the gospel [p. 85] because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith”’ (Romans 1:16–17).

-- D. A. Carson. “The Biblical Gospel.” Pages 84-85 in For Such a Time as This: Perspectives on
Evangelicalism, Past, Present and Future. Edited by Steve Brady and Harold Rowdon.
London: Evangelical Alliance, 1996.