A couple of days ago, I tweeted this:
I believe in justice, works of service, caring for the planet … I just wish more people would tweet about proclaiming the Gospel!
— Eddie Arthur (@kouya) April 1, 2014
This seemed straightforward enough to me, but a wee while later I received the following response:
if you read Luke 4, 18-19 I am not sure where the big difference lies.
I found this statement rather frustrating. Partly because the verses cited (much less the wide sweep of Scripture) don’t support the point my correspondent was making, but mainly because it reflects what seems to me to be messy thinking about the Church’s mission.
Let me be clear, I believe that mission involves both social action and proclamation of the message of Christ. I’ve blogged on the Five Marks of Mission, which spell this out and I’ve gone into some length as to why I believe in the social development side of the work that my organisation does. You can’t proclaim the message of Christ without serving people, but service without proclamation is equally short-sighted. So, if works of service, struggling for justice and proclamation are all important, why distinguish between them? Why not just agree with my twitter correspondent that there isn’t a big difference?
The point is balance. In my experience in mission, evangelicals have rarely held the different aspects of mission in an appropriate tension. There was a time when any sort of works of service were dismissed as ‘social Gospel’ and the only sort of mission that was regarded as legitimate was proclamation. Today, I fear that we have gone in the opposite direction and prioritised service and justice ministries at the expense of telling people about the Good News of Jesus. We need to distinguish between the two so that we look at what we are doing and to ensure that our mission has an appropriate balance.
I’ll return to this theme in the next day or two.
3 replies on “Service, Justice, Proclamation and Balance”
Antony Billington liked this on Facebook.
One of our local church leaders speaks of how he has had to “earn the right to be heard”. Perhaps the younger generation of Evangelicals (the ones who in my experience are shying away from proclamation in favour of “action”) don’t feel they have that right any more? Rightly so, seeing as culture has by and large rejected Christendom.
Perhaps re-earning the right to be heard has meant we have become shy of explaining our faith; but perhaps it’s not something that needs to be proclaimed in our new culture and in our new context. Perhaps it needs to be explained instead – as and when the time is appropriate?
Thanks Ben, good thoughts! My plan is to return to the question in the next day or two and look at ‘proclamation’ and why it doesn’t happen so much – this comment and our Twitter conversation may well be recycled for that. Just in passing, I’m using ‘proclamation’ in a generic fashion and I’d certainly include explanation under the same heading. I’m not thinking of yelling at people from street corners.