Doing Justice and Preaching Grace

As some of you know, Ryan and I hope to plant a church in Missoula, MT after we finish seminary next year. Of course, that raises a very important question: What exactly is the church? What makes us any different from the Mormons, the JWs, or the local Elks Club?

What really makes a church, a church? If we intend to plant one, we better have a good answer.

Now we're not the first ones to ask this question. In his book, Evangelism: Doing Justice and Preaching Grace, Harvie Conn lists 4 basic criteria:

• proclamation - true churches should be proclaiming God's words (not man's), and that means calling people to repent and believe the gospel (cf. Mk 1:15)
  
• fellowship - true churches should do more than just talk - they should be a community of believers who actually spend time doing stuff together: eating, praying, singing (cf. Acts 2:42)
• service - true churches should also serve one another, meeting needs within the body (Acts 6:34)
  
• worship - perhaps most importantly, the church is called to worship God together in unison, corporately (cf. 1 Cor 11)
  

These are all important. But Conn goes one step further: for the church to really be the church, we must also be concerned with justice.

Now this may sound a little suspicious - especially for us evangelical types who are extremely wary of 'liberals' and 'social justice'. What's interesting, however, is that the OT prophets repeatedly slam Israel's leaders, not just for false worship, but for failing to seek justice for the poor, to care for the fatherless (cf. Is 1:17)!

Fast forward to the NT, and we find Jesus rooting his own messianic claims in the fact that he fulfills Isaiah's prophecy: "the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them" (Mt 11:5, quoting Is 61).

The point here is that Jesus links the preaching of the gospel with the healing and liberation of people who are weak, sick, oppressed (whether by sickness, or the powerful). Maybe this is why James says that "true religion is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep one unstained from the world." (Jms 1:27, cf. 2:14-17).

Conn's point is that the good news of the gospel actually entails 2 distinct realities: grace and justice. If we preach the one without practicing the other, unbelievers will sense the inconsistency and reject the message. And that's because God designed it that way - grace without justice is not the gospel; its religious rhetoric.

So what does justice look like?

First of all, it means that we must be willing to call sin, sin. That may sound a little odd at first blush, but I've talked about this before in my post on Drawing the Line: if somebody is addicted to destructive behavior, a friend who truly cares will intervene and say, "you have a problem." It might seem more compassionate to simply look the other way - but that does injustice to your friendship, and even more importantly, it does injustice to the person being wronged by sin (ultimately, God).

Now, in the church today we've actually done a pretty decent job at this side of the justice coin - we're pretty good at telling people where they're wrong. Unfortunately, we've done an awful job of saying it in a way that "sinners" can actually hear it. And that's because we have often failed at the second side of justice.

Conn, in describing his unsuccessful efforts to minister to Korean prostitutes, recounts a startling breakthrough:

"I discovered that a person is not only a sinner. He or she has been sinned against. My cultural background in white, North American churches had oriented me almost exclusively to seeing a person as the subject of sin. But not the object of sin. Seeking the various factors that kept women in prostitution opened my eyes to that new dimension." (p45)

What Conn is saying here is huge: Yes people are sinners (and believe it or not, most of them already know that). But they have also been sinned against. And so we as Christians are called to stand along side them against the injustices they have suffered, to help right the wrongs that they are experiencing.

At times, this may indeed look like social justice. Conn's breakthrough came when he realized the reasons WHY these women had entered prostitution (how many girls actually say: "ooh, prostitution! Now there's a career path for me!" ?). Then he began to seek to help them address those underlying issues, whether they came to Christ or not.

He did not stop preaching the gospel, but by identifying with the oppressed, his gospel message took on a whole new weight and significance. His actions validated his message. In fact, Conn was actually modeling the gospel of grace to them - by coming and identifying with them in their mess, he placed himself in a position to help them respond to that first call for justice. He became their advocate. He became a little christ to them.

Herman Bavinck describes it like this: "Now the order is reversed. Before the Fall, the rule was: through works to eternal life. Now, after the fall, in the covenant of grace, the eternal life comes first and out of that life the good works follow as fruits of faith" (Our Reasonable Faith, p272)

This is precisely what Christ has done for us - he has intervened on our behalf, doing justice and preaching grace. And that is precisely what the church must rediscover if we hope to reach people with the gospel message.