My church is big on service.
So big, in fact, that we cancel every fourth Sunday gathering and spend the morning serving the community. We paint houses, rake leaves, serve the homeless, finish basements—you name it.
Our efforts have borne fruit. We’ve built ties to the refugee community, established a partnership with the elementary school where we meet, and helped our neediest neighbors. Dozens of students from a local Christian college have also joined us, drawn by our emphasis on service.
But there’s one crucial thing our service hasn’t done: led people to faith in Jesus.
Recently our pastor lauded our service efforts but lamented our failure to evangelize. “We haven’t baptized anyone in more than two years!” he said, before issuing a challenge for us to share the gospel with words as well as actions.
I don’t want to be too hard on my church. Other congregations also struggle to strike a balance between proclaiming the gospel and demonstrating it. For many the pendulum seems stuck in the opposite direction. They’re more apt to focus on evangelism while doing little to meet their community’s physical needs. Some even deride social action as a futile enterprise, just “straightening deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Our pastor lauded our service efforts while lamenting our failure to evangelize. “We haven’t baptized anyone in more than two years!”
Why this polarization? How do we combine compassionate action and evangelism?
To understand the current landscape, it’s worth glancing in the rearview mirror.
Early evangelicals such as William Wilberforce, D.L. Moody, and William Booth were tireless activists. But in the late 19th century, liberal theologians introduced the idea of a “social gospel,” emphasizing the need to meet physical needs, but denying the gospel’s supernatural elements.
Conservatives rightly objected to the erosion of the authority of Scripture. Unfortunately the kneejerk reaction of many was also to abandon social activism. “If liberals want to save the world, we’ll stick to saving souls,” they decided. This dichotomy has at times left the body of Christ looking disfigured—all mouth, but no hands and feet. Or all action but no voice.
In recent years, we’ve begun to rediscover the biblical basis of social justice, and many evangelicals have begun serving with the zeal of the newly converted. But others have hung back, wary of what they see as an undue emphasis on social action.
The answer for both camps, I believe, is to strive for what veteran pastor and community activist Clark Blakeman calls “biblical symmetry.”
“We have to remind ourselves that just ‘doing’ isn’t sufficient,” Blakeman says. “Still, the more common problem is for people to fear that the doing is empty, just padding people for a more comfortable journey to hell. For them, we work to show that proclamation is insufficient apart from the demonstration of the gospel. We’re pushing both sides toward biblical symmetry.”
To achieve this biblical symmetry some congregations (like mine) need to be challenged to open their mouths and share the gospel verbally. Others need to be challenged to extend a hand of compassion. All need to do both.
One of history’s riddles is the explosive growth of the early church. Scholars still puzzle over how an obscure Jewish sect grew to comprise more than half the Roman Empire within a relatively short time.
Part of the answer lies in the fact that while fearlessly sharing the gospel, even under persecution, the early Christians also demonstrated radical compassion for their neighbors. Such behavior caused the pagan emperor, Julian, to rail against “the hated Galileans” who “not only feed their own poor, but also ours, welcoming them into their agape.”
May we recapture this vision to serve and proclaim. May we be so hated again!
Drew Dyck Managing editor
Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
