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“But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God…” John 1.12
Last week, we (Southern California InterVarsity) had an evangelistic plunge on the UCLA campus. It was fun, tiring, and full of learning experiences (which I will share in future posts). The aim of the week was to raise awareness of the sex-traffic industry around the world. In partnership with the International Justice Mission, we blitzed the campus during the day and organized nightly events to bring awareness to the issue.
One of the beautiful things for me was seeing one of the best pictures of the marriage evangelism and social justice (particularly in a campus ministry). Generally speaking, the Church can find itself concerning itself with either one or the other. The two have not gone hand in hand as they should.
Probably more among liberals, social justice can sometimes become more central than Jesus and life through him. For conservatives, the number of baptisms (and conversions) seems to take precedence in what marks a healthy church or ministry. One of the profound things I learned from the keynote speaker (R. York Moore, an evangelist with InterVarsity), is that pursuing justice without Jesus may be a good deed, but not really possible. He asserted that the injustices in the world are not material issues but spiritual issues that require spiritual answers. Only Jesus offers us hope in that.
As we train the Church (or students in my case) in various aspects of “Basic Christianity”, social justice issues take on the role of Christianity 201. I am beginning to think that the discipleship issues of Christianity 201 (cross-cultural ministry, mission(s), love for the poor, etc…) are so core to our conversion that empowering people in the faith gives us no choice but to call them to love the things that are on Jesus’s heart.
Having said that, I wonder if practically speaking, churches and communities of faith should not only be preaching the gospel (doing the evangelism thing), but should be adopting social justice issues. I wonder if more of us need to be doing what:
- York is doing–he is passionate about the sex-traffic industry, and his goal is to empower students to care for those issues.
- Saddleback Church is pushing its P.E.A.C.E. initiative, with much of its effort to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa.
These are a couple of examples, but honestly, I am not aware of too many. What would it look like if in my community, we adopted one of the “big” social justice issues of the day, and as a community raised the awareness level in our context and practically empowered people to respond–whether it be financially supporting a reputable organization fighting the injustice, serving in a context that addresses it, or facilitating people’s life and career transformations that will bring change in the long term?
The heroes that come to mind to me are the abolitionists over 100 years ago, whose faith led them to fight injustice. These were not some theological heretics–but people who acted on their conviction to help end a terrible injustice. I want students under my leadership to learn to do evangelism, study the Bible, adopt a servant’s heart, etc… but I also want them to be people of active-conviction who bring renewal to the people and the world around them. These are the children of God Jesus empowers.
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Thanks for the post, Eddy.
Cool to see you guys doing evangelism around sex trafficking. Who could be against that kind of approach? I’d guess it passed muster even with the IV development people :^)
Campus ministry is elementary school vis a vis justice stuff. The current American local church is mostly kindergarden.
I’m glad you guys are calling people to conversion around justice issues. I pray for them. But the folks that come out of your ministry will be shocked at the lack of interest in this stuff when they join the available evangelical local church options.
I’d love to see more gifted leaders leave elementary school and give themselves to creating second level discipleship structures. Missions and churches that are willing to do the wider agenda of Jesus.
My wife is an elementary school teacher. She’s doing wonderful work that I respect.
But eventually you need high school and university level leaders and structures to get people living like the real thing.
Great post Eddy. I am encouraged by the college students who sense an unnatural divorce of justice from evangelism. My prayer is that churches and the Church would be ready to listen to these important disciples in how they’re learning to reunite justice and evangelism.
Historically, the dualistic approach is new to Christianity. Without getting too technical, it has to do with the emergence of the Social Gospel through Rauschenbusch and the Fundamentalist (our Evangelical forebears) reaction against it. As Rauschenbusch and others emphasized a gospel that affected the here and now but had little to do with spirituality. Fundamenalists ran the other direction and adopted a gospel that has to do with all things spiritual, but systems and issues here on Earth are secondary. The Social Gospel is reminiscent of early paganism and the Fundamenalist spiritualization of everything is sadly akin to Gnosticism. I don’t want to throw both the Social Gospel and Fundamentalism under the bus because there is still a lot of good we can gain from them.
But as I said, the dualistic approach is not generally a Christian notion. The abolitionists you mention are a great example. So are the reformers. When John Calvin entered into Geneva, the literacy rate was something like 5%. 100 years later, literacy was 85% or higher — I heard that in a lecture at seminary. Around the world, most Christians do not separate these two issues. Another great example in our country would be the Catholic Church. Charity has always been understood as evangelistic and vice versa.
I think a key we’ll need to adopt is the idea of praxis where our reflections and actions continually inform each other. Our actions on behalf of justice must inform and influence how we read the Bible and how we pray. Our worship, prayer, and study must also influence and inform our engagement of the world around us. My assumption — because I’ve experienced it — is that the Spirit will lead us in new directions outward and those actions will likewise shape our prayer and what we see in the Bible.
I like the point that justice matters are always spiritual matters. Great idea.
It’s interesting to read your thoughts here, because some of us liberals who focus our work on social justice do so realizing that it IS evangelism. Evangelism to Jesus never meant trying to convert every individual to a religion called Christianity, after all. It meant spreading the good news! The good news that we are all children of God and are all loved by God and call all live under those awesome recognitions through the Greatest Commandment - You know, the one where Jesus said squat about converting to a religion called Christianity but instead said Love God and Love Neighbor? Social justice and evangelism weren’t divorced from one another until people decided evangelism meant only increasing the empire of a specific religion.