Why would Lakeside Covenant Church cancel its Sunday services in order to assemble AIDS caregiver kits for use in Africa instead? What’s happening when the Sunday coffee hour on the patio at Praise Center becomes a weekly open-air breakfast for indigent people? Why would 25 adults in one church use most of their annual vacation to travel to New Orleans and clean houses ruined by Katrina, while another 10 from this same congregation go to Washington, D.C., to lobby their congressional representatives to continue support for Katrina victims five years after the tragedy?
Are these signs of a dynamic ministry embodying the wholistic gospel of Jesus Christ for all, including the poor and vulnerable and oppressed? Or are such actions indicative of a foreboding breakdown in evangelical clarity about the gospel’s priority of spiritual salvation?
It helps to examine what accounts for the shift in the last decade from a common evangelical skepticism regarding issues of injustice to the enthusiastic engagement we see today. Will this concern for justice last, or will it be another evangelical fad? I’m hopeful it’s here to stay, but we need to identify what it will take for this change to be sustained.
Understanding the times
Since the modernist-fundamentalist debates of the early 20th century, “social justice” was considered the passion of the theologically liberal, while “evangelism” was the passion of the theologically conservative. This divide had not characterized the church in earlier eras, but it emerged as a response to shifting theological and cultural ground in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This divide has been a hallmark of American Protestantism ever since. But as the 21st century dawned, this dichotomization of the gospel began changing.
Early signs of the shift could be seen in the founding of such relief and development organizations as World Relief in the 1940s, and World Vision in the 1950s. They helped evangelicals move beyond exclusive concern for spiritual alienation and lostness (evangelism) to add concern for physical deprivation (relief and development) as well. The Lausanne Covenant, drafted in 1974, further added to the theological and global commitment of evangelicals. It spoke of taking the “whole gospel to the whole world,” and issued a broader understanding of Jesus’ kingdom. It affirmed that “evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of our Christian duty. For both are necessary expressions of our doctrines of God and … our love for our neighbor.”
Justice is as inseparable from the gospel as truth is from grace, all of which is an expression of the character of god.
More recent re-engagement with justice is represented by the founding of the International Justice Mission. IJM has drawn attention to the millions who suffer at the hands of oppressors. Sex trafficking, slavery, land grabbing, sexual abuse, and hate crimes are typical and pervasive examples of crimes perpetrated against the weak, the widow, the child, the vulnerable, or the powerless.
Finding or losing the gospel?
These changes are by no means welcomed or blandly accepted by all evangelicals. For those who defend an essential division and prioritization of evangelism over “social justice,” these changes among evangelicals are signs of a liberalizing drift, a slippery slope that leads people away from the central call of salvation. They insist that emphasizing justice means second-order concerns are threatening first-order priorities.
An emphasis on justice, they continue, leads to a human-centered gospel that makes too much of this life and fails to make enough of the life-to-come. It treats the social symptoms but not the spiritual root of human suffering. It believes the kingdom of God includes or fulfills this world, rather than believing the kingdom of God destroys this world and ushers in a new one. Matters of justice, they argue, are a distraction from the most-urgent task of saving souls.
But there are many evangelicals (full disclosure: I’m one of them) who vigorously affirm the need to engage issues of justice. This side sees concern for justice as the recovery of an aspect of the gospel that evangelicals have too long and tragically forgotten, neglected, or even rejected. Justice is not simply a pragmatic bridge to create an opportunity to present an otherwise spiritual gospel. Rather, justice is as inseparable from the gospel as truth is from grace, all of which is an expression of the character of God. This means that the gospel of Jesus Christ encompasses God’s response to every dimension of human experience and need.
This conviction is grounded in the affirmation that central to the scandal of the Incarnation is its demonstration that God enters and shares our full humanity. God’s character, his love and justice, truth and mercy, revealed in Jesus, is one whole, so God responds with the whole of his being to the whole of our need. Life on earth is not a prototype or test-run for an eventual life in eternity, but is itself intended and meaningful in all its dimensions.
Any view that implies we are primarily spiritual beings who happen to be (temporarily) material creatures, and that therefore injustice is inconsequential to God or to the priorities of God’s people, would be biblically invalid. Yes, our trials are temporary and the lead to an eternal “weight of glory” that outweighs them all, but matters of injustice grieve God. Justice is intrinsic to the gospel faithfully lived and proclaimed.
Perhaps most important, the primary Christian confession of faith that “Jesus is Lord,” means that the reign of Jesus over all things recasts power on earth. No one and nothing else is Lord: neither economic power nor powerlessness, neither political power nor powerlessness, neither class power nor powerlessness. All power is and will be redefined by the saving and recreating power of the One before whom every knee will bow. He reorders power and asks us to follow him in doing so. The right ordering of power is called “justice.”
A generational shift
Theology is not the only reason evangelicals have awakened to issues of injustice. It also has to do with broader cultural and generational changes. For example, young adults today have grown up in a world of endless flashing images, stories, and music from anywhere in the world, bringing home the realities of life all over the globe. In an internet-connected world, instantaneous contact with human tragedy and suffering brings wars, tsunamis, famines, earthquakes, and more into our homes. It’s harder to simply divide the people of the world into categories of the better and the worse, or of smugly justifying lives of privilege amid desperate poverty.
Lines of social division that defined earlier generations can still be seen, but they are much fainter and demand a greater social cost to admit, let alone defend. In a post-9/11 world, fear has become a global experience, and adds to our common sense of human vulnerability. Affordable international travel since the ’80s has introduced millions of Americans, including many evangelicals who have gone on short-term mission trips, to wide swaths of the globe.
Where earlier generations might have seen Europe, this generation is seeing Malawi or Cambodia.
The rise of Fair Trade movements, Bono’s One World campaign, and the RED products seen in department stores add more social conscience to our baseline of cultural awareness.
Events like hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami show us how the poor suffer disproportionately, not just during such storms, but for the decades leading up to and following such events.
The point is not that such needs are new. It’s that they are so much more vivid and inescapable. The walls that kept many of them from our awareness have fallen. The Cold War world is gone, but the New World is anything but more hopeful or peaceful. Economic, political, and religious tensions are the daily headlines, and no place seems free from their impact. Hiding seems impossible. So too is turning a blind-eye.
Many 20-somethings I know are deeply confident in the grace and truth of Jesus Christ, and also deeply humbled about their place in the world. Neither zealotry nor triumphalism holds any appeal. They see the world in overwhelming need on every level and feel compelled to respond.
As Gary Haugen aptly says, “This generation is simply unwilling to endure the credibility catastrophe of a gospel that does nothing in the face of massive human suffering.” Given these realities, seeking justice is one of the most obvious responses for this current young adult population.
A fix or a fad?
Will these changes last? Will they endure and mature in capacity, wisdom, energy, and effectiveness? Or will passion for justice wear off when the scale, the complexity, or the intractability of need simply feels overwhelming?
Faddishness is a human instinct, so it is predictable that for some people this “justice wave” will fade and be replaced with some other temporary passion. A “justice fatigue” may set in. If so, it will reveal that the privileged often treat justice as something discretionary that one can choose to engage or not. But opting out is not an option for the millions whose lives daily bear the marks of injustice.
After all, seeking justice is hard. It means seeing, engaging, and challenging powers and principalities of many kinds. To do serious battle against the evils of injustice will require anyone’s spiritual life, faith and hope and love, to grow. A commitment to prayer, the spiritual resilience demanded for sustained engagement, the wisdom and discernment required to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” are just part of what seeking justice will involve. This kind of maturity is not common in North American churches that have often done a better job cultivating Christian consumers with well-developed musical tastes than nurturing battle-ready disciples. Consequently, seeing justice as a passing fad is a real possibility.
On the other hand, if awakening to justice emerges from a theological and spiritual reformation central to the passion of God, and not just a program of the church, then what is happening could be a sign of deep and lasting change.
Showing and telling
If, as I hope and pray, pastors become convinced of the biblical legitimacy and urgency of engaging justice, then they will need to lay a theological foundation for such a view, and guard against distortion and short-sightedness. The greater the church’s action in the world, the deeper the theological and spiritual wisdom needed to undergird it.
It is noteworthy that some link this emphasis on justice to a rejection of preaching, an affirmation of faithful action over endless words. “Let the gospel be seen, not preached,” they say. This either/or thinking can, however, set in place a new and damaging division in which the centrality of Jesus Christ, the truth of biblical teaching, not least about justice, is pitted over and against action. This would be a disaster for both faith and justice.
In the same way that justice is not a project of the church but a passion of God, so seeking justice in action does not reject the biblical proclamation but embodies a faithful response to the Bible’s teaching.
This underscores the vital role of preachers and of preaching.
The place of justice in the revelation of God’s character throughout the Bible needs to be taught from the pulpit. The key is for the preacher to ground the congregation’s action in a growing theological understanding that God is just, God seeks justice, and God is reordering the power for the whole of life.
Helping our people grow into a more sophisticated grasp of the depth and reality of evil, of the countervailing forces that seek to destroy life, needs to be met with an even greater knowledge of the God who alone can make all things new. This is why hearing the truth is never separated in the ministry of Jesus from doing the truth. Hearing and doing are not enemies. They should not be rivals. They are indispensible partners.
To make this case is the peculiar and urgently needed contribution of the preacher and pastor of every congregation. To fail to do so will allow the passion of God for justice to be trivialized, or distorted, or abandoned.
If these themes are newer to a congregation, all the more effort needs to be taken to make it clear that justice is not just the preacher’s newest hobby-horse, nor is such engagement in the community or around the world a quick and easy fix. It’s actually a call into the fellowship of Christ’s suffering … for the joy set before us.
Justice efforts are not a step away from the saving love of jesus, but a form of demonstrating gratitude and maturity in living it out.
Pastors committed to take this direction may not need to do a “justice” sermon series. Decide instead to name the issues of justice and injustice every time you encounter them in the biblical texts. This will quickly show the way justice permeates the biblical witness and makes us less prone to proof-text and inadvertently trivialize the whole theme.
Justice then becomes not just the concern of the major or minor prophets, but of Matthew and Philippians and Corinthians and Philemon and 1 and 2 Peter and far more. Such preaching enables God’s people to hear and see God’s heart for justice.
When the joy of our singing is tied to the joy of our love, when the saving grace of Jesus Christ reveals God’s suffering and redeeming heart for a world filled with oppression, alienation, and deprivation, then the Good News we proclaim and live is that much closer to a reflection of the God we name in our worship.
Food bags for the homeless assembled on Sunday? Anti-sex-trafficking concerts by our youth group? Adopting an underserved neighborhood school and loving the kids and parents? Prayer for effective public justice systems in nations without the rule of law? Buying fewer gifts at Christmas from commercial stores and giving meaningful Fair Trade gifts made by former slaves? All this and far more is not a step away from the saving love of Jesus Christ, but a form of demonstrating gratitude and maturity in living it out.
And though the times may make justice more needful in our world, it’s knowing God’s heart for justice that will sustain our engagement far beyond the limits of a fad.
And it’s growing deeper in the knowledge and trust of God’s Word, centered in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, that sends us into our world where light and salt are more needed than ever.
Mark labberton is professor of preaching at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.
Copyright © 2010 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
