The word "gospel" comes from the old English expression "good (or God's) spell." In other words, the good story or good news. The term has come to refer to the news of Jesus Christ's teachings about salvation and the kingdom of God. It refers as well to the four stories we have of Jesus in the Bible—Matthew, Mark, Luke (called Synoptic, or "similar" Gospels because of their similarity to one another), and John (see Bible). In this context, Christian churches that follow the universal lectionary readings each Sunday will always have a reading from the Old Testament, the New Testament (meaning the Epistles, or letters), and the Gospels. Often congregations will be invited to stand while the Gospel is being read. Each year a different Gospel is featured, over a three-year cycle. The Gospel reading is considered the controlling text; in other words, Old and New Testament readings are selected on the basis of the light they shed on the Gospel text.
In the 1950s, the Red Letter edition of the New Testament was published. This version printed all the words of Jesus in red. The idea behind this was that the Gospel would be differentiated from the words of the transcribers. It was an editorial method of highlighting the "Gospel truth."
Lately the word "gospel" has been used as a method of marketing churches preaching a conservative theology. A "Gospel-preaching church" is an evangelical or fundamentalist church, differentiating it from a liberal or mainline church. The distinction is one of semantics. All Christian churches believe they are preaching the Gospel. They just disagree as to what the Gospel is. Churches that believe the Gospel refers to a body of doctrines to be believed (the fundamentals, for instance; see Fundamentalism) refer to themselves as "Gospel-believing churches." Churches that emphasize the words of Jesus referring to outreach ("Give a cup of cold water in my name.... True worship is visiting the sick and feeding the hungry....") are often accused of preaching only the "social Gospel." Often it is said that the Gospel is summed up in one passage—John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son; that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."