"Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow." This call to pursue justice in Isaiah 1:17 is just one of many such exhortations in the Bible. And yet many churches view justice as secondary to, and distinct from, evangelism, discipleship, and worship. As vice president of church mobilization at International Justice Mission, Jim Martin helps churches understand and engage the biblical mandate to seek justice for the oppressed. His new book The Just Church (Tyndale, 2012) shares practical strategies for churches looking to respond to that call. BuildingChurchLeaders.com editor Laura Leonard spoke with Jim about why churches should prioritize justice issues and how they can meaningfully respond to the most pressing issues in our world.
The title of your book is The Just Church. What does a "just church" look like?
A just church is a church that has the concept of biblical justice in its DNA. Just as evangelism and worship are in a church's DNA, and these concepts shoot through every ministry, justice really ought to be the same. That would mean that it would be difficult for someone to come to faith in Jesus and not have their worldview affected by the concept of justice.
Just churches are generally both courageous and willing to engage these issues around them with enough humility to come alongside organizations that have been working for justice in their communities for a long time. These are churches that have, in a disciplined way, moved beyond the anger and outrage that issues like sex trafficking cause, and they have found a way to a deeper motivation—a biblical conviction—that the church ought to be concerned about these things, and are on the road toward finding meaningful engagement themselves.
How would you describe the church's historical relationship with justice?
There have always been branches of the church that have championed the call to justice, because it is such a deeply biblical call. In the last 100 years, though, evangelical churches, particularly those in the developed world, have really struggled to see the call to justice in the Scriptures as well as what a church could do to have any sort of impact on issues of justice in the world.
So why should churches prioritize justice? How does the Bible talk about it?
The whole of Scripture speaks to the issue of justice and the call of God's people to engage. Reason one: God is a god of justice, and anyone who follows Jesus as a disciple should have that DNA in them.
It could be helpful to make a distinction between the concept of social justice and the concept of biblical justice. They are both good, but the question is ultimately one of motivation. Social justice is something that caring people do because they are concerned about the plight of people suffering in the world—that's a great thing. Biblical justice is something that disciples of a just God do because they long to mirror this aspect of the Ancient of Days in a world of desperate need.
That's a helpful distinction. A lot of people hear the term social justice …
And we sort of cringe, right? As Christians it puts us in a difficult position. Of course we don't want widows thrown off their land, that's not right. We certainly don't want children sold for sex. But we're at a loss to explain why it is that the church should be involved.
So why hasn't the church been following that call to justice?
When you get to a place of enough affluence in your life or your culture, you work hard to insulate yourself from any sort of danger or suffering around you. And when you do that, your worldview changes. You stop seeing the need in the world as it actually is.
For Christians, the problem goes even deeper. Once we insulate ourselves from the injustice-related suffering in the world, then we actually stop seeing it in the Scriptures. We read the Scriptures differently because we don't see those things going on in the world. David wrote many of his psalms while he was on the run from someone trying to kill him; a lot of the justice language and concepts in the psalms escape us, because we don't know that that is still going on in the world. It's a self-reinforcing spiral: because we don't see it in the world, we don't read it in the Scriptures, and because we don't read it in the Scriptures we don't look for it in the world.
So what are the first steps a church could take to pull itself out of that spiral and begin pursuing that call to justice?
There are two simple things. One, go back in the Scriptures and look really carefully. This is why Gary [Haugen, president of IJM] put out The Good News About Injustice; the first half of that book is really just a simple yet profound treatment of all the justice material in the Scriptures. It's so transformational when people see that.
Two, we have to be willing to take a good look at what the world is actually like. A few years ago World Bank put out this shocking statistic: 4.5 billion people in our world live outside of the reach of the rule of law. This means that for more than half of the world's population, their basic issue is that they are not safe. They can fall victim to anyone around them who is more powerful. The issue of violence among the world's poor is something that we just have to be willing to see. That includes all the issues that IJM deals with: sex trafficking, modern slavery, police abuse of power, unprosecuted sexual abuse of children.
What is the relationship between the church's call to evangelism and its call to justice? Sometimes it can feel like one must take priority at the expense of the other.
The church, in my experience—I've been involved in church ministry for more than 20 years at this point—has been 10 years behind the culture on every important social issue. It hurts our credibility. We love to watch churches taking leadership in their communities around issues like human trafficking and modern-day slavery, because nobody really knows what to do with it. The church can step in and say, "We're hosting this community awareness-raising event, we're going to show this film, and then we're going to talk about steps we're going to take as a community to actually engage this issue both locally and internationally." We've had church after church after church do that in their own community in a way that brings people toward the church that otherwise would not move in that direction.
What are some examples of churches you have seen successfully addressing justice issues in their community and in the world?
Some small churches have said, 'We're going to take this issue seriously, this is something we have missed and we're going to go back and have all of our small groups do a study of the justice content in the book of Isaiah, or have them all read The Good News About Injustice, or The Just Church,' and that surfaces people in the church who are passionate and desire to move their lives in that direction. Some churches have sent people to work with us for a significant period of time to assist the work of IJM as a legal fellow or an aftercare fellow.
We're working with a couple thousand churches, and maybe 500 of them are deeply engaged with us in a way that they are actually trying to take steps in their own communities and serve justice issues locally. We can go to some of these churches and say, "As an organization we have these challenges in the field and we need help." We went to this church that had been journeying with us for a couple years and said, "Would you be willing to start an aftercare home in Calcutta?" They jumped onboard. Now for about two years we've had this very big, very high-quality aftercare home that Discovery Church in Orlando, Florida is executing in partnership with an Indian organization. IJM existed to broker the relationship and to consult on what the aftercare home should look like. And it's running fantastically well. The book tells a bunch of stories like that, of churches that have stepped up to do these really significant things. They're church of all sizes—Discovery is a church of about 2000, and there are smaller churches and larger churches that have jumped in to do significant things.
How can small churches best use their resources to engage justice issues?
Small churches are so much more nimble—it's actually quite refreshing. Churches of just a couple hundred have done some really interesting and significant things. In fact, the first aftercare home we started with a church happened because one of our staff came back on furlough to the US and ended up speaking at a church in California that was in the middle of a building project—they were trying to get out of a school they were meeting in—and this staff person from IJM presented the need for an aftercare home in the Philippines. The church basically said, "You know what, we don't need a building as much as this organization needs an aftercare home, so we're going to shut down our building program and start an aftercare home." They did it. And this was a church of 85 people.
There are so many injustices in our world—how does a church discern which issues they will target?
At first churches try to react because they are outraged at the issue—they are angry because these little girls are being trafficked for sex—and they try to move from there. It turns out anger just isn't lasting fuel. You have to wait and work toward a deeper biblical conviction. That is what's going to last.
Many churches also make the mistake of leaping at the first thing they see, when a much more disciplined discovery process of the possibilities that are out there allows you to move forward with discernment and not desperation.
In the book we have a series of processes by which people can do the discipline work to discover what is already going on in their communities. It's not difficult to do an assessment of your community; it's just that churches don't often have that skill. What you're looking for is the convergence of three things: find out who you are and what your gifts are as a church, your unique ability, then you want to find an unmet need in your church or in the world, and then you want to wait for God to give you a sense of call. Once need, ability, and call line up, then you know it's time to begin.
Any words of encouragement you would share with church leaders who would like to rally their churches on these issues of justice?
The big surprise is that it really is about deepening discipleship in churches. One of the assertions we've been making for years is this idea that the church of Jesus is actually hard-wired for life-and-death struggle in the world. If we opt out of the harder struggles in our time, the church slowly dies. We've seen this happen to churches by the hundreds in Europe, and it happens in the US. The church becomes irrelevant when you disconnect it from the most meaningful problems in the world. To reconnect ourselves with some of the most significant challenges in our world today will be for us to actually be called by God to a place where our discipleship deepens and we find life and meaning and purpose.
To learn more about the book, visit the Just Churchwebsite at http://www.thejustchurch.com. International Justice Mission also recently launched the DIVE program especially to engage churches to seek justice; for more information go to http://www.ijm.org/content/dive.
