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EVERY HEALTHY CHURCH regards the world as their parish (as John Wesley put it). Biblical mission involves three concerns: compassion for those the New Testament calls the lost (evangelism); compassion for the hurting (mercy) and compassion for the powerless (justice). These three concerns are highlighted by Micah (6:8) and Jesus (Matthew 23:23) as being essential to an authentic faith. Mission in the Bible involves three modes: word (what we say to others for God); deed (what we do for others in the Lord’s name); and sign (what God does to corroborate his word through our words and his works through our deeds).

EVANGELISM

In the apostolic church ordinary Christians wandered around sharing the good news with those they met. Churches everywhere are healthy or unhealthy to the extent that their members are verbalizing their faith. Where this is left to ‘professional’ clergy or evangelists, those churches are diseased.

Evangelism is ‘one beggar telling another beggar where to get food’ (D.T. Niles). Jesus came to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10). The Lord… wants all to turn away from their sins (2 Peter 3:9). It is God’s desire that all hear the good news in such a way that they will turn from idols, i.e. living for anything other than God (1 Thessalonians 1:9). In the terms the New Testament uses, people either ‘perish’ or are ‘saved’ according to their response to this good news. And we, his people, are commissioned to preach it. What an awesome responsibility!

Peter Wagner (Your Church Can Grow) says 10% of all Christians have a special evangelistic gift, but only about one half of one per cent are actively using it. Why is that? The other 90% are also ‘gifted’: all the spiritual gifts are meant to lead persons to Christ.

The most overtly ‘evangelistic’ Christians are the fundamentalists, who have a more literal view of hell. As we move towards the ‘universalist’ end of the theological spectrum (‘everyone will be saved’; ‘if there is a hell God will empty it’), evangelism becomes almost non-existent. Three other theologies which hinder evangelism are ‘hyper- Calvinism’ (God saves who he wants to save and rejects the rest; there’s nothing we can do about that); anti-proselytism (‘even if they are only nominal members of my church, don’t you preach to them’); and syncretism (‘all religions are valid; Christianity doesn’t have all the answers’). What is your view?

Good evangelism is more than apologetics, which attempts to give a reasoned defense of the Christian faith. Apol- ogetics cuts down trees; evangelism builds houses! Evangel- ism is more than imparting organised doctrine. As John Stott puts it, you have to win a person’s confidence before you can win their soul! Do what Jesus did: minister to a ‘felt need’ first — for example, loneliness and poor self-image, sickness, hunger. John Stott told a conference on evangelism in Britain: ‘Christians are more like the pharisees than Jesus. We keep our distance from people. We do not want to get hurt or dirty or contaminated.’

But good evangelism is more than being friendly: I come across ‘friendly’ churches that can’t name many people who have committed their lives to Christ in the recent past. (Reason: new people change the chemistry of the group and we unconsciously freeze them out of our social life). Good evangelism is more than inviting your neighbour to a ‘mission’ at the church. (Although these are valuable: your church ought to have regular special evangelistic efforts, appropriate to the culture of the people you are aiming to reach). Evangelism is relating as Jesus did to people day by day, week by week. The best evangelism is done by new converts: they still have the most non-Christian friends! And the best evangelistic churches are where people truly love one another, especially across racial, social, cultural and other barriers which previously divided them.

The size of a church is not an infallible measure of spiritual health. Some small churches are healthy, others malnourished; some large churches are healthy, others fat! However we can say that all healthy churches are experiencing additions by conversion, i.e. they grow! Some of these growing churches give themselves away by adopting a ‘mission mode’, sending their trained members away to plant other churches, and so may not, over time, experience net numerical growth. That’s alright. But I would be worried if my church were not causing the angels to have a party from time to time as people come into Christ’s kingdom! The church at Antioch (Acts 11, 13) experienced rapid growth, both numerically and spiritually — though not all churches grow both ways at the same time!.

The acid test: list all the young people and adults who have come to Christ, joined the church and are growing in their faith in the last, say, ten years. Write down their names. In the ‘great commission’ (Matthew 28:19-20), there are four ‘action verbs’: going, making disciples, baptising and teaching. But only one (‘make disciples’) is in the imperative mood, the main command. Our central purpose is not merely to win converts, but to make disciples!

In the end, an evangelistic lifestyle arises out of the reality of our experience of Christ. If he has really changed our lives, that’s great news and we’ll want to share it!

.PA

COMPASSION AND MERCY

Healthy churches are concerned not only about ‘saving souls’ — evangelism — but helping others deprived of nec- essary daily needs. Unfortunately Christians have sometimes emphasized one or the other of these two areas of essential ministry, rather than both.

Jim Wallis somewhere put it well: ‘The greatest need in our time is not simply for kerygma, the preaching of the gospel, nor for diakonia, service on behalf of justice, nor for charisma, the experience of the Spirit’s gifts, nor even for propheteia, the challenging of the king. The greatest need of our time is for koinonia, the call to simply be the church — to love one another, and to offer our life for the sake of the world.’

A theological understanding of Christian social concern begins with the character of God. He is a ‘social God’, relating within the community of the Trinity, and, in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, with his creatures on this planet. Jesus came with a mandate to preach, liberate and heal (Luke 4:18-19) and commissions his followers to do the same as he did (John 20:21). So the church, the body of Christ, does in its world what Jesus did in his: no more, no less. It adopts Jesus’ stance towards others: that of a servant. And it will be called to account at the Great Judgment relative to the presence or absence of ministries of compassion to the poor (Matthew 25:31-46).

Who are the poor? They are people who have no ‘place’. The materially poor are deprived of a place within the bounty of the community; the lonely, the imprisoned, or the emotionally poor do not have a place within a loving family or community; the politically poor do not have a place in the decision-making processes of their government; refugees are ‘displaced’, without a part of the earth to call their own; the spiritually deprived do not have a place in the Kingdom. Our Christian compassion must address all these issues. The meaning of Christian ‘hospitality’ is simply our opening up our hearts, our lives, our homes, our commun- ities, to the ‘wretched of the earth’. Hospitality is providing a place for Jesus, who is still poor today.

I asked some very poor rural Brazilians what made them anxious or fearful. A sad-looking mother said, ‘I cannot warm my children with just one blanket.’ A man who had the face and hands of half a century’s hard labour said, ‘I toil and toil but have very little to show for it’.

I was very moved. What do I say to them? Maybe my tears spoke louder than any words. I felt helpless, but I also felt a solidarity with them in their despair.

‘Compassion’ comes from the Latin pati and cum – ‘to suffer with’. The church takes Jesus as its model for compassion. Twelve times in the Gospels Jesus or his Father- God are said to be ‘moved with compassion’ for worried and helpless people (e.g. Matthew 9:36). Our Lord sends us his followers into the world to ‘be compassionate as your Father is compassionate’ (Luke 6:36).

How does compassion work? In the same way God’s does: he sends Jesus into the world to be with us. He emptied himself and became a servant (Philippians 2). That gives us dignity: we must be worth a lot if he is willing to be our slave! He says to us: ‘I will be with you always until the end of the age’ (Matthew 28:20). We are not alone.

So compassion is more than sympathy — ‘feeling sorry’ for the poor. It’s not ‘pity’ for someone weak or inferior. Compassion is a ‘doing verb’ — relieving the pain of others, not just emoting about it. But it’s more than ‘helping the less fortunate’ — that’s elitist and paternalistic.

Compassion, says Matthew Fox, is the world’s richest energy source. A few days before his death, Rabbi Heschel said, ‘There is an old idea in Judaism that God suffers when we suffer… Even when a criminal is hanged on the gallows, God cries. God identifies himself with the misery on this earth. I can help God by reducing human suffering, human anguish and human misery.’

But there’s so much pain — where do I start? In the Matthew text describing Jesus’ compassion (9:35-38), our Lord then turns to his disciples and says ‘There’s so much to do, and so few to do it, PRAY!’ First, pray! Prayer tunes us in to the heart of God. Prayer helps us focus on others and their needs. Prayer turns frustration and anger into hope. A by-product of prayer is peace, without which we will never act appropriately in an unjust world.

I believe it is important for every wage or salary earner, with their family or community, to give a proportion away regularly to the poor — in one’s own country and overseas. You could sponsor a child, or give directly to projects among the poor (more of your dollar gets there that way). Choose an organization, preferably, that is committed to a ‘need not creed’ approach (as Jesus was, rather than giving to your kind of people only). Or you can give through your own denomination: whatever you do, try to be well informed about the situations you are supporting.

We are called, to use an image of Thomas Merton’s, motivated and empowered by the love of God to be involved in the sufferings of the world because it is the aim of God’s love to reset the broken bones of humanity.

.PA

SOCIAL JUSTICE: GET INVOLVED!

PAUL says that when we are united in Christ Jesus the barriers between races, slaves/freepersons and sexes are removed (Galatians 3:28).

A Christian can no longer pray the words of the Jewish daily thanksgiving, ‘I thank thee O Lord that thou hast not made me a Gentile, a slave or a woman.’ This principle — that we are all united in Christ, and that racist, economic, and sexist divisions have been obliterated — has taken a while to catch on in the church.

The 11 am worship-time in the U.S. has been called the most segregated hour in the nation’s week, and the Dutch Reformed church in South Africa is very reluctantly dismantling its institutionalised racism. (I met an intelligent white Christian in South Africa who told me he believed blacks were created by God to serve whites!).

The income gap between the poor and the rich, everywhere, is widening. Since the Industrial Revolution we’ve never learned to share wealth properly. It’s not ‘trickling down’ to the ever-increasing poor. White western Christians are among the wealthiest people in the world. And they are potentially the most powerful lobby in the world: but they don’t lobby governments in the area of wealth-redistribution. In Australia, the most effective recent lobbying efforts have been about issues of self-interest: a proposed ‘bill of rights’, consumption tax, and a fringe-benefits tax, at a time when we have record stockpiles of unsold grain, and are giving less of it away than at any time for 25 years!

Justice is all — and only — about the uses of power. Injustice is the mis-use, non-use or abuse of power. In the Bible justice is personal (living a righteous, just life), forensic (relating to matters of law), and social (our treatment of the poor). The Bible is full of God’s concern for justice, from his holding Cain accountable for the murder of his brother in Genesis, to a similar accountabil- ity by the secular powers persecuting Christians, described in the graphic imagery of the Book of Revelation.

Social justice concerns the least privileged – the poor, widows, orphans, foreigners. When harvesting, the Israelites were to leave them something (Deuteronomy 24:19-21). Interest on loans is forbidden (Exodus 22:25). All persons – including slaves and migrants – are entitled to rest on the sabbath (Exodus 23:12, Deuteronomy 5:14). Slaves must not be treated harshly (Leviticus 25:39-43). There is a clear relationship between oppression and poverty: ‘Remember you were once slaves’ (Deuteronomy 26:5-8). The God of the Exodus intervenes on behalf of the powerless and oppressed: so must his people.

The message of the prophets can be summarized: ‘Seek justice, correct oppression’ (Isaiah 1:17). They thunder against the rich and powerful who oppress the poor but their outrage is strongest against a religion devoid of justice (Hosea 6:6, 8:13; Amos 5:15, 21-25; Micah 6:6-8, Isaiah 58:1-11; cf. Proverbs 21:3). God accepts or rejects Israel’s worship according to their concern for the poor. Even prayer mustn’t be a substitute for helping the poor (Isaiah 1:15-17). In the relatively affluent 8th century Israel, poverty was not accidental. The prosperity of the rich rested largely on the exploitation and mistreatment of the poor – through a legal system biassed towards the rich, monopoly control, restrictive trade practices, unjust wages and arbitrary price increases. Many of the poor had lost their land to large property owners. Later, Ezekiel rebukes the rich for unscrupulously accumulating real estate for profit (22:28).

Many of the Psalms describe God judging the world with justice (eg 96:13; cf. 97:6, 98:9). His will is that justice and peace kiss each other (85:10-11). ‘The Lord executes justice for the oppressed’ (146:7).

Mary’s Magnificat praises a God who shows mercy, scatters the proud, puts down the mighty, lifts up the lowly, feeds the hungry (and by these means ‘helps Israel’, Luke 1:46-55).

Jesus’ ministry will bring good news to the poor… announce a ‘jubilee’ (Luke 4:16-19). In the Jubilee (Leviticus 25:3-5, 8-12) soil was to be left fallow, debts remitted, slaves liberated, and property returned to owners who had forfeited it by debt.

God in Christ becomes poor, choosing the weak, as Paul says, to ‘confound the mighty’. The Kingdom, says Jesus, is given to the poor (and to the rich if they will repent). It is all about new relationships – with God, with others. It turns our customary values upside down: so the ‘first in the kingdom’ are those with no status in society. The poor are blessed, not because of their poverty and misery, nor because they are ‘better’ than others but because they recognize their need for God (Matthew 11:5, 5:3-11, Luke 6:20). To the rich, the gospel is ‘bad news before it is good news’, so the rich young ruler, with his inordinate love of money and power is told to sell his possessions and give them to the poor so that he could have ‘treasure in heaven’ (Matthew 19:16-30).

The New Testament epistles are replete with admonitions to care for the poor (eg. Galatians 2:10, James 2:5-7, 5:1-6, 1 John 3:17, 1 Timothy 6:17-19). Greed is a cardinal sin, a form of idolatry (1 Corinthians 5:10-11, 6:10, Ephesians 4:19, 5:3, 5, Colossians 3:5).

For Jesus ‘the really important teachings of the law’ are ‘justice and mercy and honesty’ (Matthew 23:23). Elsewhere Jesus gives us ‘the great commandment… love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength… [and] love your neighbour as you love yourself’ (Mark 12:30-31). It is interesting that evangelical Christians rarely agree with Micah or Jesus when asked to highlight what are for them the most important doctrines: outside of the Wesleyan, some Catholic, and a few conciliar churches’ creeds or statements of faith, I can find no evangelical ‘doctrinal basis’ before the Lausanne Congress (1974) that explicitly mentions justice or love!

Every human being is made in God’s image. So we uphold the right of every person to live in freedom, in dignity, in peace, in health, and to know the One whom to know is to experience fullness of life.

Here’s something to ponder from Billy Graham’s book Approaching Hoof Beats: ‘My basic commitment as a Christian has not changed, nor has my view of the Gospel, but I have come to see in deeper ways the implications of my faith and the message I have been proclaiming. I can no longer proclaim the Cross and the Resurrection without proclaiming the whole message of the Kingdom, which is justice for all.’

But there is so much injustice in the world. What can one person do? Here are five suggestions.

(1) Research: Get the facts. Talk to the ‘poor’ – single parents, unemployed, migrants – and to social workers, district nurses, etc.

Why are they poor? Is it their own fault? Most answers are either too simple or untrue. Perhaps it’s the death of a parent, ill-health, physical/mental disability, collapse of a business, breakdown of marriage, lack of basic education, medical bills for sick children – the list may be endless. Anglican Archbishop Peter Hollingworth says: ‘…the causes of poverty are precipitated more by problems in the organization and structures of society than by individuals themselves.’

Item: Brazil has more cultivated acreage per person than the U.S., yet in recent years the proportion of undernourished there has risen from 45% to 72% of the population.

Item: 1.9% of El Salvadorans won 57.5% of the land – mainly selling cash crops abroad while at home hunger is endemic. Archbishop Oscar Romero spoke out against his country’s injustices and the newspapers almost daily vilified him as corrupt, insane, a communist – and never printed his sermons. (Many wealthy El Salvadorans are mass-going Catholics too). Behind him on an office wall were huge photos of two priests who were murdered, and a banner HE WHO GIVES HIS LIFE FOR ME IS SAVED. Romero was shot while celebrating the eucharist on 24 March, 1980. In El Salvador, to work among the poor is an act of subversion.

For Jesus when a system got in the way of people’s wholeness, it had to go. Inveighing against the pharisees’ legalistic religious system he said, ‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath’ (Mark 2:27). Our systems are mostly serving mammon, so we too will call for systemic change. We may not hold to any particular economic/ political theory: a Christian is called to critique all ideologies. (As the cynic put it, capitalism is people exploiting their fellow-humans; with communism it’s the other way around!!). Systems either do God’s will, or they are under his judgment…

Item: There are one billion hungry or starving persons, and 38,000 children dying every day from hunger-related diseases.

Item: more people died of hunger in the last five years than were killed in all wars, revolutions and murders in the past 150 years. Four-fifths of the hungry live in rural areas. Fifty thousand a day die from diseases associated with dirty water. Up to 100,000 children and 400,000 adults go blind each year because of insufficient vitamin A.

The rich countries contain a fifth of the world’s people, but consume four-fifths of the world’s resources. That’s not fair!

(2) Reflection: Think about the facts. Working hard to think clearly is the beginning of moral conduct, said Pascal. Beware of temptations not to think objectively. Our church congregations are mostly embedded in the rich half of society, so our ‘suburban captivity’ can be self-protective. We meet few destitute ‘hidden people’.

The problems are complex, but some things can be said simply:

# Poverty is not just a lack of resources, but of power, of knowledge, of help and of hope. Poverty is loneliness. So it is not alleviated by handouts alone, but when the poor themselves become givers.

# The best prophet of the future is the past, Lord Byron said. Reinhold Neibuhr has argued (convincingly in my view, in Moral Man and Immoral Society) that is we wait for the powerful to come altruistic we will wait forever. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrups absolutely. The powerful have never – well, hardly ever – relinquished their privileges without some form of coercion being applied to them. Those with a biblical view of sin and evil won’t find that surprising.

# Let us beware of ‘selective indignation’, preaching only against evils threatening my family/group/church. Ask what Jesus got mad about… And I must accept myself as part of the problem, rather than blaming others: what have I not done that causes this one to be poor?

# Jesus grew up in an oppressed country. The Zealots were ‘freedom fighters’, Herodians and Sadducees went along with the status quo; Essenes withdrew to the desert; Pharisees debated questions of private morality. Jesus disappointed them all, renouncing violence, exploitation, apathy and moralism: they’re all dehumanizing. His was the way of sacrificial love.

(3) Pray. Ask ‘Who are my people?’ then pray fervently for them – and their oppressors. Prayer, says Jacques Ellul is the ultimate act of hope. Prayer is ‘God with us’ in our struggle. It is the only possible substitute for violence in human relations. Without sincere and earnest prayer the church can easily develop a bureaucratic oppressive mind-set, becoming an ally of, and operating like, worldly powers. Prayer rescues action from activism, and inaction from bewilderment and despair. But prayer is not a substitute for action. Contemplative love is not the end, but a means to the end of authentic love. As Thomas Merton once put it, let us not forget that Mary and Martha are sisters.

(4) Feel. This is ‘listening presence’, compassion, identification and encounter (ie. incarnation). We won’t do this as well as Jesus did but we must try. Reality is much more than objective facts. We must not act for others merely through feelings of personal outrage, but when – and until – through caring friendship we earn the right to be invited to be their helper or advocate. Such feeling presence enables us to transcend narrow bigotries. Our practical help and advocacy for the poor will have the marks of suffering – the beatings, crown of thorns, and the nails – if we are truly the church of Jesus Christ. Only thus will it be sacramental, mediating the grace of God to those in need.

(5) Act Creatively. Let us not be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problems: if enough individuals act, in concert, almost any problem can be solved. To act is to effect change; godly action is to bring in the kingdom somewhere on earth. Robbers move against their victim; the priest and levite have a passive mind-set and move away – to be ‘neutral’ (encouraging more injustice); the Samaritan uses the materials at his disposal (donkey, oil, wine, clothes, money, physical strength, compassion. In our culture he would also make representations to the police about security on the Jericho Road).

The church is involved politically if it does nothing: it is voting for the status quo. All it takes for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing. The villains in Jesus’ stories were seldom those who did things they ought not to have done; usually they had left undone the things they should have done. The rich man let Lazarus lie unhelped at his gate; the servant made no use of his talent – these received the severest cond- emnation. The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.

If ‘charity begins at home’ then a church will ask: ‘What needs exist in our neighbourhood, and what resources do we have to meet them?’ Day-care facilities, a food box in the foyer, counseling centre (with fees related to ability to pay), housing for the homeless/elderly, writing letters to keep elected officials honest – these are some beginnings. Above all, let us build ‘shalom churches’ where the values we preach to the world are incarnated in the faith community.

Father Brian Gore, an Australian priest held for 14 months in a Philippines prison, said recently that aid organizations were actually supporting a system of injustice when they do not ask why Filipinos went hungry. ‘An organization which exclusively looks at the effects rather than the causes is a dead loss’, he said. We must therefore be involved in process as well as projects. Camara’s best-known quote is devastating on this issue: ‘When I give money to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask “why are they poor?” they call me a communist!’ From a biblical perspective, mercy and justice belong together.

Let us not succumb to immobility: let us do something, and be free to learn through failing, if necessary. Let us repent of our sins of omission before we blame others for their sins of injustice. Then let us get involved. Fighting poverty is war: the violence of poverty kills just as surely as bullets. I am convinced, however, that we must fight this war non-violently. Christ gave his life for others who could not save themselves: let us give our lives for the wretched of the earth. Let us begin with ourselves, and in a world of crying need, adjust our lifestyle accordingly. Let us renounce addictions, especially those involving the desire for immediate gratification. Let us be ‘Christs to others’, as Luther put it – serving them, being advocates for them, acting as agents for change. Albert Einstein once said: ‘The problems of the world cannot be solved with mechanisms, but only by changing people’s hearts and minds and speaking courageously.’