by Keith Bassham
This issue of the Tribune contains an item not usually seen in the magazine: an article authored by Assistant Editor Rob Walker. Rob’s fingerprints are all over every issue, of course — the layout, graphics, placements — and his advice and suggestions are frequently a part of the final product, but I like it when we can showcase all that Rob brings to the Tribune table.
Part of the impetus for the article about one church’s ministry in a community came from an online discussion in which I made a few observations about “social justice” and what we used to call the “social gospel.” For most of the history of Christianity (both genuine and specious) it was largely assumed that the gospel inherently had both a social and temporal aspect alongside a spiritual and eternal — that is, a both/and approach. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelicals had no problem wedding the two. Witness the explosion of mission societies, publishing houses, Bible distributions, and institutions offering support for clinics and hospitals, care for orphans, literacy (original Sunday school), slavery abolition, temperance, and other social causes of the day.
Unfortunately, the Modernist/Fundamentalist controversy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries created an either/or dynamic for evangelical Christians on the matters of “social justice” and “evangelism.” But somehow, a lot of us over the years suspected that we should be doing more in our ministries to relieve suffering, provide for people in need, and so on, but when we did those things we also felt compelled to justify the work, that is, we should make explicit that we were using the “good works” as a tool or a means toward our true end, saving of the soul. I was always uncomfortable with that kind of thinking, believing as I do that the gospel carries with it a power to truly change people and things. And so I have been involved with my communities in “non-church” activities, not as marketing or bait, but with the idea that Christians ought to do good as a matter of course.
That may sound like a “social gospel” to some, but I explain that while we may effect change in our “worlds,” we cannot “change the world” in the sense that we usually use that term, and in the way God will when He establishes a new heaven and a new earth.
And according to 2 Corinthians 5:17, we ourselves are new creations, and so God has in effect gone out into the future new creation and brought bits of that renewed creation — us — into the present time. And that as new creations we are able to model what we know of God’s design and plan for humans insofar as we are able, not to supplant what God will do, but to show what God has done in us, and what He will do universally some day, and that means you don’t have to tape a tract to the side of a cup of cold water to make it a godly thing worth doing. So do some good.